Failure is not a dead end — you have to sift through the ashes of your failure to find the key to your next success, and if you're not looking for it, you don't find it.

Rodriguez tells the story of Four Rooms, an anthology film that flopped financially. Despite the failure, he sifted through it and found two keys to his biggest successes: Spy Kids (from the idea of kids as spies, born from the kids-in-a-room setup) and Sin City (from wanting to make an anthology work with a single director telling three stories). He argues that following your instinct is always right — if it fails, the result is something bigger you don't yet have the vision for. ✦ AI generated

Robert Rodriguez · Lex Fridman · 2025-04-17 · original ↗

I made a movie called Four Rooms. I didn't make any money, right? When Quentin asked me, hey, would you want to make a movie with me and two other filmmakers? It's an anthology. It's on New Year's Eve. It's in a hotel. You have to use the bellhop. We're not going to know what each other's making. And we make it and we put it together. My hand went up right away, just instinctually saying, that sounds, yeah, I'll do that... I make that movie. It bombs. Now, I could feel real bad about that, but if you really think about it, you go, well, why did I sign up for it? Did I raise my hand because I thought it was going to go be this big financial success? No, I did it to work with my friends, to do something creative, to try something. But that's still not good enough. I need to really sift through the ashes. And if I look through the ashes of that failure, I find 2 keys to my biggest successes in there. While I was on the set, they said it has to be New Year's. So I thought, I'm just going to do like bed. I'm going to have two little kids that are running around in this room. And we have to use the bellhop as a babysitter. Well, it's New Year's. Let's dress everybody in tuxedos because it's New Year's. They're all going to go out, but the parents leave without them. When I saw Antonio and his wife, I thought, wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies? And these two little kids, one of them keeps falling asleep on the set. He's so young. They barely tie their shoes. They don't know parents are spies. They have to go save them. Okay, there's five of those movies now, right? The other one was, I really love making short films. I really want this anthology thing to work. What if it's three stories, like a 3X director, not four? Same director, not four different directors. I'm going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again? Well, because I'd already done one and figured out how I could do it better, and that's Sin City. Those are by far two of my biggest successes that came directly from that failure. So I always say, follow your instinct. If it doesn't work, just go. Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. So where's the key in the ashes of the failure? Because if I had an instinct, that means I was on the right track. I didn't get the result I want. That's because the result might be something way bigger that I don't have the vision for and the universe is pushing me that way.

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