Hacker Cinema
El Mariachi
1993 · Film · 81 min
Part of Mexico Collection
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
El Mariachi just wants to play his guitar and carry on the family tradition. Unfortunately, the town he tries to find work in has another visitor, a killer who carries his guns in a guitar case. The drug lord and his henchmen mistake el Mariachi for the killer, Azul, and chase him around town trying to kill him and get his guitar case.
9 positive14 neutralfrom 23 commenters
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26 comments on Hacker News
Your comment left me encouraged, just because there are so few people left around here who would say something like
>You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
That being said, it's not true. Even Robert Rodriguez had to exercise a modicum of management skill and spend a non-trivial amount of money to get El Mariachi made. And even then, the available resources severely constrained what he could do with $7000 (about $20000 today).
The next Rodriguez is probably already using half-baked, primitive tools like WAN 2.2 to blow us all away. We just don't know who he or she is yet.
Something else that's not true is:
>It will equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
The great works add far more to our culture than the shitty works take away. Before AI, 90% of everything was crap. After AI, 99% of everything might be crap. But the remaining 1% is all that matters.
Also the plot of El Mariachi https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0104815/ and its sequel, Desperado.
> But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake
granted, but this wasn't a Point Break remake either. Dark Star is pretty much a student film turned into a blockbuster. Even El Mariachi->Desperado wasn't as different as Dark Star->Alien was.
Your comment reminded me of a scene from the movie "El Mariachi". In it, the title character walks into a bar looking for a job as a Mariachi, and is faced with the bar owner telling him something like "Why do I need a Mariachi when I can have a full band?", then pointing to a guy resting in the corner next to an organ (an "electronic organ", of the family type, as opposed to, you know, a hammond or something like that). The resting guy presses the "demo" button and the organ plays Mariachi music on its own ...
I share your pessimism partially, but I also wonder: if the system keeps optimizing for profit, at some point there just won't be enough people in the world to sell products and services to. I don't know what the answer is.
Edit: typo
> It’s not less work to make those films
It's more! That's part of what makes it impressive.
You can come at it from the perspective of "It's merely an accounting trick and slave labor" but I think that's missing it for what it is. Most art is created without an expected paycheck. Movies especially are collaborative and everyone involved in small indie projects with no budgets knew there were working for little to no pay. You think the actors, camera man, lighting and set guys, were all thinking they were going to make a bunch in the box office from Dark Star / Mariachi? Likely not. They probably were thinking they'd try their shot at exposure. Actors might get recognized and get a career out of it, or not. Film crew at least had something on their resume. It's not like the directors (Cameron, Rodriguez) were making any promises they couldn't keep.
Robert Rodriguez wrote a fun book about the making of his first feature film (El Mariachi) and how he saved up the money to finance it. On the strength of that he got a contract with Columbia Pictures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Crew
They're doing it for exposure!
But really, they helped a friend - or family member - make a movie. I would help a friend make a movie. And I'd be thrilled if he made it big. Granted, I have the luxury of having a steady job - and of not having movie making be my career. But still.
I mean, I get what you're saying. But let's look at Robert Rodriguez and the cast of El Mariachi. He put several of them in Desperado, and I bet they got paid working money for that.
Looking through the cast of El Mariachi, it looks to me like every single one of them who made any other movies, also made movies with Robert Rodriguez. It seems like if they wanted to act, Rodriguez helped them get work. I don't know that for sure, but that's what Googling the results looks like.
Primer, one of the great time travel movies, also had a $7000 budget.
Both Primer and El Mariachi are excellent, excellent examples of how to make a quality movie on a tight budget.
El Mariachi has entered the chat.
$7000 budget in 1992 that made director Robert Rodriguez famous, and happens to be a good movie.
Some of the best content I've encountered is exactly this. A good example is "High Maintenance", which started as a Vimeo web series and cost $1000 / episode to produce. [1] Another example is Christopher Nolan's first film, "Following", which cost $6,000 to produce. "El Mariachi" by Robert Rodriguez famously had a $7,000 budget.
