Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1

by Carnell, Thom

  I thought it was interesting that you spent the first part of the film developing the Gecko Brothers as being really bad individuals, and suddenly they’re the guys you have to rely on to get you out of it. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

  That was [Quentin’s] whole trip. That’s why when I did Road Racers for Showtime, he wanted to do Rock All Night, because that’s where Dick Miller plays a real creep and he’s a real shithead, but then he’s in a situation where they need a guy just like that to get them out of it.

  You made dozens of no-budget videos and films when you were growing up. Other than the millions of dollars you get now or the fancy toys you get to blow up, does directing feel different for you?

  No, you should really visit the set. I’m laying on a skateboard pushing myself around or on an “office-cam.” I get an office chair and take the arms off and I just push myself around. That’s even different from what I did on Desperado. I had someone pushing me in a wheel chair. Now, I’m like Fred Flintstone. I’m pushing myself around. It gets the crew and the actors excited because they feel like they’re really making a bare bones movie. This is a big movie to make with the amount of money we had, so, there is no luxury. I mean, people like to think, “Oh wow, from seven thousand to seven million; now you’re probably sitting around and counting the dough.” We are just having to struggle because we are making much bigger pictures, with much higher quality and we’re really having to pinch pennies and just use more creativity and hard work to get it done. Which is what I like any way, but that’s why you see me operating the Steady-Cam, doing the camera, mixing the sound, and editing the picture as well as producing and directing.

  Is there any aspect of the film you don’t have your hands on?

  Not really, because, even when we’re doing the music, I’m in there with the band conducting or mixing the music and stuff. It’s just so important to the picture, especially if you have a clear vision of what you want. It’s so subjective. You can send somebody off on an assignment with pretty clear directions and they’ll still do it a completely different way than you imagined. That’s kind of a thrill, when you really picture something and see it through. The biggest thrill was seeing the snake dance come out exactly the way I’d imagined it, even though there were so many obstacles. You can’t just leave it to chance. You have to be killing yourself the whole time. Salma was afraid of snakes. The snake was afraid of her. The music wasn’t there when we were filming it. I had to match the movement in the editing. All kinds of things just get in your way, but we still want to see our vision come to life. It becomes almost obsessive for you. I don’t really like to direct pictures. I really just enjoy making them. I realize what directing is. Directing is really just a position of power. I mean, you stand over a room full of people and you tell them what to do and you delegate. I don’t like to do that. I like working with the movie. I don’t just want to have someone do it for me.

  Do you expect any more collaborations with Tarantino?

  He’s already talking about it. He’s been talking about it since we were shooting. We had such a great time. We got a really good deal to do this movie. We were thinking, “This is the kind of movie we would do for free in our backyard. This is one of those funky movies you make with your friends. Let’s go make a horror movie and chop everybody up! Just for fun. No one is ever going to watch it, but let’s just make it.” And here we were doing it on a big scale and it was just a blast. His writing is so great. I told him he has to write me another script now because I made him look cool. [laughs] “Now you have to give me another script. I won’t put you in another movie until you make me another script.” He’s already talking about all kinds of stuff. It’s cool. We had talked about making something together since back when we first met in ’92 at the Toronto Film Festival. Most first films by a director are usually personal stories and here we both had our first film there and ours were like these crazy genre pictures. Both had dudes dressed in black running around with guns in hidden places. We thought it was cool that we both liked making the same kind of twisted genre pictures and we talked about doing something even way back then, we were going to do an anthology of movies, like the same story but by different directors and different cultures, like John Woo would do the Chinese one, [Quentin] would do the American one, I would do the Mexican one, and Jean-Luc Besson do the French. We’d come with all these crazy things we never thought we’d ever get to and one of the ideas we tossed around was From Dusk Till Dawn. Creatively, it’s just a cool thing. I mean, he liked just having written it and then leaving it up to me to make and yet still enjoying it as if it was one of his own pictures, even though he wasn’t around for the post or anything. He really thought he could trust me just to go make it and then he comes and enjoys it as if it’s one of his own pictures, yet he didn’t have that much to do with the making of it. He really liked that feeling.

  What made you decide on Graeme Revell for the film’s score?

  I was looking for a long time for somebody who would not give me the traditional score. I liked how all his stuff sounded different. In fact, I didn’t know a lot of the scores he had done. I knew of Dead Calm, which I always liked, but I could never get a soundtrack on, and he gave me a copy of it. I used it a lot in the temporary music [of the film]. So, if you’re using someone’s music like that a lot, temporarily while you’re cutting, you should just hire them, that way they can ape their own stuff.

  Since Elmer Bernstein’s out of the question… Everyone seems to temp their films with his music.

  It depends. I use James Horner’s Aliens a lot, too. I used that and Dead Calm for this movie. It just really gets you in the mindset of what you’re making, because I was so used to doing straight action. [Graeme] was just a great guy. I mean, I really just meet the people on a personal basis and see if you get along with them; because you’re going to be working with them, you don’t want big ego trips or anything. You just want to hang out with people. I end up firing people all the time because of attitude, nothing to do with ability. I think even someone who doesn’t have that much ability but has a lot of passion and is cooperative and fun to work with can go a long way.

