- [Director] And action.
- I can feel it. Look around on the ground,
look around on the ground. Left and right,
all the way down that long hallway.
Maybe it's coming from that long hallway.
Get to the walls! Get to the walls!
- We built only a little bit of the hallways.
- Yeah, just a small section of it.
- Because the scope of it was so enormous that we thought
we'll have to do it with CG and elongate the hallway
so that when the characters come around a corner,
really that long hallway isn't there,
we just duplicated your tentacle field.
- And you just see it go all the way down.
- Hi, this is Robert Rodriguez,
director of We Can Be Heroes.
This film was made by a family for families.
My son Rogue grew up working on some of my films and videos.
He showed an early interest in designing
and creating his own worlds.
So when it came time to make We Can Be Heroes,
I knew I wanted him to be a lead designer
for the interiors of the alien spaceship.
There's so much incredible imagination that goes into it,
And it comes from the minds of children.
Here's Rogue to talk more about the design of our film.
- My name is Rogue Rodriguez,
and I was a set designer for We Can Be Heroes.
This was the original hallway design. It's pretty basic,
but in some of the concept art,
there's some pieces that I took,
like this was like a little light that was on the ground,
but I also made it my own thing.
It's like these weird alien trees that I made.
It's pretty interesting.
In 2018, my dad and my siblings
came up with We Can Be Heroes,
writing the story, and creating the characters.
My dad gave me an awesome task.
He and the art team had been designing
some of the sets for the movie,
but there was one set that still wasn't figured out yet.
The inside of the alien spaceship.
I grew up in a family that loved watching and making movies.
But what I loved more than anything growing up is games.
The thing that I love more than anything in video games
is world design.
One of those tools that quickly became my favorite
was called Unreal Engine.
I started to mess around with Unreal for a bit.
Little did I know, though, that my passion
would become very important in our newest movie,
We Can Be Heroes.
- We had just finished the exterior,
which was the sphere of the alien ship and the tentacles.
So I thought, "Let's have Rogue, you know,
come up with what he can with a game engine."
And I was so shocked when you showed me
like a couple of weeks later.
- I was like, yeah, here you go.
- You have this whole 3D moving character
running through hallways.
- So this is a room that connects the four hallways
to the entire spaceship.
And one of those leads to the pyramid room.
- [Robert Rodriguez] I remember saying,
"Think about the language of the exterior.
It's got to match the exterior.
- [Rogue] Yeah.
- Kind of go crazy. Wow, you went crazy.
The thing was huge. It was so huge.
- And here it can only stay on one side,
like one part of the pyramid room. It was massive.
- [Robert] It was so massive that I have a big green screen,
So the characters have to run all the way across
from the door to the pyramid. We'd have to shoot it,
that run in sections. That's how big
the set that you designed was.
- Yeah.
- It was huge. I remember you told me that you were
so blown away that we're using your design,
that you couldn't wait to go visit the physical set
and lay down in the middle of it
and just stare at your world.
- Yeah.
- I remember very distinctly when you'd be making
your worlds like in Minecraft or something,
and somebody, like your brother wiped out your set,
I remember one time you were crying.
(mumbles) . . . destroyed my world!"
- "Will destroyed my world!"
- Wow. That sounds so huge. What a huge concept,
your whole world was destroyed.
That's how much you invested in it.
And you'd certainly invested in it in this movie because
your set was just awesome and gave the movie such big scope,
especially for the end. I mean,
they'd been in a classroom
and they'd been in these hallways,
but then you want to expand it for the third act of a story.
And to be in that big set piece,
I had to keep making the squiggle monsters bigger.
That first wide shot,
they still look tiny because your set's so big.
(both laughing)
- I remember that. Like when you were first filming
that it was so crazy to see, oh yeah,
this is just one part of the bridge or how big is it?
Oh, there's like three more of that.
- Little sections. And we had to make a map
of your whole set just to film each little section
and puts each actor on their little place
where they'd be standing. And then there was the pyramid,
which in your original design,
I thought was really brilliant that you put them
on walkways. They were so perilous.