They could also pool their money, crowdfund, or otherwise shoot for a bigger budget, in which case they could mimic the first Coen Brothers movie, "Blood Simple", which had a $1.5 million budget. There's also "The Blair Witch Project" ($200k), "Clerks" ($230k), "Paranormal Activity" ($15k), etc. [3]
I truly hope this latest labor dispute causes an industry shift in the direction of creatives taking more control over production and distribution of their content. Musician Anton Newcombe said this about the recording industry, and I think it applies equally well to film studios:
"...it’s a mafia. And until they can write the letter that I’m writing, they are the postman, and I am the letter writer. Period. End of discussion."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Maintenance
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Following
3. https://collider.com/movies-with-smallest-budgets/
What a great idea! I wonder how big the 16mm film communities are in these days of pervasive digital, given the costs of developing film and the risks associated with processing.
What I also found interesting is this site:
https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/movies-shot-on-16mm-moonrise-kingdom-carol/
Everybody knows the famous story of how El Mariachi was made, but I was surprised by some of the other films in the list (eg. Black Swan).
Speaking of Tarantino and low budgets, Tarantino apprentice (I say this tongue-in-cheek) Robert Rodriguez did his first feature film El Mariachi on a $10k budget.
I distinctly recall that he for instance had only one guitar case on hand, so if you pay close attention, you'll notice that our protagonist (an innocent mariachi with a guitar in his case) and the bad guys chasing him (sporting lots of guns in their case) use the same guitar case! Now that's props on the cheap...
Everytime I see one of these "Shot on ____ ", I think about the following:
People used heavy film cameras, awful lenses, rusty shutters amidst a raging war to take incredible pictures (Magnum photographers). If they had iPhone cameras back 50 years ago, they'd kill to get such a small camera system in their pockets.
Good photography (and cinematography) is largely a conceptual thing - put the right brain behind the tools, however limited, and they'll produce incredible content. This is hardly surprising. It is the Jimmy Hendrix equivalent of using an eBay cheapie to shred incredible music. Or look up Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi film shot with a total budget of $7000. No shit!
Can't discuss the subject without mentioning Robert Rodriguez's "10 Minute Film School" series, how-to shorts included with many of his video releases. The first famously describes how he made the relative blockbuster "El Mariachi" on just $7000.
https://indiefilmhustle.com/10-minute-film-school-robert-rodriguez/
You might already be familiar with it, but Robert Rodriguez pursued a very budget-conscious approach when filming El Mariachi.
Much of the approach is explained in the DVD extras to the film, but is summarised on the film's Wikipedia[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mariachi#Production
The best movie I've (finally) seen in recent months was El Mariachi. He made that for like $8K. Assault on Precinct 13 (the original one): $150,000. The list goes on and on. The Way of the Gun, a more recent favorite of mine with a bunch of big actors in it: $8.5M.
Another factor might be exorbitant star salaries. However, I think that's a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is that Hollywood is greedy. They won't touch a $10M film with no big stars in it because it's not likely to make an 8-figure profit.
This piece seems to want to redefine 'auteur' to mean "there is nobody else". However, and quoting "auteur theory" on Wikipedia:
> In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinct enough to shine through studio interference and the collective process.
The American Heritage Dictionary describes 'auteur' as:
> A filmmaker, usually a director, who exercises creative control over his or her works and has a strong personal style.
The author acknowledges that "filmmaking is where auteur theory first got developed and still where it feels the most comfortable and dominant", so knows there are already auteur filmmakers, which makes it impossible to accept the qualifier "first".
Sticking "auteur filmmaker" into Google newspaper search shows that Woody Allen, Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Cronenberg, Yahoo Serious and others have all been given that label. These all fit the above description.
Thus, this piece only makes sense if 'auteur' is being used with some alternate definition. But that was never given. Nor does it make sense to re-use a well-known term. Nor is there any reason why these filmmakers should not deserve the term 'auteur'.
For that matter, there are any number of films which were made completely free of the studio system. "El Mariachi" comes to mine, which "helped usher in the independent movie boom of the early 1990s." Or Andy Warhol's films, which were avant-garde films completely outside of the film industry. "Sleep", for example, was created as an "anti-film."
The author uses the waiver "I am far from a film historian", but I am likely even less of a film historian, and still know enough to refrain from saying "world's first auteur filmmaker", so can only assume it's meant as clickbait, and the waiver disingenuous.
