In December 1991, a young man wanted to sell his favorite work, not a script, not a student work, but a well-made large-scale movie. The news spread in Hollywood. The film is called "Al Mariachi" and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Without the following details, there is nothing extraordinary about the film. The director is only 23 years old, costs 7,000 US dollars, and there is only one filming crew-Robert himself. A month later, three major Hollywood companies competed to hire him with high salaries and signed a contract with him. He eventually signed a contract with the Columbia company. Prior to this, the obscure young man began to be on an equal footing with the star figures in the same company. Rodriguez made his first film at the age of 8. This is an 8mm cartoon. At the age of 11, a real wealth appeared in the family: a Kwarzal-brand video camera that can be connected to the TV, which can shoot everything within a radius of 12 feet at will, or sound color images. But unable to edit the film, Rodriguez had to master the editing skills from the beginning of the filming. Later, my father bought a second video camera. Using these two cameras, the company "Ross Huligangnos" (Robert Rodriguez and his siblings acted as actors) began shooting amateur films and won many awards at short film festivals. With these films (his middle school grades are always poor), he entered the film department of the University of Texas in Austin. By the way, he didn't even graduate from middle school. After the success of "Al Mariachi", thousands of Hollywood film appointments have continued to flow, and it is meaningless to stay in school.
After finishing the script for his classmate and friend, he struggled to find a film producer to buy it. Rodriguez knew the reason for their failure: all scripts required tens of millions of investments, and their authors were unknown. An excellent idea flashed in his mind: why not write a low-investment script, make it as beautiful as possible, and then sell it to the Spanish film market-where there is a network of companies that shoot low-cost movies for the Latin American market. Then he began to fight alone.
To be honest, a movie that only cost 7,000 US dollars to produce sells for 20,000 yuan, and the income is not bad. If it succeeds, you can make persistent efforts to blackmail some filming funding from the publisher.
Rodríguez made detailed records from the shooting, editing and selling of "Al Mariachi", and on this basis, he processed it into a best-selling book called "No Rebels of the Film Crew". Although the content of the book hurt many film authorities-its main point is: "Don't stay in school and study, go out to make movies."-but it has become a must-read book in all American film schools.
The following excerpt is an abridged translation of a chapter. It's called -
Robert Rodriguez film school ten minutes
Original reprint: http://www.filmbasic.com/html/dichengbenpaipian/200812/11-92.html
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