He is also the creator of the Spy Kids franchise, as well as The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005), Planet Terror (2007), Machete (2010), We Can Be Heroes (2020), and also directed The Faculty (1998) and Alita: Battle Angel (2019).

Rodriguez was born in San Antonio, Texas, the son of Mexican parents Rebecca (née Villegas), a nurse, and Cecilio G. Rodríguez, a salesman.

Not having grades high enough to be accepted into the school's film program, he created a daily comic strip entitled Los Hooligans.

The film chronicles the amusing misadventures of a young girl whose older brother sports an incredibly tangled mess of hair which she detests.

Even at this early stage, Rodriguez's trademark style began to emerge: quick cuts, intense zooms, and fast camera movements deployed with a sense of humor.

[9] He went on to shoot the action flick El Mariachi (1992) in Spanish; he shot it for around $7,000 with money raised by his friend Adrian Kano and from payments for his own participation in medical testing studies.

[11] Intended for the Spanish-language low-budget home-video market, the film was "cleaned up" by Columbia Pictures with post-production work costing several hundred thousand dollars before it was distributed in the United States.

[13] Desperado was a sequel to El Mariachi that starred Antonio Banderas and introduced Salma Hayek to international audiences as her English-language breakthrough role.

[14][15] Rodriguez went on to collaborate with Quentin Tarantino on the vampire thriller From Dusk till Dawn (also both co-producing its two sequels), and he wrote, directed, and produced the TV series for his own cable network, El Rey.

[19] Rodriguez co-directed Sin City (2005), an adaptation of the comic books by Frank Miller; Quentin Tarantino guest-directed a scene.

By resigning from the DGA, Rodriguez was forced to relinquish his director's seat on the film John Carter of Mars for Paramount Pictures.

[20][21] Sin City was a critical hit in 2005 as well as a box office success, particularly for a hyperviolent comic book adaptation that did not have name recognition comparable to the X-Men or Spider-Man.

[22] Rodriguez released The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 2005, a superhero-kid movie intended for the same younger audiences as his Spy Kids series.

He has a series of "Ten Minute Film School" segments on several of his DVD releases, showing aspiring filmmakers how to make good, profitable movies using inexpensive tactics.

Starting with the Once Upon a Time in Mexico DVD, Rodriguez began creating a series called "Ten Minute Cooking School" in which he revealed his recipe for "Puerco Pibil" (based on Cochinita pibil, an old dish from Yucatán), the same food Johnny Depp's character, Agent Sands, ate in the film.

The popularity of this series led to the inclusion of another "Cooking School" on the two-disc version of the Sin City DVD where Rodriguez teaches the viewer how to make "Sin City Breakfast Tacos", a dish (made for his cast and crew during late-night shoots and editing sessions) utilizing his grandmother's tortilla recipe and different egg mixes for the filling.

Rodriguez's ideas included a planet-sized game preserve and various creatures used by the Predators to hunt a group of abducted yet skilled humans.

He says, "When I met Danny, I said, 'This guy should be like the Mexican Jean-Claude Van Damme or Charles Bronson, putting out a movie every year and his name should be Machete.'

"[32] In May 2020, Rodriguez announced, via an Instagram post in which he posed with a puppet of Grogu, that he would direct an episode from the second season of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, part of the Star Wars franchise.

[34] Rodriguez was also an executive producer on The Book of Boba Fett, a spin-off of The Mandalorian released in December 2021,[35] where he also voiced Dokk Strassi[36] and Mok Shaiz.

[37] In 2020, Rodriguez wrote and directed We Can Be Heroes, a Sharkboy and Lavagirl spinoff, which was released on December 25, 2020, on Netflix to mixed reviews.

[42] At the 2007 Comic-Con convention, actress Rosario Dawson announced that because of Barbarella, production of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For would be put on hold.

[44] In May 2008, Rodriguez was said to be shopping around a prison drama television series called Woman in Chains!, with Rose McGowan being a possibility for a lead role.

[45] In May 2009, Rodriguez planned to produce a live-action remake of Fire and Ice, a 1983 film collaboration between painter Frank Frazetta and animator Ralph Bakshi.

[47] In March 2017, it was announced that Rodriguez would direct a remake of the dystopian sci-fi action film Escape from New York, with original director John Carpenter producing.

[53] In October 2010, he walked Alexa Vega (Carmen Cortez in Spy Kids series) down the aisle at her wedding to producer Sean Covel.

He calls his style of making movies "Mariachi-style" (in reference to his first feature film El Mariachi) in which (according to the back cover of his book Rebel Without a Crew) "Creativity, not money, is used to solve problems."