"How did they develop their skill? The best film makers through the years usually seem to have learned their art in comparatively primitive circumstances, often in other countries with a limited movie industry. And in recent years the most important things we have been learning about programming seem to have originated with people who did not have access to very large computers. The moral of this story, it seems to me, is that we should make use of the idea of limited resources in our own education. We can all benefit by doing occasional "toy" programs, when artificial restrictions are set up, so that we are forced to push our abilities to the limit. We shouldn't live in the lap of luxury all the time, since that tends to make us lethargic. The art of tackling miniproblems with all our energy will sharpen our talents for the real problems, and the experience will help us to get more pleasure from our accomplishments on less restricted equipment."
So true. Robert Rodriguez filmed El Mariachi with almost no resources. It's why the demoscene produced - and still produces - such amazing creations within its self-imposed strict limits. It's one of the reasons why the Raspberry Pi is so popular and why you see the most beautiful ARM assembly on the Gameboy.
And conversely I think it's why Web development is collapsing under the weight of too many shiny things. It's lethargic and living in the lap of luxury. I watched a video the other day of AirBNB talking about the evolution of its Web site. The 2008 version was fine: Rails, a database and dynamic page output. The 2015 version was insane: Rails, React, Node, all sorts of dependencies, some stuff I'd never heard of but that the speaker assured was good, complex mobile optimization when you could instead, you know, just write lean and mean mobile-friendly HTML.
Limit yourself instead and see what happens - the results might just be awesome.
Yes, it's a lot of work, which is one reason, even on a short you'll see a long list of credits (specialization definitely improves the product). You can make a film for nearly nothing and occasionally someone will have the idea and talent to put together a film on a shoestring budget that cuts through (Pi, Primer, This Is Martin Bonner, Paranormal Activity, etc). And shoestring budget has different definitions for different people, everything from couple hundred bucks to low millions. The Duplass Brothers made a short for nearly nothing, whatever camera they had and an answering machine that launched their career (following it up with the micro-budget feature The Puffy Chair). Robert Rodriquez shot El Mariachi for $7500 (couple hundred thousand was poured into after it was bought to make it ready for theatrical release). It's easier now with so many great digital cameras and editing software. But first and foremost, filmmaking is a collaborative art. If you're trying to do it all by yourself, you're doing it wrong (unless it works, then you're doing it right) and people cost money, especially talented well trained people.
As the interminable stream of kitten free videos demonstrates, entertainment does not need to be expensive.
I like me some kittens as much as the next guy, but it's a different sort of product. When I want to watch a movie, 2 hours of kittens aren't a good substitute, the same way that I sometimes prefer to curl up with a good book rather than spend more time reading comments on HN or tweets on Twitter.
It's not that you should be sympathetic to those media with higher costs, as that such art forms couldn't come to be absent some system of copyright in the first place, and the fact of consistent demand over the last century shows that those kinds of entertainment have huge economic utility for consumers. Again, I'm not arguing for the Disney perpetual copyright approach here, but especially in this era of virtually cost- and effort-free digital copying, you can't realistically plan to recoup your production investment without some sort of way to assert authorship.
film a relatively minimalist production of "Hamlet" for less than the cost of a new economy car (assuming your small cast and crew work for shares of revenue)
You can, indeed. But this is itself a problem: actors and crew need to work to gain experience and exposure, but more and more often they're asked to work for free. It's very very hard to get those shares of revenue to turn into anything resembling cash, especially if you don't have a budget for marketing, and so people, especially crew, are constantly being asked to work long days without even getting paid minimum wage, because returns are so uncertain. Without some sort of reasonably robust copyright system, the incentives to do that get even worse.
I think critically successful movies like "Primer" and "El Mariachi" demonstrate that rather well.
Not as well as you imagine; bear in mind that the tiny #s you hear about associated with films like this are part of the marketing in just the same way as big budgets on blockbuster movies. Primer is a very good idea in a pretty bad film - a fair bit of its apparent complexity comes from obscurity, eg the scenes at the party later in the film are hard to figure out because you can't see what's going on on the screen very well. I like reading the script more than watching it. And I think it's kind of significant that despite the success of Primer Carruth has only made one other film, Upstream Color, which most people outside the experimental film community find incoherent at best.
