Did Robert Rodgriguez Invent This Classic Hollywood Trope?

Is there anything in movies more effortlessly cool than walking away from an explosion?

You know the shot. A building erupts behind our hero, flames shoot into the sky, debris is flying everywhere, and instead of reacting like any normal human being would, they just keep walking. In fact, they don’t even bother turning around. Because apparently once you reach a certain level of confidence, massive explosions are just background scenery.

Tony Stark has done it. Wolverine has done it. Denzel has done it. The Joker almost did it, although his explosion had other plans. It’s become such a familiar piece of action movie language that we barely even think about where it came from.

But how did this trope come to be?

Because Robert Rodriguez claims the version we all know today started with Desperado, it happened almost completely by accident. But start digging into the history and you’ll find earlier examples, a second Rodriguez movie that helped cement the idea, decades of Hollywood copycats, and eventually an entire comedy song dedicated to the simple rule that cool guys do not look at explosions.

So, did Robert Rodriguez actually invent one of the most cool clichés in movie history? Or did he just perfect it?

Let’s find out.

BEFORE THE EXPLOSION WALK

Trying to figure out who first walked away from an explosion is surprisingly difficult because you immediately run into an important question: What exactly counts? Does someone calmly standing near an explosion count? What about walking through one? Do they have to cause the explosion themselves? Does it need to happen behind them? And most importantly, do they have to resist that completely understandable human urge to turn around and make sure the exploding truck behind them isn’t about to send a piece of burning metal flying toward them.

Movies had been using explosions to make their heroes look tough long before Robert Rodriguez showed up. One famous precursor comes from Goldfinger in 1964. James Bond isn’t actually doing the walk we’re talking about, but he calmly lights a cigarette while an explosion rocks the background and everyone else reacts. It establishes the basic attitude behind what would eventually become the trope: Everybody else is impressed or terrified by the explosion, while the cool at the center of the scene treats it like just another day at the office. The Goldfinger moment may be an early relative, even if it doesn’t technically qualify as the full walk-away.

The distinction becomes important because the modern version isn’t simply about surviving an explosion. Action movies have been doing that forever. There’s a very specific swagger involved. The character knows what is about to happen, turns their back on it, and continues moving with complete confidence as the rest of us watch thousands of dollars make Mother Nature take notice.

By the 19’80s, we start getting much closer. When you think of cool characters in the ’80s, who’s the first person you think of? If you said the unpleasant boss in 9 to 5, then you’re correct. In 1984’s Cloak & Dagger, Dabney Coleman emerges from the flames after an airplane explosion and calmly walks toward his son. It isn’t exactly the modern version because he’s walking out of the destruction rather than deliberately away from it, but visually, you can see pieces of the language coming together.

Then comes what may be one of the strongest pre-Desperado examples. In 1985’s Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, Fred Ward walks away from a wrecked car, lights a trail of gasoline, and tosses the flame behind him. The gasoline ignites, the car explodes and Remo continues on his way. Ranker specifically identifies it as an early example of the walk-away explosion, and if we’re being completely literal about this whole thing, it makes it pretty hard to declare Desperado the first movie to ever do it.

Paul Verhoeven gives us another variation two years later in RoboCop. A gas station erupts into flames and Peter Weller’s RoboCop comes walking straight through the fire without the slightest concern, continuing his pursuit while everything burns around him. Again, he isn’t necessarily performing the exact “I caused that and refuse to look back” move, but the attitude is absolutely there. Of course, RoboCop being a giant walking piece of armored machinery gives him a pretty good excuse. If I were bulletproof and mostly made of metal, I’d probably be a lot less worried about the gas station too.

By 1991, Christopher Lambert was doing his own version in the wonderfully insane Highlander II: The Quickening, strolling through burning wreckage after an explosion triggers his regeneration. At this point, all the individual pieces of the trope clearly existed. Characters could ignore explosions, walk through them, emerge from them and occasionally even walk away from something they had intentionally destroyed.

That same year, James Cameron gave us an even more memorable variation in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. During the canal chase, the T-1000’s tow truck crashes into an overpass and erupts into a massive fireball. Moments later, Robert Patrick simply emerges from the flames unharmed as his liquid-metal body reforms into human shape. He isn’t walking away from an explosion in the Rodriguez sense, but the attitude is absolutely there. But more about that later.

What hadn’t quite become standardized yet was the shot.

That version would arrive in 1995. And strangely enough, the guy responsible didn’t even set out to create it.

EL MARIACHI AND THE REBEL WITHOUT A CREW

To understand how Robert Rodriguez ended up accidentally creating one of the most copied shots in action movies, you have to understand how he learned to make movies in the first place.

