reesesWeb

Two things:

If you have any interest in making film, read this book. If nothing else, if you ignore every piece of advice in it, it's inspirational. As you can guess from his films, and you can conclude from the frequency that he releases films, the guy has an incredible amount of drive and energy. It's very infectious.

If you have any interest in doing anything that you feel is "too expensive" because of equipment or whatever, read this book. It's a great reminder that resourcefulness (which Rodriguez refers to as "creativity") is worth dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars in expensive equipment. Sometimes, the resourcefulness involves more work, sometimes, not. It's an incredibly accessible (almost too much so) book, and you will finish it with your head full of those projects you have wanted to execute, but didn't have the equipment or money.

The book is divisible into three parts. The first and largest is a diary of the entire process of making, selling, and releasing El Mariachi. This actually includes useful information that is often left out of other accounts of filmmaking, such as the size of deals, cost of equipment rental, video tape markets, etc. The second, very short, section, is Rodriguez's "Ten Minute Film School," which is just that. It's a bunch of small pearls of advice on how to strip thousands of dollars from your film budget. The third section, which I consider padding because these things are of no interest to me (YMMV) is the script for El Mariachi.

I loved this book, and it's just long enough. Near the end, it repeated itself a lot as he described the same interviews with different people, but it reads more like someone amazed at the turns their life has taken than anything else. After all, it's a journal.