Robert Rodriguez shot to fame by shooting his debut feature, "El Mariachi", for $7,000. He made a sequel, "Desperado", starring Antonio Banderas, and now completes the series with the star-studded, Sergio Leone-inspired "Once Upon a Time in Mexico".
You wrote, directed, 'chopped' and scored this movie. Why?
I think it keeps the film in the series, you know? Especially because the first one was made so independently, I thought this one being part three, I don't want to just get a big budget [it cost $27m] and have everybody do all the work for me.
I'd rather try to make it feel like it's still part of the series. Yeah, it's a bigger movie in that it's bigger actors. But I didn't want it to be a big, overblown, expensive movie.
Johnny Depp's character, Agent Sands, has a stronger presence in this film than the Mariachi. Why?
I wanted the movie to be like "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly". It had to be epic, so the Mariachi could only be one of the characters, meaning I had to come up with equally strong, if not stronger, characters to make an impact.
I did it by drawing. I drew the man with no eyes and the man with no face [Willem Defoe's character], and I thought, "OK, now we're getting into very iconic territory." That was important because a guy with a guitar case full of guns is incredibly iconic.
It's kind of like a Batman movie, where Batman is Batman but you're always interested in the villain because he's even crazier sometimes. So what happens with Johnny's character is that it adds
something else exciting to the series. It's not just part three. It's something bigger.
What was he like to work with?
Johnny's great. Sometimes he will do a scene and I'll go, "Is that in my script?" It is but it's just the way he says it and performs it. It seems foreign even to me because he makes everything seem really fresh and odd.
Mickey Rourke furtively carries a Chihuahua everywhere with him in the film. Is that his own dog?
What happened is I met him for the movie and I saw a dog head sticking out of his sleeve. It was a Chihuahua. I said, "Hey, bring your dog because since you're going to be in Mexico, it would be great if your character had a dog as a souvenir and you're always hiding it from the boss."
He said, "Oh, my dog's too out of shape." He showed me the whole dog and it's actually really fat. So I found him another dog in Mexico that was smaller and that he could hide easier.
