WARNING: Contains Spoilers for El Mariachi and Desperado
In 1992, twenty-five year old American filmmaker Robert Rodriguez embarked on a film project that would not only fast track his career to superstar director status but would also inspire an entire generation of filmmakers to go out and make their own films with their own money. The story is a remarkable one of triumph over adversity and also acts as lesson in creative and lateral thinking. For the uninitiated, Rodriguez wrote, directed and co-produced El Mariachi for a grand total of $7,000.
Robert Rodriguez took the film world by storm in 1992 with his $7,000 budgeted feature film El Mariachi. The film is an excellent example of low budget filmmaking and what can be achieved with very little money. The sequels Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) are less impressive despite the substantial increase in budgets.
It is, as the title song written by the late, great Howard Ashman puts it, a tale as old as time. While nowadays a romantic cliché, the fact of the matter remains that the story of a beautiful self-less peasant woman, a cursed selfish prince and the transformative power of the love between the two of them has been around for centuries, reaching back even further than Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's original French rendition published in 1740.
When one looks at the overall work of a specific filmmaker in order to determine his status as an auteur, questions of originality, authorship and whether specific films fit into an overall schemata come into play. If a director does something completely different from his normal line of work and lacks aspects that are common in his overall body, is it a "true" film in his filmography?
Sir Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke: “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, implying that every scientific success is based entirely on the success of those who have come before. This statement can, and regularly is, transposed into other areas of human endeavor such as philosophy or art.
The question as to what makes a Canadian film distinctly Canadian has always been an issue for Canadian filmmakers, particularly in regards to their American counterparts. Despite the progress the Canadian film industry has made in getting their films seen by their own people, they still have to compete with the Americans in getting their films noticed.
Two British films with common themes and characters but which approach their subjects from entirely differing perspectives and virtually opposite aesthetics. The first is Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, which was produced in 2002. 