Robert Rodriguez is a filmmaker who has defined film for multiple generations. Whether it is watching Machete and seeing how Isador Cortez (Danny Trejo) ties into the Spy Kids movies as the same character is what makes Rodriguez’s filmography so fascinating. And now he’s taking into an entirely new world with Hypnotic.
The movie, which stars Ben Affleck and Alice Braga, is about a man trying to figure out what happened to his daughter and where he goes from there. Or at least that’s what we’re all made to believe. It’s a twisting tale that will leave you constantly second guessing what is going on. And it is Rodriguez’s answer to the question: What makes the movie making process so spectacular? Even if it is in its own way a completely different kind of story.
Whatever you think you know going into the movie, you don’t. And it’s one of the reasons why Rodriguez is a filmmaker that fans continue to come back to. For the release of the film, I got talk to Rodriguez briefly about the film and I asked what was the most exciting thing about getting to play with the audience’s perception in the way that Hypnotic does.
“Well, I love, it’s just like what I get to do as a filmmaker every day,” Rodriguez said. “You know what we do as filmmaker and storytellers, which is we try to create this hypnotic construct for our audience and they’ve bought a ticket and they know it’s actors, they know it’s a script. They know it’s gonna happen to ’em, but if you do it right, they can get lost in the dream so much that they laugh or cry or cheer or invest in the characters, invest in the story, recommend it to their friends. So I wanted to do that without making a movie about movie making. I got to do it with this where you get to peel back the layers in a very meta way and then the audience is like, ‘oh, I was watching this movie with Ben and I didn’t realize I was being hypnotized along with a character.’ You know? So that’s a lot of fun to do that and it takes a lot of clockwork and working that out, but the payoff would be really great if you can surprise people.”
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Hypnotic is in theaters now!
(Featured image: Hypnotic Film Holdings LLC)
