With Friday’s sci-fi thriller “Hypnotic,” Robert Rodriguez closes a circle with a scenario he created over 20 years ago.
Set in Austin, Rodriguez’s hometown and central beehive where he films, edits and produces his movies, “Hypnotic” stars Ben Affleck as Danny Rourke, an Austin police detective haunted but never ever giving up the search for his missing three-year-old daughter.
When Rourke busts an elaborate and bizarre bank robbery in progress he discovers Hypnotics — powerful hypnotists trained by a secretive government agency known as the Division that controls people’s minds.
“I’ve always loved the story. It came to me very fast,” Rodriguez, 54, said this week in a phone interview. “I wanted to do something like my favorite Hitchcock thrillers. But I kept getting on other projects and before you know it, like 15 years have gone by before I brought it back up.
“What’s nice about a story if it hooks you like that and you keep going back to it, you know it’s probably worth doing.”
Rodriguez also knows, the sky’s the limit when you are the one creating a particular world. “Story-wise, what’s funny about this is I could just make up my own rules, because Hypnotics have an ability that no one knows about. It starts between two people, then it becomes four and then 200! You want escalations in a story and that was a natural escalation.
“What I loved is it’s more about what we do as storytellers and as filmmakers: We create. When we bring an audience into a theater, we’re creating a hypnotic construct for them to believe everything they’re seeing and hearing to hopefully invest emotionally and at the end cry or laugh or cheer for your movie. As if it was a real event they were experiencing.”
“Hypnotic,” he added, “shows how when the curtains are pulled, they reveal what we do as filmmakers. An audience allows themselves to be hypnotized — because they want to believe in what they’re seeing. This is a play on that.”
A filmmaker who’s leapt from a debut feature that cost $7,000 – 1992’s “El Mariachi” – to the “less than $80 million” “Hypnotic,” Rodriguez remains true to his roots.
“I still make them the same way, as an independent film. We raised the money independently. When I have bigger budgets and do my big visual-effects movies, I just try to put more on the screen.
“It’s the process I invented down here in Austin. I stayed out of Hollywood and just did it this way where, if you’re a lot savvier, you have a lot more creative freedom.”
“Hypnotic” opens May 12
