9 Great Directors Who Could Really Use A Career Boost

8) Robert Rodriguez

Robert Rodriguez is some sort of hero to wannabe filmmakers, many of who likely have Rebel Without a Crew – his book chronicling his beginnings as an indie filmmaker and his journey to make El Mariachi – as their personal Bible to striking it big in Hollywood. An icon of American independent cinema in the same realm as Richard Linklater and Quentin Tarantino, Rodriguez was one of the most exciting voices in low-budget cinema in the late 20th and early 21st century, making genre films loaded with good production value. There is an energy in Desperado, the first Spy Kids film and the original Sin City that came from a mix of high-octane adrenaline and artistic vision. Meanwhile, Planet Terror, the first half of his Grindhouse double-feature, is a big tub of bloody fun.

However, while Rodriguez’s early films benefitted from an iconoclastic, outsider’s view of how to make a big, bold, exciting film, the director has not had the best of luck in recent years. The latest Sin City and Spy Kids films were box office duds, while his Machete films were junky indulgences that proved the Texas filmmaker was starting to run out of viable movie ideas.

Rodriguez is a multi-talented artist, serving as more than just the director on his projects. He also frequently writes, edits, photographs and composes his frenetic action adventures. As he wrote on the back of Rebel Without a Crew, “Creativity, not money, is used to solve problems.” Now that his career has taken quite the fall since the early 2000s, let us hope Rodriguez still has enough creativity in store to give us a few more big and bloody genre pleasures.