Rebel Without a Crew
Last week, I finished reading the wonderful Rebel Without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez. The book is mostly a diary Rodriguez wrote when writing, directing and then selling his first feature film, El Mariachi, at age 23. It is a great book, steaming of youthful fuck-it-let’s-do-it energy and extremely inspiring in that regard. Against all advice and common wisdom, Rodriguez managed to shoot a full 90 minutes movie with a tiny budget, doing almost everything that directing and producing a movie entails on his own. His actors were amateurs, found not by elaborate castings but rather by happenstance. For instance, Rodriguez got to know a guy who seemed to resemble all the best villains of movies they watched together so he asked him if he wanted to play the villain in his movie. The guy hadn’t ever acted in his life. That all happened during a one-month stay in a research hospital which Rodriguez used to finance parts of his movie and get the time for writing his script. Many points Rodriguez makes in his book can be applied widely. First and foremost, it is the just-do-it-spirit, a prioritization of practice over theory – underpinned by extremely high intensity, a willingness to improvise and lots of practice. Time and again, Rodriguez repeats that his one big advantage was that he had started making movies on a very simple technical setup at around the age of twelve. So when he directed his first full movie with 23, he could actually look back at around a decade of experience. The magic seems to lie in the mixture of extremely hard work and a cool willingness to improvise, cut corners, and seek simplicity. For instance, he makes the point that he does not see why shooting a 90 minutes movie should take several months and how one of the advantages of keeping this period short and juicy – besides saving money – lies in avoiding everybody getting bored, most importantly the actors.
Rodriguez emphasizes how all the constraints he faced actually became his biggest advantages. He was forced to tell his cinematic story in a different way. Hence, the idiosyncrasy of his whole approach rubbed off on the movie, making it stand out. On top of that, he makes the point that constraints are a big enabler for creativity. He had so limited resources that many elements of his story forced themselves upon him – and therefore didn’t require any choice at all. His creative task was ‘only’ to stitch them together. In that sense, infinite resources and possibilities are terrible for a creative project, increasing the difficulty significantly. This makes a lot of sense and is yet so far away from common sense. For the usual expectation is that you cannot undertake this or that fancy project as long as you lack the necessary resources. At least I think that quite often. Getting rid of this bullshit excuse alone is worth a lot.
Less explicitly, the book also teaches a lot about smart risk-taking. Much in the spirit of Richard Branson, Rodriguez fully capped his downside-potential. He took great pains to fully avoid taking up any kind of debt by keeping costs ultra-low and provide the necessary budget fully by himself (remember the research hospital). Financially, he just couldn’t take any lasting damage even if he had not sold the movie at all. Funnily, this is what had almost happened: Rodriguez’ initial plan was to sell the action movie to the Mexican home-movie market with the goal of at least covering his costs. So initially he talked to relatively small film-companies focused on this niche market, without any success. At the same time, however, by means of this film (and a short movie he had produced earlier), a famous agency became aware of him, took him under contract and eventually sold the movie with great success to Hollywood. El Mariachi was unable to achieve modest commercial success but very much able to achieve huge commercial success. Another lesson and one that Harvey Firestone also already points out in 1926 in Men and Rubber, when talking about his first years as a self-made sales-guy: It is often easier to sell to the big fish than to the small fish.
Not only was the financial risk capped. Maybe just as importantly, Rodriguez made sure to drastically cap the artistic risk: His plan was to rapidly direct multiple movies in a row, with El Mariachi the first of a trilogy. The goal was not only to use the funds earned by selling these movies to shoot the next one but crucially also to use all these movies first and foremost to learn. In the spirit of putting practice first, Rodriguez mused that making good movies requires getting out your bad movies first. Thus, the appeal of the Mexican home-movie market also lay in the fact that it was outside of the classic movie-circles. He primarily wanted to experiment and try things out. This allows for huge creative freedom, especially stemming from the explicit openness to make mistakes. It is often said that writer’s blocks come from putting yourself under pressure, being afraid of writing badly (I certainly know the struggle) – and that therefore the best remedy lies in producing tons of pages without any minimum standard of quality. Similarly, Rodriguez allowed himself to fail – a necessary ingredient for the aforementioned happy fuck-it-let’s-do-it spirit. Don’t mistake this for a lack of determination and pursuit of quality, though – nothing could be further from the truth. Macro, Rodriguez created the means to have room for experimentation and failure, micro, he obsessed over making the best movie he possibly could. This reminds me of a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk about what he calls “macro patience, micro speed”:
”Everybody’s impatient at a macro, and just so patient at a micro, wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing the fuck out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out.” (Gary Vaynerchuk in Tim Ferris: Tribe of Mentors, p. 216)
Funnily, while it seems quite plausible that he might have been unable to sell El Mariachi, it seems completely improbable that Rodriguez might have failed at becoming a professional director over the years. He would have continued to create movies, whatever it might have taken. He would have continued to experiment, to learn, to get better. He would have continued to pour everything he had into his movies. Process over outcome. Taken seriously, such an approach is almost impossible to fail. Rodriguez several times states that himself: His goal was not to become famous or rich. His goal was to make movies. So he made movies. And he would’ve continued to do so anyway. In that way he could not fail. Because Rodriguez put everything he had into this movie, he had nothing to lose. He was willing to pay the price, and to pay it up-front. Taking shitty jobs to finance his undertaking, risking to not make a single dime from months of hard work, to fail in front of his amateur actors, to feel ridiculous at film-school after ignoring virtually all standard advice - the price up-front was in fact quite high. But only the willingness to pay it at once allows to be free from any serious ‘macro-risk’ later. I have a hunch that many of the spectacular failings that seriously sink people’s careers or even personal lives involve an unwillingness to pay the full price up-front. This whole approach taken by Rodriguez in general as well as the willingness to pay the price up-front is based on passion. Passion is a somewhat difficult, laden term but I feel it is the only correct one here. You simply cannot go through with such an approach if you are not passionate about whatever you are doing. Fully impossible. That is a huge barrier to entry.
After becoming part of the big Hollywood machinery, Rodriguez kind of uncovers the mystery of why usual professional movies are more expensive to make by several orders of magnitude. The whole professional machine that takes over the post-production of El Mariachi is described as slow and inefficient with lots of layers of unnecessary complexity and no serious will to save money or time. People ‘just do their jobs’, absolutely willing to stay within their siloes, to stick with non-sensical, slow, inefficient ways of doing their work etc. It is in this regard, at the latest, that it becomes evident how entrepreneurial the whole book and the work of its author is. At the same time, the book is a stark reminder of the fact that “entrepreneurial” is a quality that is not restricted to classic business-endeavors but also very much part of many creative undertakings.