Long before Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl, and Shorts, Rodriguez wanted to make a feature film for basically the same reason someone might build a rickety table in their garage before trying to become a carpenter. He needed practice. His plan was to make an inexpensive Spanish-language action movie, sell it to the Mexican home-video market, hopefully make enough money to do another one, and continue learning through experience. Rodriguez has described El Mariachi as essentially a test film that he never expected American audiences to see.

That helps explain why the production has become filmmaking legend. Rodriguez famously made El Mariachi for $7,225, with part of the money coming from participating in medical drug trials. Nearly half of that budget went toward film stock and processing alone. He shot the movie on 16mm over roughly two weeks in Acuña, Mexico, using locations he and star Carlos Gallardo could access for little or no money. There was no conventional crew, so actors would help with production whenever they weren’t appearing in front of the camera.

Saving film became especially important. In most cases, Rodriguez only shot one take because every additional foot of film cost money. He was basically editing the movie in his head while filming, grabbing exactly what he believed he needed and then moving on. He has even talked about shooting the entire movie without knowing for certain whether the camera had properly exposed everything until he returned from Mexico and had the footage processed. Somehow, El Mariachi required no traditional reshoots.

That kind of filmmaking forces you to stop thinking about what you wish you had and start thinking about what you can actually use. Rodriguez has explained that he wrote around whatever was available to him. Someone had access to a bus, so there was a bus. Someone had access to a ranch, so the villain lived on a ranch. Real guards could wear their own uniforms, saving money on costumes. The limitations weren’t something Rodriguez dealt with after writing the movie. They helped determine what the movie became.

One of the funniest examples happened while they were shooting the Mariachi arriving in town. Rodriguez spotted a guy selling coconuts and decided to incorporate him into the movie. They filmed the character receiving a coconut and walking away, only to realize afterward that he never actually paid for it. A normal production could have simply shot another take. Rodriguez wasn’t wasting the film, so he fixed the problem with narration explaining that the town apparently gave away free coconuts.

It’s a funny story, but it also says a lot about the way Rodriguez approaches filmmaking. Something going wrong doesn’t automatically mean the movie is broken. Sometimes the solution to the mistake ends up being more interesting than whatever you originally planned.

That mentality would follow him straight into Hollywood.

El Mariachi was supposed to be a cheap learning experience for the Spanish-language video market, but Rodriguez took it to Los Angeles looking for distribution and ended up signing with ICM. That led to studio meetings and eventually Columbia Pictures, which helped bring the film to a much wider audience. El Mariachi won the Audience Award at Sundance in 1993 and turned its virtually unknown director into one of the major success stories of the independent film world.

Suddenly Robert Rodriguez had something he never really had before.

Money.

DESPERADO GOES BIG

If El Mariachi was Rodriguez proving what he could do with almost nothing, Desperado was his chance to find out what would happen if somebody actually gave him a few bucks.

The jump was enormous. El Mariachi had cost a little over seven thousand dollars. Desperado had a budget of roughly seven million. Antonio Banderas took over the central role, Salma Hayek became Carolina, and the supporting cast included Steve Buscemi, Cheech Marin, Quentin Tarantino and Danny Trejo. Rodriguez was working with far more resources, but he still approached the production with basically the same mentality, trying to make the movie look much larger than the money available to him.

That attitude is all over the finished movie. Desperado feels like Rodriguez took everything that worked in El Mariachi and cranked the volume until the knob broke off. The guns are bigger, the action is crazier, the characters are cooler and the entire movie carries the energy of someone who suddenly realized he could actually put the images in his head onto a movie screen.

Rodriguez also remained heavily involved in practically every part of the process. He wrote, directed, produced and edited the film while continuing to think in the economical style he had developed on El Mariachi. Even when Columbia initially questioned whether his unusually short pieces of footage could actually be edited together properly, Rodriguez knew exactly where each shot belonged because he was essentially cutting the movie while he filmed it.

Then came two grenades and a minor problem.

THE EXPLOSION THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Late in Desperado, El Mariachi and Carolina are making their escape when Banderas drops two grenades into the alley below them. What follows is the image that would become the entire reason we’re here: Banderas and Hayek moving calmly away while a gigantic orange fireball erupts behind them.

However, that was not what he originally planned.

The grenades were supposed to send pieces of debris and shrapnel flying high enough to appear in the background of the shot. When Rodriguez got to the setup, the effects crew didn’t have what was needed to send everything high enough past the second floor of the location. Rodriguez asked what they could do instead, and the answer was a large propane fireball. There was only one problem. The fireball would disappear almost immediately.

Rodriguez came up with an incredibly simple solution: shoot it in slow motion.

Now the propane burst that would vanish in an instant could expand across the frame and hang behind the actors. Rodriguez told Banderas and Hayek to walk quickly and look determined as they moved away. Most importantly, he told them not to stop or turn around because the fireball would be close enough that they could potentially singe their eyebrows.

That safety instruction accidentally changed the entire feeling of the scene.

