The Big Picture

Spy Kids: Armageddon reunites filmmaker Robert Rodriguez with Netflix for an exciting adventure family film that is sure to captivate the streamer’s youngest viewers. Rodriguez and his own family were heavily involved in the making of the film, creating a true family franchise that incorporates their own experiences and in-jokes. The film showcases the incredible growth and development of its young stars, who started off unsure of their abilities but ended up becoming “superhuman” over the course of filming.

Over 20 years ago, filmmaker Robert Rodriguez unleashed the Spy Kids franchise to the world, full of action and a surprising ensemble cast for a family feature. The movie, starring Antonio Banderas, Alan Cumming, Danny Trejo, and more, would go on to inspire a series of high-stakes missions with kids leading the charge. Now, Rodriguez reunites with Netflix after his 2020 Pedro Pascal-led We Can Be Heroes to reboot the beloved series with Spy Kids: Armageddon. Before its release, Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke to the co-writer, director, cinematographer, and editor about the VFX, working with the kid heroes of the movie, and sequels!

Written for and about the next generation of Spy Kids, Armageddon introduces the clever sibling duo of Tony and Patty Tango-Torrez, played by Connor Esterson and Everly Carganilla. In the original Spy Kids adventure, Juni (Daryl Sabara) and Carmen (Alexa PenaVega) Cortez’s adventure began with the nefarious creator from Juni’s favorite TV series. In Armageddon, Tony unknowingly helps a formidable game developer spread a virus that allows him to control technology. Naturally, the kids find out their parents, Terrence Tango (Zachary Levi) and Nora Torrez (Gina Rodriguez), have been spies all along and have been kidnapped! Tony and Patty must train up, rescue their parents, and then enter the video game in order to try and stop The King (Billy Magnussen) before it’s too late.

During the interview, Rodriguez discusses his excitement to partner with Netflix again to provide the streamer’s youngest viewers with another exciting adventure family film, one he enlisted the help of his own family to create. He talks about working with eight-year-old stars and adapting the script to their abilities, only to watch them “become superhuman over a couple of months.” We also learn Armageddon has over 1600 VFX—“the most effects shots in any Spy Kids movie”—and if we’ll be getting sequels to this one and We Can Be Heroes. For tons more, check out the full interview in the video above or you can read the transcript below.

COLLIDER: Between this and We Can Be Heroes, how much does Netflix love you?

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ: Oh, they’re just the best. Even from the very beginning, it was their idea…I was pitching him something, and he goes, “We’ll consider that for sure, but what we really need is like a Spy Kids type thing. Those always do so good in our service.” And I was like, “That makes a lot of sense.” Kids would watch movies over and over on video or on Disney Channel or DVDs but nobody could track how much people watched it; on Netflix, they could track it. So I gotta make a movie for my family audience there because the kids don’t have to drive themselves to the theater, they can sit there and click as many times as they want, and they’ll track it, and that’ll create value. So I did We Can Be Heroes, and it’s one of the top movies. [Laughs] I couldn’t believe how many times kids would rewatch it. Then we got the rights to Spy Kids and got to go remake the original Spy Kids franchise and bring that back like a Bond series. So, they’re super excited because they want to build up their family business for sure.

Image via Netflix

I’m sure of it. Watching the film and looking at the credits, it felt like every member of your family was somehow involved in this movie. Were there any members of your family that were not involved in the movie?

RODRIGUEZ: No, just about everybody in my immediate family. Over the years, on the other Spy Kids films, my siblings worked on them. So it was always a family franchise. It’s the only film series in existence that’s actually made by a family for other families, and we wanted to keep that going. My kids, though, they started off doing stunts and acting in the first films because they were little. Now they’re the age I was when I made Mariachi and Desperado. One’s a composer, one’s a co-writer, one designs the video game within it, one sings the end titles and designs the emojis on the thought bubble, [and] one co-edits.

It’s like my favorite families growing up in San Antonio owned their own family-run restaurants, they all worked there, and they owned it. I always dreamt about doing that someday. I guess I just ended up doing it in the movie business because it has that feeling where the more time you spend working on a project—it’s family time—it’s more time you’re spending with your family. So it’s just the best life, and you’re putting in all your experiences, all your in-jokes. So many scenes in the movie are right out of my childhood or their childhood, and so everybody gets to throw in their ideas.

