After the million sci-fi action film "Alita: Battle Angel", director Robert Rodriguez returns to his no-budget indie film origins: his new sci-fi horror thriller "Red 11", which was produced during Alita's post-production in just 14 days, cost only about ,000 - exactly as much as his debut work "El Mariachi" to which the new film refers.
"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7837402/ (Red 11)" will premiere on March 15th at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. Originally it wasn't clear whether it would be released, but Rodriguez thought the film was good enough to be shown to the public despite its small budget, as a kind of encouragement for all (prospective) filmmakers to demonstrate that a film can be made with little money.
Red 11
Due to its DIY character "Red 11" can't be compared to a "real" movie either - according to a first pre-criticism it seems improvised and often embarrassing, the camera is shaky, the acting bad, but - as it's nicely called in Variety: "it's meant to be studied, not watched".
The claim of "Red 11" is also more to be a "Proof of Concept" of Rodriguez Guerilla Film School Principles and to show how to write, film, direct, edit, accompany with music and even illuminate a film in 14 days as a single crew member. There is also an accompanying documentary film, which as a new version of his 10 Minute Film School shows how to realize a film idea within a very short time with the practical example of "Red 11" and is actually more important in this case than the film itself.
The film is set in a drug research facility where young people try to earn money by making themselves available for testing new drugs. He is thus - like the name - an allusion of Rodriguez to his own time as a drug tester when, at the age of 23, he earned around 7,000 dollars in production costs for his film debut "El Mariachi", which was awarded the Audience Prize at the Sundance Festival in 1992.
The film title "Red 11" alludes to this because Rodriguez wore a red T-shirt with the number 11 as the test subject. Whether "Red 11" will ever come to the cinema (let alone German cinema) is uncertain.
Here is Robert Rodriguez's famous 
10 Minute Film School Series, which is included on every DVD of a Rodriguez film - a new episode of each film:
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