The Musician) is a 1992 Spanish language American independent neo-Western action film and the first part of the saga that came to be known as Robert Rodriguez's Mexico Trilogy.
The US$7,225 production was originally intended for the Mexican home-video market, but executives at Columbia Pictures liked the film and bought the American distribution rights.
In 2011, El Mariachi was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
[9] After breaking out of jail in a small Mexican town, a ruthless criminal, nicknamed Azul, ventures off with a guitar case full of weapons and vows revenge on the local drug lord, Moco, who had him arrested in the first place.
From the confines of his heavily guarded villa on the outskirts of town, Moco sends a large group of Sicarios to kill Azul.
They are told to look for a man who is wearing black and carrying a guitar case, but because the Mariachi also matches this description, the hitmen mistake him for Azul and start pursuing him.
As the Mariachi seeks refuge in a bar owned by a beautiful woman named Dominó, he quickly falls in love with her.
When they arrive at Moco's gated compound, Azul pretends to take Dominó hostage in order to gain entry.
Overcome with grief and rage, the Mariachi picks up Azul's gun with his right hand and kills Moco, avenging Dominó's death.
[10] Rodriguez had a $7,000 budget (equivalent to $15,659 in 2023), almost half of which he raised by participating in experimental clinical drug testing while living in Austin, Texas.
To solve this, Rodriguez filmed the firing of one blank from different angles, dubbed canned machine gun sounds over it, and had the actors drop bullet shells to the ground to make it look like as if multiple rounds had been shot.
When Moco was hit in the chest in the final shooting, Marquardt's blood squib exploded with such force that he actually crumpled to the ground in pain.
[12] Originally, the film was meant to be sold on the Latino video market as funding for another bigger and better project that Rodriguez was contemplating.
However, after being rejected from various Latino straight-to-video distributors, Rodriguez decided to send his film (it was in the format of a trailer at the time) to bigger distribution companies where it started to get attention.
For the scene in which the Mariachi delivers a song in front of Dominó, Rodriguez hired Juan Francisco Suarez Vidaurri, a local entertainer.
Writer/producer/director Rodriguez went on to gain international fame; he was interviewed on such shows as Sábado Gigante and proceeded thereafter to secure Hollywood-backing for films such as The Faculty and Sin City.
In December 2011, El Mariachi was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.