"I've always loved doing short films and always wished I could do more, there's just never a place to do them," explained Rodriguez at the LA press day for the Warner Bros Pictures movie. "And so when my son [Rebel] came to me after Shark Boy, my third son, he said, 'I want to come up with the next movie.' And I said, 'What do you want to do? We’ll come up with something. I'm out of ideas right now, I've just finished.' And then he said, 'Something like the Little Rascals,' which I’d been showing them over a few months before to show how funny they were, and they loved how short they were."
"I went, 'Of course. How come I never thought of that?' I just loved short films and we had a need to come up with a name kind of like that, like Our Gang or The Little Rascals. And we decided to call it Shorts because, as my son explained, it was because the stories are short, the kids are short, and they wear shorts, and we figured it would happen during in the summer. I said, 'Okay, that's good enough. That'll be our title for now until we come up with a better one,' which we never did. So it became that that’s the format the story’s told in, in a series of shorts. He tells them out of order, so it’s kind of like Pulp Fiction for kids and you have to figure out the little puzzle. And I just thought it would be a kind of unique way of telling the story for a family film where kids get kind of a puzzle to solve as well."
Rebel isn't Rodriguez' first son to come up with the idea for a movie. Racer Rodriguez created the superhero world of Shark Boy and Lava Girl. But Rodriguez says it's an organic process - and just a matter of giving credit where credit is due.
"Just about any filmmaker or writer, they don't really originate all their ideas," said Rodriguez. "Sometimes they’ll hear a piece of a conversation or somebody will tell them something. You eavesdrop and you get ideas for characters that way and stories that way. So very few things just come sprouting out of your brain. It’s really you're responding to the world. In my world, a lot is my children. When people say, 'Give me advice to go write a script or a novel,' and they say, 'Write what you know,' what I know is my family life very well. So to not utilize that is to rob my career of a lot of inspiration and a lot of information."
"A lot of times I’ll turn to them for ideas of empowerment that I've forgotten about, because you don't need it once you grow up. You're empowered; you know you can make anything happen. But for a kid who still needs his mom to drop him off at the mall or take him to the movies, he would love to have a wishing rod and then he could just wish he was there and be there. Or a jet pack if he was a spy kid and fly there. Or if he could be powerful like a shark, half boy/half shark,... Things really get into their dreams. So anything that empowers a kid usually does pretty well, and they watch it over and over again for those reasons."
Asked if it's hard to decide which idea from one of his kids to pursue, Rodriguez replied, "It's not like you think. We’re not like at dinner and they say, 'How about a movie about a creature...?' 'No, that's not good enough.' 'What about a big, giant balloon that?' 'No, no.' They're never pitching anything. It was just that particular experience. Just both those times they just happened to have an idea they just couldn't get out of their head. They kept saying it over and over."
"The same with [Rebel]. He loves rocks and rocks. He’s always collecting rocks and he kept saying, 'Oh, the rainbow rock and the canyon with the crocodiles and the snakes...' We have a canyon on our property with a bunch of snakes, the one we shot in actually, it’s on my ranch. So I thought, 'What if that was a wishing rock?' So I tried the idea on them and I asked Rebel, 'What would you wish for if you could wish for anything?' He said, 'I wish for a butt for a head. And I said, 'Are you sure?' He said, 'Yes.' And so I said, 'Well let me ask his older, wiser brother,' and he wished to be a potato. I thought, 'What's wrong with these guys?,' recalled Rodriguez, laughing. "So I said, 'Well, okay, what I would wish for is a million more wishes.' And then their faces sort of dropped and they went, 'Oh, oh, oh...' Like, 'Oh, he just blew our wish,' then they kind of got it. So I thought, 'Oh my god, this would be such a great story.'"
Looking Into the Future
Rodriguez is now in production on a film strictly for adults, Machete. Starring Danny Trejo, Machete is based on the faux trailer included in Grindhouse. At the time of the Shorts press tour, Rodriguez had completed one week of shooting on Machete. "It was amazing," said Rodriguez. 'It’s really going good. That's the shortest film schedule since Mariachi. Mariachi was a 14-day shoot. Desperado was a 35-day shoot. This is about half the amount of time that we had on Shorts, which is a really short shoot, which was about 42 days. [...]You have to just make quick decisions, and it comes out better. The energy is much better."The Machete trailer was over the top, and Rodriguez says we can expect more of the same from the real feature film. "There's so much crazy stuff now. I just wanted to live up to the trailer and it’s far surpassed the trailer. So if you like the trailer, you're going to love the movie. The movie’s got an insane cast," said Rodriguez.
As for other projects, Rodriguez said they have a script for Sin City 2 but they haven't shot anything yet. There's also a script ready to go on Nerverackers, and Predators is nearing production. "I have a director on that and it’s my main crew that I usually use," said Rodriguez about Predators. "And then it's taking place right there [in Texas] so I get to walk in and see designs and comment on stuff and work on the script with him. We start shooting that pretty soon."
* * * * * * *
Shorts hits theaters on August 21, 2009 and is rated PG for mild action and some rude humor.
