Robert Rodriguez quotes:

When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change.

I wish I could freeze time or go back in time and watch my kids grow up all over again because it is just going by too fast.

Low budgets force you to be more creative. Sometimes, with too much money, time and equipment, you can over-think. My way, you can use your gut instinct.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream world, because it doesn't always seem too logical how things work out.

Changing the game is a mindset.

I try to remind people, whether you have a growth manager or a value manager, you're going to go through cycles where you think you have a village idiot.

A movie goes from several stages, from idea to script. As you continue shooting, you will make some adjustments. You're constantly adjusting. It's like a piece of music. You're constantly trying to make it better.

Frank is such a great visual storyteller, that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen.

I always wanted to be a stay-at-home dad making art, making movies.

I love working with great actors.

The challenge is what was making it exciting. You don't want to do anything that's too easy or that you know that you can pull off, otherwise it's really not worth doing.

I usually have a couple of projects going on that are different. A 'Sin City' while I'm doing a 'Spy Kids' at the same time. I need different things going on.

Too many creative people don't wanna learn how to be technical, so what happens? They become dependent on technical people. Become technical. You can learn that. If you're creative and technical, you're unstoppable.

You create superheroes to take care of problems that can't really be solved another way.

Don't look at all at what other people are doing. Think of what you're doing as completely fresh because if you imitate you're dead.

Hollywood wants to own everything. I don't want to own anything. I don't want people just to make content, I want to empower and teach them to create content they own that they can exploit in any medium.

People don't live in Austin to work, they work to live there.

People talk about immigration, but they won't talk about the corruption that actually exists between Mexico and the U.S.

I was from such a large family that when I first met my wife, I told her: 'You can go work outside of the house and I'll stay home and continue making my cartoon strips. Maybe I'll make some commercials nearby, you know I'll do anything locally, but I would love to just stay at home and raise the kids like I did when I was growing up.'

Don't give me any money, don't give me any people, but give freedom, and I'll give you a movie that looks gigantic.

I collect a lot of art.

Exploitation films were famous for taking an issue an exploiting it because they could move much faster than a studio could. If there was any hot topic, they would run out and make a quick movie and make a buck on it, by changing it around and using it, in some way, to give some relevance.

Usually, I'm just pleasing myself and I have very similar tastes I think to an audience, what that core audience really likes.

Everything I've done has always been my own made up world with its own rules and its own made up stories.

I get a lot done considering I spend half my day sleeping.

When you take technology and mix it with art, you always come up with something innovative.

I realized that everything I do is fantasy, whether it is an adult movie or a kids movie.

I have 5 children of my own. They are bilingual, like most second and third generations. But they speak primarily in English and they couldn't find anything on television that represented who they are in this country.

When you make an exploitation film, you always want to have a real issue. That's how they were always done.

I don't think anyone can be more of a predator than a human being.

Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.

I was a cartoonist when I was at university, but I decided to go into movie making knowing that I could still draw by doing movies, design work, story boards, and such.

A lot of people who watch DVDs are people who are interested in, if not moviemaking, then creativity in general.

Yeah, I was always a big fan of noir.

What could make my life better? Oh, if I could only find that magic bottle that lets you never have to sleep. I have so much stuff I wanna do, but... That six or seven hours you have to be in bed with your eyes closed. What a waste!

I have so many friends who don't know how to cook.

I like to keep my budgets at a certain price when I work for someone else, and even more so now that I'm working for myself, and use new technologies to deliver films that look like they have high production levels.

Don't be told something is impossible. There's always a way.

It's rare for the studios to find a filmmaker who wants to make a family film. To find someone that has an idea, embraces it, has kids and wants to make something exciting - well, they don't see that too often.

I do like strong women in my movies. I have five sisters, so I've just grown up with that model.

A lot of 3D movies have so much on the screen that you almost don't know where to look.

