- Shark frenzy.
(growls)
- The thing with the sunglasses is really funny.
Vivian, who plays Guppy, has really light eyes,
so the sun is so hot here, she'd be squinting a lot.
And I always saw her with sunglasses outside,
and that became a great signal for her going
into a Shark Frenzy is putting on the sunglasses.
Take it off.
Filming it in reverse so that she
just puts it on really fast.
(growls)
It's ferocious.
(adventurous music)
Hi, this is Robert Rodriguez,
the director of We Can be Heroes.
This film was made by a family for families.
My son, Racer, has been working with me in our films
since Spy Kids 2, where he did stunts.
He not only played a young Sharkboy,
he actually invented both Sharkboy and Lavagirl
and the whole world of that film when he was only six
and seven years old.
- [Racer] He's a evil villain.
- [Robert] What does he do?
- His name is Mr. Electric.
- [Robert] That's why in the credits, I called that film
a Rodriguez Family movie, because, like We Can Be Heroes,
it too was made by a family for other families.
Racer and I still write movies together
and he's produced several of my films.
Here's Racer to talk about how we wrote We Can Be Heroes.
- Hi, my name is Racer Max, and I'm a writer-producer
on We Can Be Heroes.
We're going to share with you our writing process
and how we overcame some of the challenges we encountered
on our latest family project.
We spent all year writing it together,
kind of like as family, my dad, my siblings and I.
And at first, it was really fun 'cause we just kept
coming up with ideas to make each other laugh.
So like, our hero kid whose power
is he's stuck in slow motion all the time.
Or a kid who can morph his face even into you.
- Rewind guy is my favorite. - Yeah, rewind--
- [Robert] Fast forward person, then, yeah.
- Superhero grandma who trains all the kids.
After we came up with all these ideas,
we started organizing them into a story
using one of our favorite writing tools,
blank index cards, for writing down your scenes,
as well as your ideas.
- You write down all the scenes that you have in mind,
any moment that you might have in mind.
It might not be very many, might only be five,
but once you start laying them down on the floor,
you start seeing the holes that are missing.
You may have started with, you know,
Missy meeting the Super Kids.
Well, you can't start with that, really.
You need to show that there's an alien threat,
so Miracle Guy discovers an alien threat, gets hurt.
Missy has breakfast with her dad, meet them.
Then she goes to school.
Then she's taken to headquarters
where she meets the Super Kids.
That's where they watch their parents get taken by aliens.
And that ends the first act,
that ends the setup of the story.
And then we go into the second act,
which is basically the kids discovering their super powers,
how to use them, training to fight the aliens,
training to get their parents back
and all the plot twists that happen
to get you into the third act,
where the kids are going to now fight back
against the aliens in surprising ways.
- It's a really fun way to block out a story.
Each card represents a different scene.
And, even if you don't know the order of them yet,
it helps you find your favorite moments.
Like the Squiggle battle.
Ojo is an alien spy.
- Yup, Ojo's a spy.
(tentacles creep)
- [Racer] Missy and Wildcard pretending to argue.
- I'm through listening to you.
When I woke up this morning, everything was perfect.
And then you come along and everything's a mess.
- [Racer] Or Facemaker tricking Ms. Granada.
(gasps)
- Boo!
- You know, you have all these great scene ideas,
but you don't really know how they're gonna fit
until you start laying it out,
'cause a movie can become overwhelming
if you don't have a way to kind of look at it.
- We kept writing like this
until we were almost ready to film.
But even, then the story isn't finished.
You might write something good
and you wanna stick with that.
But when you're making a project like a movie,
you have to see the magic that's happening
in front of you every day
and adapt your story to go with it.
- Especially when you have this many characters
and little kids, you have to know where their strengths are
and you're not really gonna know their personalities
until you get to the set
'cause the actors bring so much to it.
And we had terrific actors.
So we wrote as far as we could
and then we knew some of this, if not a lot of it,
would change once we got there.
Let's have Acapella do this.
And have you seen what Rewind can do?
He can do all this parkour stuff.
(kids grunt)
We have to work that in.
Let's change the sequence to reflect that.
So that's why all the characters, all the actors,
come off so strong is because, you know,
we hung out with them for weeks before we started filming.