  Do you get a lot of young people who seek your counsel and ask, “How do I make my own El Mariachi?”

  I’ve had people come and tell me that they’ve sought out and bought a book that I wrote or they’ve heard the laserdisc commentary and they might have a few follow-up questions, but they pretty much figure out what the message is. It’s just to figure it out on your own. There’s no right way to do it. The way I’m doing it worked really well for me, but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for you. You can probably come up with something much better, much more innovative.

  Is the key just to get out there and do it even if you only have a video camera?

  You don’t even realize what your resources are. Looking back, I realize how dumb I was. I remember complaining all the time, “Gosh, I’m not like other people who have access to this and that.” Here I had that whole Mexican town in front of me where I shot Mariachi. It took me forever to figure out that was an asset, because it was right in front of me and I didn’t think of it that way. I could get the guns from the cops for free. They would just lend them to me. All this crazy stuff that most people didn’t have. I didn’t think of it as an asset. It’s just how you look at things. You’ve got to really just change your attitude and not be so negative. It took me a long time to do that.

  Do you have that personal and private movie that you mentioned before? Do you have one that you want to do or is it still the genre stuff?

  Both Quentin and I think we put a lot of personal stuff in our movies even though they’re hidden behind all these other things. I’ve already done all the things I wanted to do. I did a family picture in Four Rooms and Bedhead. I got to do my Latin hero movies already. The times change for me as I get older. I’m not a kid now. The things I want to make will change as the years go by and I’ll just
go do that.

  Is there any thematic stuff in what you call an exploitation movie that’s below the surface that no one will get when they watch it, but that you get?

  I don’t know if no one will get it. What was cool for me, that I like about this story in particular, was the whole journey of Jacob. He’s somebody who has lost his faith and has to get it back. That’s one of my favorite parts in the movie. Originally in the script it was just two stakes, but I had him take a baseball bat and a shotgun and have to make a cross out of it. I really liked that. That’s just a really small thing, but in the midst of entertainment it’s still, for me, powerful enough to make it worthwhile to even take the journey to make the movie.

  What was it like working with Salma Hayek?

  I’ve worked with Salma since Road Racers. Salma is always fun to work with. It’s like working with my wife on a movie. She’s someone you can depend on to be there to do a good job, to always be better than anyone will expect. Quentin wrote it to be in Mexico, but he didn’t really write it with a Mexican slant. Blonde Death was the name of the character that does what Salma does, and she didn’t have the snake dance or anything; that was stuff that we added in. I had been thinking all along that I wanted to change that and make it Salma, but [Quentin] saw Desperado, and he came to me and said, “You know what? I’m gonna change the character from Blonde Death to Salma.” I was going to do that anyway. He had the same idea, so I didn’t have to force that on him. She’s just fun to work with and she shows herself well for a Latin actress. It’s amazing to me that she was the first Mexican since Dolores Del Rio to have a lead in a Hollywood film (Desperado). That’s how long it’s been.

  When was the first moment you found out she was afraid of snakes?

  It wasn’t in the script. That was something I made up later on. The character was basically just a dancing girl who comes in and was the first one to take a bite out of one of the characters. She wasn’t the big goddess thing I made her out to be after doing some research about the Aztec vampires. I thought it really needed a central figure like that. I told her, “I want you to do a dance with a snake. I think that would be cool. A couple of snakes, one around your body and a couple of small ones in your hands.” And she goes, “Oh no. I’m terrified of snakes. You can ask my mom. She has a phobia about snakes. It’s like genetic.” I got determined, “Well, it’s not because we’re friends. Now, it’s a requirement. You don’t get the part. Madonna’s interested in the part.” So, she had to start practicing. I have a videotape of her trying to touch the snake, getting closer and closer. I went, “What? That’s it? C’mon. Start dancin’. I’ll make a phone call and you’re out of the movie!” When we were filming her, we could easily not have had anyone there, because you don’t see anyone else in the shot until the reverse, but I went and had everyone there. Robert DeNiro came by to visit a friend of his that day, so everyone was watching her, so she gives a flawless performance because she’s vain enough. If all of them were gone, she’d be tripping over herself and crying in front of me, but in front of other people, she’s gonna do it right. She was dead serious. You’d never know that she had that fear.

  One of things that the press talks about is you using your family in your pictures. Is there any one else in your family who is interested in the business?

  My older sister Angela has been an actress for a while. She’s in Desperado. She’s the girl who is talking with Cheech, the valley girl who complains about the service. She’s also in The Perez Family. She plays the one who tries to bring the couple together. I have a sister who is a model and actress. She was the dead body in Four Rooms. [laughs] All my other siblings were in my early films, which won most of the festivals and got me an agent to begin with. I don’t know if all of them are interested, but they just know that because I am in it that I will stick them in something every once in a while and they’ll go on with whatever their career choices are.