Think about what happens if Banderas reacts. The grenades explode, he turns around and now he’s just another person looking at a cool explosion. Instead, he keeps moving. Suddenly the explosion becomes less important than the fact that El Mariachi couldn’t care less about it. He knew it was going to happen. He caused it. Why would he need to check his work?

In slow motion, it looked incredible.

Rodriguez showed the footage to James Cameron before Desperado came out and remembers Cameron reacting as though he hadn’t seen that exact image done before. Rodriguez now points to the scene as the beginning of the familiar slow-motion explosion walk, although as we’ve already established, there are enough earlier relatives that calling it the absolute first requires a pretty specific definition of the trope.

What we can say is that Rodriguez knew the shot worked.

We know that because he almost immediately did it again.

FROM DUSK TILL DAWN MAKES IT A THING

Desperado hit theaters in August of 1995. Less than five months later, From Dusk Till Dawn arrived in January of 1996, with Rodriguez directing Quentin Tarantino’s script and George Clooney making one of his first major jumps from television into movies. Rodriguez has said the short gap between the two films helped the explosion walk stick in people’s minds because audiences saw essentially the same visual idea twice in rapid succession.

This time there was nothing accidental about it.

At the beginning of From Dusk Till Dawn, the Gecko brothers walk away from a convenience store while the entire place explodes behind them. Rodriguez liked what had happened in Desperado, but he didn’t want to simply repeat the exact same trick. His solution was to push the joke further. Instead of looking determined while ignoring the explosion, George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino continue talking as though the giant building currently turning into a fireball behind them isn’t even there.

The scene was designed as a complicated continuous shot. Clooney and Tarantino had to walk out, deliver the dialogue, reach the car and drive away while the effects became progressively larger behind them. The smaller explosions could happen while the actors were close to the building, with the bigger fireballs saved until they had reached a safer distance. There were plenty of obvious things that could have ruined the take. Somebody could forget a line, mistime their walk or have trouble with the car.

Instead, all of that worked.

However, the camera screwed up.

The Steadicam’s remote focus system suddenly threw the image completely out of focus for a moment before correcting itself. Because they were shooting on film, they couldn’t fully confirm the problem until seeing the footage. The shot that was designed to happen once had to be rigged and performed again, with additional takes prepared in case something else went wrong.

There is something almost perfect about that. The Desperado explosion walk happened because the planned effect couldn’t be done. Rodriguez intentionally tried to repeat the idea in his next movie, and THAT shot ran into another technical problem. In both cases, the solution became part of the story.

More importantly, From Dusk Till Dawn turned the accident into a deliberate filmmaking choice. Rodriguez had now used the same visual idea in two major movies released within months of each other. The first one showed that it looked cool. The second one practically established the rules.

Hollywood took it from there.

HOLLYWOOD STEALS THE WALK

Once you start looking for the explosion walk after Desperado, it begins popping up everywhere. Sometimes the characters caused the destruction themselves. Sometimes they were simply so tough that the explosion barely registered. Eventually the visual became so familiar that filmmakers could use it as shorthand without needing to explain anything about the person doing it.

John Carpenter gave James Woods a great version in 1998’s Vampires. After the Sun-God Motel becomes something of a cleanup operation, Woods’ Jack Crow walks away with a cigar planted between his teeth while the place burns behind him. It fits the character perfectly. Crow has spent his life killing vampires. A motel going up in flames isn’t going to interrupt his afternoon.

Tony Scott took the idea in a much darker direction with Man on Fire in 2004. Denzel Washington’s Creasy walks away while an explosive he has planted finishes his interrogation of a corrupt police official. The camera stays close to Creasy rather than admiring the destruction, which makes his complete lack of reaction even colder. The explosion isn’t there to make him look heroic. It tells us just how far this man is willing to go and how little hesitation remains inside him.

Then the Coen brothers gave the trope to Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. Chigurh blows up a vehicle outside a pharmacy as a distraction and calmly goes inside to steal medical supplies while everyone else is understandably paying attention to the vehicle engulfed in flames. There’s no superhero swagger involved. His lack of concern is disturbing because it reinforces the idea that Chigurh operates according to rules completely different from everyone around him. It does look pretty awesome, though.

By 2008, the explosion walk had basically entered superhero territory. Tony Stark demonstrates the Jericho missile in Iron Man, turns away from the blast and throws his arms open while the desert erupts behind him. It is one of the best introductions to Stark’s personality because the explosion is practically part of his sales pitch. He isn’t simply unfazed by it. He knows exactly how cool he looks standing in front of it.

That same year, it had become familiar enough that Christopher Nolan could get a laugh simply by screwing with our expectations in The Dark Knight. The Joker walks out of Gotham General Hospital while a series of explosions begin going off behind him. Everything seems to be proceeding according to the action-movie rulebook until the explosions suddenly stop. The Joker pauses, turns around and starts fiddling with the detonator like someone trying to get their garage-door opener to work before the rest of the hospital finally erupts.

