As I was expecting, I've found dozens of references on various discussion boards to Robert Rodriguez's success with his $7,000 movie, "El Mariachi".

However, in reading a lot of the posts, I think a lot of people miss a few things...

People talk about the fact that the look of the film "really isn't that great" and wouldn't pass muster at a lot of festivals today. I beg to differ. While it had much better production values than the stuff he was gunning for at the time (the hordes of cheaply produced movies in the Latino market in the late 80's/early 90's) it also had an excellent story and was much better acted and directed than a lot of what you see in festivals today.

I think that what agents and studio execs saw in Robert was that while his film may not have been letter perfect - he simply got it. "It" being good filmmaking. Telling a story with the camera, the "hero" formula, good structure, and adding production value not simply for the sake of it, but because it supported the story. The other thing that I think bowled people over is that he did it in spite of the fact that he didn't have a huge budget. That was his genius. That's what it's about.

Keep in mind that this is not at all a generalization, because I think there are a lot of talented people that frequent the discussion boards I've been checking out (www.dvinfo.net and www.dvxuser.com), but it seems that a lot of these techies spend way too much time debating things like the difference between 16mm and mini DV, which carries more clout at festivals (film or digital), DV vs. HDV vs HD, this cam vs. that cam, why editing on a Mac is so much better than on a PC yada, yada, yada.. They focus so much on how the thing will look.. I will concede that many of these people are amazing - they know the equipment and the technical aspects of filmmaking backwards and forwards and they can shoot something that's technically stunning - I mean some of this stuff out there *really* is first rate...

But what the hell good is any of it if your story and performances suck? To me, this is the true challenge in filmmaking. While look is very important to me, it's still not as important as these two aspects - in other words, you shouldn't focus on it to the point where story and performance are ignored. This is the principal challenge that I intend to focus on with Heist.

If someone were to ask me what makes a great movie, I'd have to respond that for the time that I was there watching it, I was suckered into thinking that what I was watching was real - I believed it.