(intense music)
And shot costume tests, put music on them.
(engine revs)
Really gave them a lot of confidence
that they were playing this role
to the best of their ability.
- One of the biggest character changes was to Guppy,
who I have a special connection with
because, since I created her parents, Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
- Go Sharkboy and Lavagirl!
- She's kinda like my cinematic daughter.
(both laugh)
- That's right, and then, it's my cinematic granddaughter.
Yeah.
- But for her, her big change came
from a problem we encountered
in one of the first few days of shooting,
when the kids have to take down the guards
to escape their classroom.
- And you think we'll just hand these to you?
- No, but it would made this a whole lot easier.
- When we first started the story,
there were a lot more kids than there are
in the final film. - Oh yeah, we had other,
we had more, we had 16 kids, originally.
There was one character called Strongarm,
he had this one big strong arm.
- [Racer] And then a tiny little one and one of the arms
has super strength, but it's not the big one,
it's the little one. - It's his regular arm
that has all his super strength.
He flipped the guards, originally, to get out.
One of the things you don't get from casting,
when you're first casting and seeing kids individually,
is just their size differences.
So when we had all the kids on set,
you see how tiny Guppy is.
'Cause she was six. - Yeah, half their height.
- She actually, she just turned seven.
She was exactly, she's actually the same age you were
when you came up with Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
- Which is really crazy. - That's how small you were.
(men grunt)
- [Racer] Ice!
Nice!
- [Robert] She's so tiny, we thought she
should be the one to flip them out.
That wasn't in the script, the Shark Strength.
You'll actually have the guard say,
"Oh no, she's got Shark Strength!"
- She's got Shark Strength!
- And that got us to that scene, great.
But then that now has a domino effect
on the rest of your card.
If you make a big character change like that here,
how does that affect the rest of the movie?
And so that affected her character a lot.
- So later on in the tram scene, when she grabs the bar,
you get to put a big, heavy thud there
because you know she has Shark Strength now.
And then we have the scene of her meditating
so that she doesn't go into a Shark Frenzy like her dad.
- Your powers are useless if you don't stay calm and focus.
Go meditate.
- Her discovering her power isn't the problem.
That's not a challenge anymore 'cause she's too powerful.
So she has to meditate,
which I had seen Rogue one time meditating,
just on the floor. (camera shutter clicks)
There's a picture of him.
It took, years ago, he just sat on his own
and was meditating on the floor.
I'm glad we got to use it in this movie,
a little moment from our family life.
- Yeah and then when you get,
so you have the moment of holding back the Guppy
'cause she's really strong, so, of course,
you get a moment later in the story
where they let her loose.
- Shark Frenzy.
- She goes into a Shark Frenzy. We say "that's bad."
That way later on, when they need her to be
in a Shark Frenzy, you say "that's good."
We're being shark-friendly.
But again, that's all because we made
that one change here that affects the rest
of the script 'til the third act.
- And in the final battle, we rewrote the whole scene
after we saw the great design
that my brother Rogue came up with.
His cool design of the holes in the floor
and the liquid metal pyramid,
we wrote it all to reflect that.
So we use the holes, the big scary holes as best we could.
And that's how we came up with Guppy's
big liquid metal shark she makes at the end,
since she makes it out of the pyramid.
So, again, you couldn't have known that
until you were there.
- [Robert] No, couldn't have known any of that.
- Of course, it's easy to say now,
but back when we were doing it, it was really tough work.
Dad and I'd be there writing, typing at the speed of light,
because the scene we were changing
was the one we were shooting that day.
We'd be talking about the scenes,
making little drawings to see,
"Okay, with these 11 kids, who's gonna stand where,
say what when, figure this all out."
- Yeah, you can't live with the original version
once you see the actors that you have in the set.
So every night, when we'd come look at the next day's work,
we'd go, "Oh, we can't have that happen anymore.
That's not strong enough."
- Even though storytelling can be challenging,
what I love most about it is that it doesn't take
anything more than index cards and some dedication
to make a story.
There's nothing stopping you from taking the time
to write a story and making it happen.
All you have to do is start.
I'm Racer Max. Thank you for watching.