All those years I had been making movies because I loved movies, and that's what made all the difference. If you're doing it because you love it you can succeed because you'll work harder than anyone else around you, take on challenges no one else would dare take, and come up with methods no one else would discover, especially when their prime drive is fame and fortune. All that will follow later if you really love what you do. Because your work will speak itself.

Any time you do action and horror, you've always got to try to find a way to make it fresh for the audience, but also for yourself, and there are so many different ways to freak people out and create tension.

Anyone who can only write about themselves or their life experiences, in my mind, isn't a very good writer.

Creative people are notoriously the slowest to adopt new technology.

Creativity, not money, is used to solve problems.

Data scientists are statisticians because being a statistician is awesome and anyone who does cool things with data is a statistician.

Ever director has at least 10 bad films in them.

Everyone applauds each other's success in Hollywood because they know how tough it is, but it really comes down fundamentally to the process.

For me, Mexploitation seemed like something that should have existed, but didn't.

I definitely want to produce more because I have a bunch of projects that I've either written or half written and I want to continue developing them and if cant direct one right away cause I'm doing something else I will love to still see it get made.

I kind of like working fast.

I want to push technology boundaries to be more efficient.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

If you do a film with a studio, agents step in, they start saying, 'My actor has to get this amount of money', and it becomes about deals.

If you want to be a rock star, you're not going to just walk on stage. You gotta go practice in the garage until your fingers bleed. I always say that - the same with writing and the same with filmmaking - if it's really your passion, you've just got to stick with it and do it.

If you're just creative, you'll always have to rely on technical people. If you're creative and technical, you're unstoppable.

I'm all about freedom in art. I'm from Texas, so when someone tells you which way to ride your horse, you think 'I'll just go to a different ranch. You guys are riding it backwards anyway.

It [lighting the set up] is quite a process. It's like drawing. It's like being an artist. You pencil it in first, and then you ink it. When you're filming, it's like you're penciling it all in. You know where everything is going to go. But, that application of the final ink takes some time.

It's easier making a smaller film like El Mariachi. There are no budget worries because there is no budget. There is no crew problem because there is no crew. And if you screw up, no one is around to see you screw up -- so it's no longer a screw up.

It's such a drag to make a movie.

Make DV movies so you can learn how to make films, but don't try to distribute them until they are fantastic.

Only by seeking challenges can we hope to find the best in ourselves.

Really, children will support anything that is empowering to them.

Sometimes a movie series that becomes popular can be a blessing and curse because you get known for that. People don't give you a chance, after that... I'm a big proponent of getting somebody that you always admire and giving them a chance to do something else because they can redefine themselves.

Television series always have a lot of characters because you want people to identify with someone on the show, who will be your eyes.

Tell everyone that your mistakes are art. You can get away with a lot that way.

That six or seven hours you have to be in bed with your eyes closed. What a waste!

The accidents are things that audiences always remember most, I've found on my own movies. The things that they like the most are the things that were just by accident. So you have to create a situation where nothing but accidents can happen the entire time.

The only thing I ever wanted to do is never have to work a day in my life.

The studios don't finance anymore, they get outside funds.

There are real issues going on in just about any movie that's got fun elements to it.

Very few people have a lot of time to dedicate to one hobby. I was fortunate to have started so young, because when you're young you have nothing but time. Hours and hours to burn up on something as silly as a movie.

We [Rodriguez and Frank Miller] wanted to take the movies and turn them into a graphic novel, so that people wouldn't even know what they were looking at. It's still visual storytelling, but it's approached completely different. The two mediums don't have to be separate mediums. They can be one and the same.

What I love about new technology is that it really pushes the art. It really pushes it in a way that you can't imagine until you come up with the idea. It's idea-based. You can do anything.

When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.

When you put on the glasses in a 3-D movie they just kind of sit there and you forget about them.

When you use the same actors a lot, you get to know them and you realize that one movie can't explore all the talent that they have. You really have to give them several different kinds of roles, in completely different movies, to push them and to push yourself.

You ask any moviemaker what their favorite movie experience was, and they'll say it was one of the first ones, where everyone had to pitch in and do everything together, and you had to struggle.