El Mariachi got nearly $1m of additional post-production work (paid for by the distributor) to fix the soundtrack - originally the scenes were recorded without sound and Rodriguez had the actors repeat their lines into a tape recorder afterwards - and to do a proper film transfer, vs the videotaped version shown at Sundance. But nobody outside of the filmmaker community talks about that (although it's no secret, Rodriguez detailed it at length in a book he wrote and is great about sharing his knowledge in general). Plus, even the figure for production costs are a bit deceptive; Rodriguez got loaned a lot of equipment for free, and shot in a town in Mexico where he was able to borrow guns from the local police through a personal connection, among various other freebies.
> Now compare the costs of staging a theatrical work or making an independent film. It's not that that type of artwork is fundamentally better, but that the up front costs are much higher because of the resources involved.
It's hard for me to be sympathetic for some media just because they have higher costs. As the interminable stream of kitten free videos demonstrates, entertainment does not need to be expensive.
So maybe we are talking about "art" in some sense? Even art doesn't need to be expensive now. Cameras are cheap. Simple video editing software is relatively cheap (or free even). You could remake classics like "Twelve Angry Men" and film a relatively minimalist production of "Hamlet" for less than the cost of a new economy car (assuming your small cast and crew work for shares of revenue). I think critically successful movies like "Primer" and "El Mariachi" demonstrate that rather well.
> ...while having very little appreciation of how the majority of films get made...
I get how they're made. But I honestly don't care. Cheap media are just new forms of disruption, if you ask me.
This is dead wrong.
Indies don't make nearly as much money as studio titles, nor do they have such a huge investment on the line. Consider that for something like a new superhero movie, the production costs are easily >$100 million and marketing costs are about the same (a 50:50 ratio of production to marketing investment turns out to produce the optimal return, based on empirical measurements). $200 million and up is a lot of money, so films like this are largely financed by presale agreements with distributors. Yes, this can be offset by stars taking a profit share instead of up-front payment and by wealthy investors with deep pockets - but there are limits to both approaches, and neither is sufficient for really expensive projects of the kind the public has come to expect.
Of course things like Kickstarter and so on are great and will continue to gain in importance. However, they are much ,much better for established media properties (eg cancelled cult TV shows with an existing fan base, or projects by existing celebrities in other media, like if Justin Bieber decided to start making movies) than they are for innovative products (with new actors/ directors/ writers/ characters).
No doubt it will continue to grow and before the end of the decade a crowdfunded project by a bunch of unknowns will turn into a monster runaway cinema hit. But then it will revert to the mean. Anyone who is a filmmaker is familiar with the 'first time director X made a hit movie with a tiny budget of $Y' story. Blair Witch Project! El Mariachi! Primer! We love stories like this but there are a few things to bear in mind. First, the low-budget figure is not what it cost for you, the consumer, to see it, but what it cost to get it in front of a studio executive who OKed spending the money on making it market-ready. Second, it's untrue because there was a list of free stuff as long as your arm in the way of donations from friends of favors owed or suchlike, that most people don't have access to. Third, there were hidden costs in time or lost production quality. And fourth, and by far the most important, only one film every few years out of many thousands made every year hits a sweet spot and recoups some very large multiple of its original budget. It's like getting a royal flush in poker, or successfully splitting your blackjack hand multiple times: it's always a possibility, you could hit an enormous jackpot if you succeed, but odds are that you won't.
To paraphrase the famous Dov Simens, that's why they call it 'show business' and not 'show luck.' The business model is that you make an entertaining movie that people want to watch, movie theater owners rent it from you in order to rent out seats and sell expensive snacks, and then later streamers rent it from you and a you make some additional money on hard copies. (There's whole additional business model built around merchandise/franchise income like toys and theme park rides, but those are generally limited to family-friendly sci-fi and fantasy films with vast marketing budgets.) You can't run a business around the idea of producing surprise movie hits on a shoestring. You build one around the idea of being able to reliably pick projects with commercial potential and reliably match your investment with the profit potential. Essentially it's fund management in a market where many of the producers and consumers behave irrationally and unpredictably. If you want to do big deals, then you need to be able to sell the film before it gets made. Publishers are hard-headed about these things not because they are stupid, but because the alternative is losing a ton of other people's money and having to exit the industry in fairly short order.
