All About the Shooting.(Once Upon a Time in Mexico)

Robert Rodriguez is an anomaly in Hollywood: a director who can make big box-office extravaganzas on the quick and cheap. And he does it all alone; the 35-year-old Mexican-American director of such films as "Spy Kids" and "El Mariachi" eschews Los Angeles in favor of Texas, where he writes, edits, composes and creates special effects in his stone- turreted castle on 25 hectares of rugged hill country. He and his wife, Elizabeth Avellan, produce all his pictures. His credit on his latest film, "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," reads "Shot, chopped and scored by Robert Rodriguez." As one of the film's stars, Johnny Depp quipped to NEWSWEEK, "I expected to see him making sandwiches!" Indeed, Rodriguez may be the only true auteur in American cinema today.

How does he manage to retain creative control? "Easy," he told NEWSWEEK over drinks in the Hotel des Bains at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. "Don't ask for a lot of money." Low budgets are certainly a Rodriguez trademark. He made his first feature, "El Mariachi," for $7,000 in 1992. Its 1995 sequel, "Desperado," starring Antonio Banderas and the then unknown Salma Hayek, cost Sony $6 million--still paltry by studio standards. And the third and final installment of the series, "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," came in at $26.5 million--$15 million of which went to its stars: Banderas, Hayek, Depp and Willem Dafoe. It nearly broke even when it hit U.S. theaters last week, and will no doubt keep ringing up the receipts when it opens in Europe this week. "I could have asked for three times the budget with this cast," Rodriguez says. "But if I had, there would have been studio people on the set in Mexico, making sure we were covering their investment, and that's very restricting. I know how to make cheap movies--and I have to do all the jobs to keep it cheap--but in turn I can make the movie I want. Even if it bombs at the theater, they get their money back. And you have the chance to make something a bit different."

"Once Upon a Time" surely falls under that category. A paean to Sergio Leone's 1970s spaghetti Western "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," the film tells the story of a shifty CIA operative, played by Depp, who arrives in a small, dusty Mexican town to foil a political coup with the help of the gun-slinging guitarist El Mariachi (Banderas). Like the other "Mariachi" installments, the film is exceedingly violent; in one scene Depp's character's eyes are drilled out. Yet "Once Upon a Time" managed to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating in the United States, which would have kept away most of the lucrative teenage audience. "Tone is everything," says Rodriguez. "And the tone of the 'El Mariachi' series is so comic-book that I've never had any problem with the censors."

It's no accident that Rodriguez's movies look like comic books: he started his artistic career as a cartoonist. The third of 10 children, he grew up in Austin, Texas, the son of a door-to-door salesman and a nurse. He was full of creative energy, and as a teenager he wielded a video camera nonstop. At 18 Rodriguez enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin but was rejected by the film program because his grades were too low. So he created and drew an award-winning comic strip called "Los Hooligans" for the student newspaper, The Daily Texan. He also met Avellan, a fellow student, whom he married in 1990.

Eventually Rodriguez dropped out of college and started making movies for the Mexican video market. In 1992, out of money but full of ideas, he volunteered for a monthlong cholesterol-drug experiment that paid $3,000. During the trial, which required him to be sequestered, he wrote "El Mariachi," about a nameless, clean-living guitarist who is driven to violence by revenge. Afterward, Rodriguez took the cash and headed down to Acuna, Mexico, to shoot the film in Spanish with a 16mm camera that ...