Robert Rodriguez has been a trailblazer in Hollywood for over 30 years. The director, producer, and composer first burst onto the scene in 1992 with his ultra-low-budget action film El Mariachi, which he made for just $7,000. This innovative DIY approach set the tone for Rodriguez’s career, as he went on to become known for his efficient filmmaking techniques and imaginative visual style across films like Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, and the Spy Kids franchise.
Now, Rodriguez returns to the world of Spy Kids with the new film Spy Kids: Armageddon. As he explains in this interview, the timing felt right to revisit the family-friendly franchise that holds such meaning for him. Having made the original Spy Kids films when his own children were very young, Rodriguez saw this as a chance to bring the series full circle now that his kids are grown. Their contributions elevated Spy Kids: Armageddon, as they helped develop key elements like the video game at the film’s center. Even 20 years later, Rodriguez retains the creative spirit of an imaginative kid, devising playful spy gadgets alongside his children.
Let’s just start off by—what made you want to return to the Spy Kids Universe for Spy Kids: Armageddon?
Robert Rodriguez: I love making these movies—pure imagination. I showed someone the sketches I originally drew for Thumb Thumb when I was in high school and won my first art competition. It’s driven by all the dreams I had as a child. But now I have children of my own, from a family of ten, and all the stories of my siblings, my family stories about a Hispanic family, but I made them spies so that everyone could see the film.
It had such an effect on the children that now those children are grown up and have children of their own. So, I thought that now was a good time to put out a movie that could be a really fun legacy experience for a family to watch together, knowing that the parents grew up with the original series.
They could show their kids, and they would see things that were in the original film. But then new gadgets and things that are from the new movie. This is the movie we grew up with. This is the series of films we grew up with. So, the timing seemed right.
My own children have been working on them since they could crawl! Now I turn around, and they’re the age I was when I made El Mariachi. So there I was, creating fire creatively. So for them to be involved with me in big roles was just amazing — the osmosis goes both ways. The films are always about families working together on a spy mission, and they get stronger in the end. Well, that happens behind the camera.
The more we work together, the more time we spend as a family because it’s essential to the project. Because it’s the only series in Hollywood that a family actually makes for families! You just have to do it that way. And it makes us stronger as a family. It’s like you’re ticking all the boxes. You’re living the best life when you get to mentor your kids. But then they’re mentoring me, teaching me things. Things I never would have thought of because they’re just at the age I was when I was coming up with a lot of innovations.
What sort of things did they innovate with that they might have brought to Spy Kids: Armageddon?
Robert Rodriguez: Yes, they did. They even created that whole video game. They created it on their own; they were creating a game to sell independently called High Score, and they were just building it. I was writing the script, and we realized we needed a game or, like, I just make that the game in the movie. We’ll get to see it come to life in a huge way. Now they’re actually making an actual game of it. It will be out soon.
So then just innovations in the process, they were just figuring out all kinds of ways to pre-visualize things, and they have more ideas now, see me make these movies, they’re like; I think there are more ways we can streamline a lot of this using technology. I’m like, that’s what I would have been coming up with if I was there. They now have those thinking caps on. It’s really cool to see their ideas validated, and then they go further with it.
That’s really cool! Now you’re known for really vast creative worlds. When working on a movie that is designed for kids, do you ever have to rein those ideas in, or do you just find different ways to make them happen?
Robert Rodriguez: It almost feels like the other way around. I feel like you’re unlimited when you make something for kids — that your imagination can go really wild where you couldn’t put a lot of these ideas in an adult film because it would be too silly or too whimsical. But it makes a lot of sense. This is a gadget Bond would never have, but it makes a lot of sense. If you’ve got a warming affection, just make them all happy and make them all get along, or just drop an emoji bomb instead of something they’re just going to obliterate.
There are just some ideas you can entertain that are more thematically suited for families and kids that you never can show that side — all of your other side, which is a side I showed the most because I have five kids. I’m from a family of ten. I can really jump into what it is that I’m most passionate about — which is family. In the Spy Kids film, they just make them Spies, but they’re really at the heart of it. It’s just about a family that gets stronger through the course of a mission.
Now I see some of the gadgets you’ve been showing as we’ve been talking. How did the process come up for making all those gadgets and gizmos in the movie along with the vehicles the kids in real life?
Robert Rodriguez: We need more gadget ideas. Come on, where are the gadgets? Okay, super goop. We can use that. Grappling was always helpful. The emoji bomb was really fun. It came about when I had an idea for making someone hungry or this or that. But then my daughter saw the robot design. She’s like, “Those are really cute!”
She did a really cute drawing of them, and I said, “Well, they’re supposed to be menacing.” But her drawing made them look cute. And she said, “I’m just a beep boop.” And I thought, I really want him to see them, turn like that and say that. Let’s add a cute overload button here so that she can use it to get them to go into that mode. Because now I’ve seen her drawing. I can’t unsee it.
Her car, kids with a go-kart. It is a go-kart, but then this road warrior front on it. We’re always just trying to make things look like kids would just want to have that. And even adults would wish that they had something that cool. So if the original Spy Kids was a modern spy film like Bond, this new film would be visually something like a neo-Spike look.
We said, let’s come up with a look that’s somewhere in between, where it still has the shapes and the feel and the roundness of Spy Kids, but the colours and the textures are updated to be more spy-fi. So that was kind of our guiding principle. And me and my kids, we just sat around and came up with ideas. It’s a lot of fun.
Now, when working on a movie that does have so much CGI and visual effects, how does that process differ from working with one that is more focused on practical effects?
Robert Rodriguez: We just have a better budget this time, for once, to be able to hire even better artists. And because the process for filming it is exactly the same. I’m filming this exactly in the same location, same green screen, the same wiring, same everything that I used on Spy Kids, Spy Kids II and Spy Kids III.
We were filming all that the same way, and so it was really just the updated visual effects have gotten better. Because a lot of my crew was the same, too, it was really trippy to be there on the same screen, in the same space, making another Spy Kids 20 years later. It really blew our minds how the method had really changed. It sounds really advanced for back then. No one was filming digitally or with the green screen and stuff like that.
So, I was way ahead of the curve back then, and now that’s just how it’s done. But it was cool to do it at the same spot with the same technology. We didn’t even upgrade the technology.
Gaming, tabletop, and video games are a big, big part of this film. Are you personally a gamer? You mentioned your kids are. How does that all work, and how did you kind of bring that to the project?
Robert Rodriguez: I was always an original gamer. I mean, I used to play games back in the days of Pong as well as on my Apple II computer. During the early Spy Kids movies, I would be the first to get an Xbox, and we’d be playing games on the set with the kids and the crew. It was always part of the fun. In fact, my call name was “Always The King.” In school, we used to say, “I’m going to turn you into the court jester.” Of course, he would lose. He couldn’t defeat “The King” until the kids got to be about the age of the Spy Kids when they were 8 or 9.
Something happened, and I just never won again after that. They just somehow figured it out, but they knew how to do things I didn’t know how to do, and I just never won again! We put that in the movie, of course, that they didn’t need me for anything. I used to be able to look up codes to give them access all over the game. They didn’t need me for that anymore. They suddenly knew everything about it, and I didn’t. I fell way behind pretty early in their lives, and it stumped me for a long time. I realized that’s just how it goes — the kids take over from the parents eventually.
Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed the film, and I’m excited to see what people think of Spy Kids: Armageddon.
Robert Rodriguez: Thank you. Appreciate it so much.
Have an awesome day.
