From bloody thrillers to family comedies

LOS ANGELES - Robert Rodriguez is back in a family way.

His kid-friendly comedy Shorts is the latest movie in a seesaw career in which Rodriguez has veered from family fare such as the Spy Kids flicks to violent thrillers such as Sin City and Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

A collection of "Little Rascals"-inspired adventures with a loosely linked plot, the PG-rated Shorts has some mildly crude humor, including a giant monster created out of a stray booger a boy picks from his nose.

But it's a complete turnabout from Rodriguez's previous flick, 2007's Planet Terror, a violent, gory zombiefest that featured an amputee with a machine gun for a leg.

As the filmmaker switches back and forth from family films to bloody adult action, Rodriguez said, one genre reinvigorates the other for him.

"By splitting it up, it's that palate-cleansing, where you can almost feel like if your head was too close to a project, I just needed to turn to the other one and edit that just for a day," Rodriguez, 41, said in an interview. "When I came back to the original movie, it's like I'd been away for months, because you've just done a complete mind-switch. So it gave you a fresher perspective and much more distance."

Rodriguez recalled shooting Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over while he was editing Once Upon a Time in Mexico, with both movies hitting theaters within a couple of months.

Likewise, he was editing Sin City while shooting the family tale The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, the two overlapping to the point where he had the prostitutes of the former and the child heroes of the latter in front of the cameras the same day.

"There were literally some days where we'd be like, OK, we still have to shoot some pickup shots from Sin City, so we'd shoot the kids for half the day, send them away, and in come the Sin City girls in their robes," Rodriguez said.

A do-it-yourselfer since boyhood, when he began making short films starring his siblings around their Texas home, Rodriguez did his usual multitasking on Shorts, writing, directing, producing, editing, writing the music, and serving as his own cinematographer.

Four of Rodriguez's five children appear in Shorts, including 10-year-old son Rebel, who came up with the movie's basic idea when he suggested his father do something along the lines of "The Little Rascals" short comedies.

"Most of his ideas are based on his kids, and a lot of his kids are in the movies, too," said 11-year-old Shorts costar Jolie Vanier.

A batch of cinematic short stories was "perfect for this day and age. Short attention spans," Rodriguez said. "Let's make a bunch of cool 'Little Rascal'-type short films and just make it into a feature."

The result is a collection of tales set in a neighborhood where adults and children cope with the disastrous results after a magic rock lands in their midst, making people's wildest fantasies come true.

Rodriguez has shifted back to adult action for the movie he's shooting now, the revenge saga Machete, a feature-length spin-off of a fake movie trailer that ran in Grindhouse. The cast includes Robert De Niro and Jessica Alba.

"I don't know if I would ever make a straight, serious drama," Rodriguez said. "I like really making things where you have to piece them together and layer things and mix genres. More like giant magic tricks, illusion, rather than just documenting a reality."