So there's more DRM-free content every year, yippee. That's wonderful. It's wonderful in the same way that you can get better digital cameras for less every year and so on. But tell me what fraction of industry revenues this content accounts for, and what the economic inputs and outputs are. It's great to see Louis CK put out DRM-free editions of his stand-up performance, but his downside risk on that was maybe $10,000, $25,000 at most. Plus he was already famous. It's great that Veronica Mars raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter, but it only made 2/3 of that back at the box office although I anticipate it will break even by the end of its second financial year. And again, that was from a base of a multi-awarded hit cable show that ran for 3 years and had already had several million invested in it. Kickstarter works extremely well if you already have a franchise to leverage, because the marginal cost to the fan-investors of backing the project is pretty low relative to the opportunity-cost value of the time they have already invested in the franchise. But if you don't already have a brand, it's a very different situation.
I've brought this up again and again on DRM-related threads here. Publishers don't want to make consumers' lives difficult or prevent you from enjoying yourself - that's a juvenile and inaccurate picture. They're businesses that compete intensively against each other and launch a large number of extremely high-risk products each year, many of which never break even. The portion of the public that goes out and expends effort to discover artistic quality is tiny. Most people want to be entertained - and given that the #1 whine about DRM is the 'inconvenience' it imposes on consumers (eg the original article's complaint that having to stop the movie so one family member can let the cat out is an unacceptable loss of enjoyment), I'm pretty sure that the anti-DRM lobby is not champing at the collective bit to free starving artists held hostage by studios, but rather to watch more or less the same expensively-produced and marketed blockbuster entertainment as everyone else in their demographic cohort.
It's certainly possible. As with anything, it's a trade-off, and making the most of what resources you have and being willing to do the hard work and make the sacrifices necessary seems to be key.
Some notable examples made under $10,000 USD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Following_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mariachi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apu_Trilogy
This might be pedantic for this thread, I have to point out that Clerks wasn't really a "self financed" movie. At least in the sense that the final product you saw on theaters and on DVD was not paid for by Kevin Smith.
Smith did spend around $30k of his own money on production costs. The bulk of that was for film stock. (Similarly, Rodriguez spent $8k of his own money on Mariachi.)
Now, here's the kicker: Neither one of them spent a dime on film prints. They signed deals and let the studios take care of that. This is significant because if people talked about Clerks' or El Mariachi's budget in those terms, the numbers would be in the rane of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To put it in perspective: Would you say you "self financed" your startup if a big multinational paid for all the servers and bandwidth from the get go? It's sorta like that.
Saying it in interviews makes for a better story ("College dropout makes major movie for $8,000!") but it's not really accurate.
That stream of people supposedly represents people you already know but aren't friends with on Facebook.
I agree with OP in that Facebook that greatly taken away the ability to find people who are into a specific topic. I would like to find people in my area who like the film "El Mariachi". There is a Facebook page for it here: https://www.facebook.com/ElMariachiMovie I can see that 30,000+ people are fans of the film. Great! However, I can't see any of these people (let alone their proximity to me). The best I can do is maybe post something to the page, which will NOT appear by default, and may or may not get lost in the noise about other posts about actual Mariachis or maybe Mexican restaurants with the same name. The functionality related to one of my favorite books is even more bare (https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Man-with-the-Golden-Arm)!
This leads me to believe that (in the wake of privacy concerns) Facebook is no longer designed to help you meet strangers. You might find someone with similar interests, but it is likely to be a friend of a friend. This might be intentional. It's not necessarily bad or wrong, but I think it is important to call it out.
It's hard to make a decent living in film making, especially in a way where you're creative. So, if you're asking, my suggestion is keep your day job and stay a programmer -- at least for a while.
Filmmaking is a lot of fun and it's a hobby of mine as well. With digital cameras you're infinitely liberated. It's dirt cheap: you just need a good boom mic and your good-to-go, for the most part (especially if you go Dogma 95). So shoot. I mean it. Just go shoot. You'll most likely have to wear most of the hats: producer/screenwriter/director/editor/sound/etc. But that's great training. You'll see what you enjoy most.
And each time you shoot something, throw it up anywhere you can: YouTube, etc. If you're good, people will notice. Robert Rodriguez shot a short 16mm called 'Bedhead' for a local competition, and that took him to film school. After school he shot El Mariachi for $7,000, and went on from there. If you're talented, it will show. To get talented, watch great films with the sound off and shoot, shoot, shoot.