There’s a great story that has been repeated online for years claiming the explosion actually malfunctioned and Heath Ledger simply stayed in character, improvising with the detonator until the pyrotechnics suddenly came back to life. It makes Ledger sound like an even bigger genius than he already was.

Unfortunately, it’s not true. Sorry, nerds.

The pause was intentional. Christopher Nolan has explained that special effects supervisor Chris Corbould designed the demolition in stages so Ledger could initially remain fairly close to the building during the smaller explosions before getting farther away for the enormous blast that brought the place down. Nolan said they rehearsed Ledger’s movements over and over that morning, somewhere around twelve times, with Corbould calling out exactly where the explosions would happen. The production spent months preparing the demolition of the abandoned building because, for fairly obvious reasons, they weren’t going to get a second chance to bring the whole thing down.

Then X-Men Origins: Wolverine came along in 2009 and decided subtlety was for cowards. Wolverine intentionally uses his claws to ignite fuel leading back to a crashed helicopter, then turns around and walks away while it explodes behind him. He isn’t merely ignoring an explosion that happens to occur. The dude basically creates his own explosion specifically so he has something cool to walk away from.

At that point the trope had gone about as far as it possibly could.

Which meant it was time to make fun of it.

COOL GUYS DON’T LOOK AT EXPLOSIONS

By 2009, walking away from an explosion was so deeply embedded in pop culture that The Lonely Island could build an entire song around it.

Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions debuted during the MTV Movie Awards with Andy Samberg and Will Ferrell singing about the basic principle that truly cool people never bother looking at whatever destruction is happening behind them. Even J.J. Abrams gets involved. The joke doesn’t require explanation because by this point everybody already understands the shot.

That’s probably the best indication that a piece of filmmaking has officially become a cliché. First, somebody does it and audiences think it looks cool. Then other filmmakers copy it because it still looks cool. Eventually enough people have copied it that everyone notices the pattern, and comedy writers can reference it without bothering to explain what they’re talking about.

And yet the explosion walk never really disappeared.

That’s because, as dumb as the whole thing is, it still works.

WHY DOES IT WORK?

Walking away from an explosion makes absolutely no sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. An explosion is loud, hot and unpredictable. In fact, I turn around when somebody drops a plate at a restaurant. If a gas station blows up behind me, I’m probably going to at least glance over my shoulder to see what just happened.

That completely normal human reaction is exactly what makes the movie version work.

The person who doesn’t look appears completely in control. They already know what happened behind them because they caused it. Everyone else is reacting to the destruction while they have mentally moved on to whatever comes next. The explosion may be the biggest thing happening in the scene for the audience, but to the character it is almost irrelevant.

That’s why the exact same visual can communicate completely different things depending on who is doing it. With Tony Stark, it means arrogance and swagger. With Wolverine, it means toughness. With Creasy, it means cold determination. With Anton Chigurh, it makes him seem almost inhuman. The explosion changes, the character changes and the tone changes, but the basic message stays remarkably consistent.

This person does not scare easily.

There’s also something inherently cinematic about it. In real life, explosions are horrifying. In movies, they’re spectacle. Putting a calm human figure in front of all that mayhem gives the audience two things to look at once: the enormous destruction we came to see and the character who apparently thinks they’re cooler than all of it.

DID ROBERT RODRIGUEZ REALLY INVENT IT?

Which finally brings us back to Robert Rodriguez.

If we’re asking whether Desperado contains the first moment in film history where somebody walks without reacting to an explosion, then no. There are clear earlier examples and variations. Cloak & Dagger, Remo Williams, RoboCop and Highlander II all got there first in one form or another, and the larger idea of a hero appearing completely unfazed by destruction goes back even further.

But it becomes a lot more convincing if we’re talking about the specific modern version of the shot.

Seeing those two movies so close together helped the image take hold, and considering how recognizable the trope became afterward, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t play a major role in popularizing it.

The best part is that none of this came from Rodriguez sitting around trying to invent the next great action-movie cliché. It came from exactly the same filmmaking philosophy that made El Mariachi possible.

The effect you wanted isn’t available? What IS available?

A propane fireball.

It disappears too quickly? Shoot it in slow motion.

The actors are close enough to potentially singe their eyebrows? Tell them to keep walking and don’t turn around.

Suddenly a production problem becomes a cool shot. The cool shot becomes something Rodriguez deliberately uses again. Other filmmakers pick up on it. The image spreads throughout action movies, thrillers and superhero films until eventually people are writing comedy songs about it.

That’s an extremely Robert Rodriguez way for a movie cliché to be born.

Maybe he didn’t technically invent walking away from explosions. But he damn sure showed Hollywood how incredibly cool it could look.