Image via Netflix 

I’ve spoken to you before, you know I love talking about the editing process. How did this film specifically change in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect?

RODRIGUEZ: It’s just always a surprise because when you’re working with kids, you don’t know until they get there what they’re capable of doing. You write a scene, you hire an adult actor, you know they can pretty much do the scene – not with the kids. You don’t know which actor is gonna be— They’re developing at the same time, they’re only eight years old. Both of them at the beginning would be like, “I don’t think I can do that,” [laughs] and you’d say, “Well, let’s give it a try.” “Okay, I’ll try,” and I’d say, “But don’t try, do it.” By the end, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m sorry, I’m not gonna try anymore, I’m just gonna do it.” Their confidence level goes up, and by the end, when I see Tony battling with the king, it’s a totally different kid than I started out with. These movies, they develop so rapidly because of all the challenges you throw on them, and it taught me to do that with my own kids. Throw challenges at your children. You tend not to. At the level I do these Spy Kids, they become superhuman over a couple of months.

When you’re on the set you realize, “Okay, they’re not capable of doing what’s in the script. Let’s come up with something they can do really well.” So by the time you get to editing, you’re like, “How did we change this scene?” It doesn’t resemble the script at all, you got much better stuff out of them because you kept honing the script to what their abilities were and pushing them to do things you never thought they could have done. So it’s a discovery process where you’re practically making a documentary [laughs] because the script goes out the window, and it’s so fun to edit that way. I have to edit really quickly as soon as I’m done shooting, and while I’m actually filming, I’m editing because I don’t wanna forget because I don’t have a script as a guide anymore. I was making up whole new choreographies and lines to really capitalize on their talent. That’s really fun about it.

Image via Netflix

The kids grow up very fast, and I know this is gonna be a huge hit for Netflix. With the strike being on, is there a plan that you want to make a sequel to this as soon as possible?

RODRIGUEZ: I always want to make one pretty quickly, but you really can’t film them until the summertime because the kids have to do schooling no matter what, but they have more school that age during the nonsummer break. You would only get them for an hour or two set. You get them for about four or five hours on summer break, so it’s a little easier to film them. That would be great. The first Spy Kids series we had a movie in the theater every year for three years straight for Spy Kids 1, 2, and 3. They were consecutive. We were just finishing one and starting the next, so that would be really great. But fortunately, with these kids, we got them so young, they’re younger than the original Spy Kids. They’re only eight years old, so we’ve got them for several years.

So ideal world, maybe next summer you’d be filming a sequel?

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, that would be great. That’d give me time to write something really robust and fun.

I definitely want to ask you about We Can Be Heroes. As we’ve talked about, huge hit and you talked about doing a sequel. Are there any plans for that?

RODRIGUEZ: The bigger rush is to do a sequel for that because of the kids growing up. Although the script always kind of took that into account, they’re supposed to be kind of next-level. And I like the idea of kids seeing their favorite characters grow so exponentially on screen, and it makes them realize how time works to go. It makes them go, “Oh yeah, Guppy was this age in the first movie. I’ve been watching it again and again, and now she’s already…” They can picture themselves growing and developing and their brains expanding in leaps and bounds like that. So I think the time works in our favor.

Image via Netflix

My last question for you. This film has a ton of VFX, can you talk a little bit about doing the VFX on this one and how it’s changed throughout the years with technology?

RODRIGUEZ: I’m still doing it exactly the same way. I actually filmed on the same green screen I filmed the original on. It was trippy. I have a lot of my key crew still there, and we’re doing another Spy Kids. We’re hanging them on the same wires that the original ones did over 20 years ago, only the level of effects is just so much better. I mean, if you compare them, it’s like night and day. The level of effects that Netflix affords you is just a dream. For this thing to actually look like the vision we had in our heads. I find old drawings from the original Spy Kids, and I’m going, “That’s what it was supposed to look like!” We just didn’t have the money. Here, it just looks amazing. They go into the video game, and it only needed to look like a video game, and it looks like they’re really in these locations. So yeah, there’s over 1600 effect shots. There’s a ton – the most effects shots in any Spy Kids movie. It is just nonstop, but you know, that’s why kids are gonna love it. They just never see a movie made for them that’s got that level of love and attention put into it to just fuel their dreams and give them something to dream about.

Spy Kids: Armageddon is available to stream on Netflix.