Short answers, pulled from the story.
Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi in 1992 for approximately $7,000, raised through a friend named Adrian Kano and payments from medical testing studies. Columbia Pictures later spent several hundred thousand dollars on post-production before distributing the film in the United States, but the studio's marketing still advertised it as "the movie made for $7,000".
Rodriguez resigned from the DGA in 2004 before shooting Sin City so that he could credit co-director Frank Miller alongside himself. The DGA refused to allow a shared directing credit for the two, and Rodriguez chose to leave the guild rather than make what he called unwilling compromises. The resignation cost him the director's seat on John Carter of Mars at Paramount Pictures.
The Mexico Trilogy, also called the Mariachi Trilogy, consists of El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995), and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). Desperado starred Antonio Banderas and introduced Salma Hayek to international audiences in an English-language role.
Brass Knuckle Films is a production company Rodriguez announced at SXSW in Austin, Texas in March 2025. It raised $2 million in development money from 2,184 investors through the online platform Republic, giving fans a direct stake in the studio and the ability to pitch film ideas for its slate.
Danny Trejo is Robert Rodriguez's second cousin. Rodriguez cast Trejo in Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Spy Kids, where the character Machete first appeared. Rodriguez said he conceived of the Machete character as early as 1993 when casting Trejo in Desperado, eventually developing it into the 2010 feature film Machete.
Rodriguez's grades were not high enough to enter the film program at the University of Texas at Austin, so he created a daily comic strip called Los Hooligans for the student newspaper The Daily Texan. The strip ran for three years and featured characters based on his siblings. A short film he entered in a local contest in late 1990 ultimately earned him a spot in the film program.