  Is there anybody else in the family who is as creative or as much of a compulsive worker as you are?

  I have a younger brother who was always better at everything than me. I was bad in school, bad in sports, but I was good at being creative. He could do all that, but he just wasn’t focused. I finally told him to just go into film, start studying film and start making movies, because I could hire him on as something. If he could run a Steady-Cam, we could be the Steady-cam Brothers, back-to-back. I need an extra hand and somebody that close to my own thinking would just be great. I was always envious of the Hughes Brothers. I would love to have a twin brother who could help me out, there’s so much work. He finally came to his senses and he’s doing that because he can include all of his hobbies and interests into filmmaking. That’s what’s great about filmmaking, if you like music or drawing, it all goes into that. That’s why I finally chose that as my career goal because I had such scattered interests.

  When El Mariachi was released on disc, you did the director’s commentary. Is that something you’d like to do with all of your films?

  Yeah! Yeah! It’s difficult. They almost left me out on Desperado because they’re getting so money hungry they’re having problems with libraries like that. When you sell a piece of video or something, once it’s bought, you’re not going to buy it again. You have it and it’s part of your collection. So what they tried to do on Desperado was just put it out without any of the commentary that I’d been telling them I wanted to do, and then a year later put out a more expensive, enhanced version, which you’d have to buy again. I made them let me do it on the first version that goes out, the regular priced one. We’ll do it for Dusk, probably a double track where Quentin and I talk together.

  Kevin Smith did that for Clerks, he had the whole cast there.

  Which can be fun, but not much information comes out because you end up bullshitting. So, I’d just do one where I just jam it with information. I usually write it out ahead of time and really make it more like a seminar for those who are really interested. I’ve heard some “shoot the shit” ones that are worse than the movie. [laughs]

  What’s the status on the Stevie Ray Vaughn project?

  Jimmy Vaughn and I are probably going to start working on a script and getting together some of the music for that. It wouldn’t be anything that happened right away. It’s just in the planning stages right now, but it’s something I’m interested in. I think that would be cool. I mean, I worked with Jimmy Vaughn on this movie. I just happened to be putting Stevie Ray Vaughn music in the movie because it was very Texas. I contacted Jimmy and, at the same, time Miramax had bought the rights to a Stevie Ray bio. It all just kind of came together at one time.

  Which one of your films was the most enjoyable to make?

  Four Rooms, probably. That was a week after Desperado and it was a really fast shoot and I was shooting with kids and Antonio. It was a blast because we were both so tired from Desperado. Literally, a week later we were shooting that. I love making short films. It’s such a real potent thing you can put together. I edited it over my Christmas holiday and I was just done with it five days after I started editing. It was really fast and really fun. I like doing little projects like that in between the big ones because the big ones take so long, you almost forget about the immediacy of the other art forms.

  In your book you make several references to reading Stephen King novels.

  I haven’t read one since. The last one was The Langoliers. I don’t have time to read anything any more.

  What kind of industry feedback did you get on your 10 Minute Film School? You’re pretty much bucking everything The Establishment is saying.

  That’s just the idea. The whole idea is that… If that could work… Because I did everything wrong. I mean, I wouldn’t even do it again where I would feed actors their lines and not show them the script. Man, that’s offensive to any actor, but those guys weren’t actors so I could do it that way, and it worked. It got big kudos for performances and how realistic the guys were, and I was feeding them their lines. I wa
s telling them what to say and how to say it. I mean, you’re not supposed to do that, but it worked, and that was just to show people that you don’t have to think that you’re doing something wrong or that you have to learn the way to do it in order to do something. That you can just do it completely any way you want and just go by instinct. The first pioneers of film didn’t go to Film School, they just made it up and look at their movies; their movies are cool. So, I just heard from people in the industry, they hear from their assistants – not the guys who are the big wigs, but their assistants running around, running to get somewhere – that there are two books they consider to be the bibles of filmmaking in town and they are Rebel Without a Crew and Art Lindson’s A Pound of Flesh, the producing one. They say those two are the ones they read.

  The one thing that struck me from your book is, continually, you say, “this is getting weird.”

  It was weird. It was strange. I’m glad I had the diary because, after a while, you forget and you kind of take it for granted. I would go back and I would read what I had written and I really was trippin’. I really thought it was going to go away any second. You don’t know. You’re so unsure of every step.

  Do you still sometimes wake up and pinch yourself?

  Now, I’m just so involved and I’ve been working non-stop, every day. I don’t have vacations. I don’t have a weekend off in years. I’ve just been non-stop going at it, multiple projects at once and I’ve already forgotten what it was like not to be working so hard. People say, “Don’t you miss your old life”? My old life was just waiting to find something to do. I’ve always wanted to work this hard. I wanted to be creating all the time, and if that’s what you really want to do… It’s so much fun. I like it.

  Lorelei Shannon