The kids didn't have to actually walk on a walkway and
they're just running along like they're not gonna fall
cause the floor is right there.
But once you take that away with visual effects,
it looks like they're just gonna plummet and very dangerous.
- It was also one of the biggest challenges
out of everything in that whole movie,
because what was so hard about it
is that there was no concept art.
- Right? Oh yeah, there's no concept art for any of that.
You were the concept art.
- Yeah. The concept art for the hallways and the doors,
there's some for that,
but there was nothing for the pyramid.
It was only in script. So I had to come up
with my own ideas for that.
- How did you figure out those textures?
Cause that actually informed my lighting.
Cause I have to light the set.
- Basically, the purple and the pink that were there,
I got that from the outside of the spaceship.
So I wanted to make it everything on the same material.
The whole liquid metal water material,
that completely came out of nowhere
when I was trying to figure out what the pyramid
should be made out of.
- Look at that thing!
- I tried chrome and glass and all sorts of things,
and I eventually gave it this water material,
which made it look like liquid metal.
- When I first saw that, I thought,
"That will keep it from being static. It'll make it moving."
Then later, this was not part of the script at all.
Another thing that came out of your design
and inspired an idea, I thought,
"Oh, let's let her run out of water."
And then Wheels is smart enough to say:
- Hey Guppy, this whole thing
is covered in liquid metal.
- That's not on the script.
I didn't come up with that until near the end,
as we were there filming. And I was trying to find a way
for her to use water, and she could use the liquid metal
from your pyramid to create that shark at the end.
Again, that's where ideas came from,
directly from your sets.
If I hadn't given you that assignment
to see what you would have come up with,
we wouldn't have come up with one of the best ideas
in the movie, which is that whole last part,
the squiggle battle and the squiggles falling.
It wouldn't have had a place to fall.
I never would have thought to put that
on the catwalk like that, where they would have to go.
So what made you elevate the set like that?
Cause none of the other hallways were elevated.
But then when you went into the pyramid room,
suddenly there's no floor. Where did you come up with that?
- When I first read about it,
how there was like a hole in the ground
in the pyramid room,
it was just some random hole that they dropped
from the motherboard. I just thought,
"Why not just rip open the whole floor
and just have like, you'd go down to an empty pit?"
- Yeah. I thought it was gonna be
one little hole through the motherboard down.
- No.
- Took the whole floor away.
- Yeah, just take it all
and make it look even more dangerous.
- Ah, that's great.
- Yeah. And there was just an empty pit
and I was looking down there.
I was like, "But there's should be something down there.
Maybe some fog so it looks like it just goes on forever."
Then I just randomly thought,
"Why not put a big vortex down there?"
And it immediately made it look 10 times more dangerous.
Which means it worked.
- Yeah. It works, but also because it gives light,
which works really well. And oh, when she shows
that she's an alien and she's got this under light coming.
They call happy accidents in a movie where you just do
something and you're following your instinct,
and then it makes all these other parts of the movie
and story work because one person
decided to go the direction their instinct told them,
not knowing, you didn't know we're going to use
the liquid metal, you didn't know we needed under lighting
on her to really make that scene even more incredible.
And you want to get away from that low light
by the time you realize she's good.
So we just had the light now come out of the pyramid.
The script originally had confetti coming from the ceiling
to show that it was a happy ending
because you put that pyramid like that.
It had that bright, bluish light.
We countered that with that warm light at the end,
when the pyramid opens, and it feels like sunlight.
So it feels like a sunny day
and gives you a warm feeling at the end of the movie.
- My advice to anyone who's interested in this
would be to take the time to learn the things
that they're interested in,
no matter how complex they seem to be.
It's never been easier
to do the things you always wanted to do.
Don't worry about any challenges that you run into
that you might not know how to solve,
just start learning and face those challenges on the way,
because you'll start to love those too.
So if you want to create the world of your dreams too,
go for it. I can't wait to see the volcanoes and castles
you create.