Los Angeles Film Festival: A Conversation with Antonio Banderas
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Thursday, June 26, 2008
On his introduction to the work of Robert Rodriguez:
The first time I saw him, Sony pictures called me at the time and said we would like you to see this movie called El Mariachi. So I saw the movie and I was totally fascinated by what I saw. Then when I finished watching it somebody from the studio came to me and said, ‘Did you know this movie was done with $5,000?’ I said ‘What? That’s impossible. They are a bunch of actors there, there are traveling shots.’ They said, ‘Those weren’t traveling shots, that was done with a wheelchair.’ I said, but all of those actors? And he told me this story, [Robert] went to a place in Antonio, Texas, a hospital in which they pay $500 to each one of those guys to test a new medicine against cholesterol. They were for five days in this hospital and they did the casting with all of those people. He said, ‘Do you want to do a movie?’ and they said ‘sure.’ He said ‘Okay, you’re in the movie.’ El Mariachi was done like that, with all those people, with imagination, with a camera he borrowed from somebody, with wheelchairs. With nothing.
On making Spy Kids with Robert:
I remember with the first Spy Kids, I was in Paris shooting a movie and he called and said, do you want to come to Austin, Texas in three weeks, we’re going to start making a movie. I said ‘Where’s the script?’ He said, ‘we don’t have the script yet.’ I said ‘You don’t have a script and in three weeks we are going to start making a movie?’ He said ‘Yeah, I’m going to go to Sony and pitch this idea.’ And he went and then called me back and said ‘We are starting in three weeks’…Spy Kids was almost like an amusement park because he invited all the kids of everybody who was working, so we had clowns, and musicians there, the kids of the extras, the kids of the stunt guys. He just made the entire thing something different, we were not shooting a movie it was something different which was a lot of fun. I love the guy.