Freddy Robles
He is the filmmaker of Cain Rose Up Dollar Baby Film.
SKSM: May you introduce yourself to our readers? Born? Raised?
Freddy Robles: My name is Freddy Robles and I was born and raised in Round Rock Texas which is a suburb of Austin. The rest of my family is from Coahila, Mexico which is where I spent half of my time as a child.
SKSM: How would you decide that shoot movies was your mission?
Freddy Robles: I have always loved movies and Tv my whole life but it wasnt until I saw Wes Craven’s Scream for the first time that I realized that I had to be apart of something like that. Then when I discovered interviews on youtube with my favorite filmmakers I realized that the directors thought about the film like I did so I knew I wanted to do what they did.
SKSM: You got permission to film Cain Rose Up. Why was it cancelled?
Freddy Robles: There was a lot of stops and starts to the project and it also just took a while to write, but once I did get it right it was pretty much the best thing I had written up to that point. I got pretty excited over it and the farthest I got was casting the three main leads and we had some rehearsals but the thing that kept holding me back was that I was living with my parents at the time and I couldn’t find a location for the longest time. Then the rights expired after the first year and I had to wait to get them back and apply again but once I did the actors just couldn’t commit. I moved back to college and it looked like it was gonna be possible because the apartment I moved into was perfect. The thing is, the head of the dollar baby program retired and the program disbanded.
SKSM: If you had filmed Cain Rose Up, how long would the running time have been?
Freddy Robles: The runtime of the film would have been around 8-10 minutes.
SKSM: Was anyone else involved in the project?
Freddy Robles: I had three different actors to play the three main roles and we had script read throughs and zoom meetings about the script but since the film kept falling apart they had to pursue other projects.
SKSM: How come you picked Cain Rose Up to develop into a movie? What is it in the story that you like so much?
Freddy Robles: For me when I was looking at the list of stories I knew I had to think practically when it came to something I was actually gonna have to film (potentially by myself). So when I came across the story Cain Rose Up and saw what the premise was I immediately knew this was something I could do right now in school and it was something that dealt with difficult subject matter. I also liked the idea of someone in college going through a severe depression and the events leading up to him doing something terrible. This resonated with me because I was going through a really hard time in my first year in college struggling with depression and grief that I really just didnt know how to deal with so I decided to use this as a way to cope with all of that to put all of my frustrations into.
SKSM: Did you know that this story has already been filmed as Dollar Baby? Have you seen any of these adaptations? If so, what do you think about it?
Freddy Robles: Yes I did realize that this had been done many times in the past since the 90’s I believe. This was a bit of a problem for me because the main concern I had was will people even want to watch another adaptation of this? How can I make this something new? So I decided watch as many of the adaptations as I could because they were all so different and try to even get in touch with some of the filmmakers (sadly no luck) that made those shorts. The biggest takeaway for me was that there was a character in the short story called beaver and it seems to be an actual beaver in the story talking to Curt in the last couple pages in the book and realized that none of the adaptations had even tried to touch this character. Even the ones that did the short story verbatim didnt have him and they stuck too close to the book or too far. So for me when adapting this I had to have three things which was keeping the story in his dorm room the whole time, having the Beaver character be in the room with Curt as a personified version of temptation, and the last thing was to not make the film about the shooting but what would have to go so wrong in a young persons life to want them to do something like this. For me this was the biggest thing I was excited for because I felt like I really had something nobody had seen before with this story.
SKSM: How did you find out that King sold the movie rights to some of his stories for just $1?
Freddy Robles: I was on a location scout for a documentary with someone in the industry that I had met and in the car he tells me about the program. At the time I couldnt get anything made and I was looking for a story so when I looked at the list I knew it this was my chance to be able to adapt something that I already loved into a short film.
SKSM: Are you a Stephen King fan? If so, which are your favorite works and adaptations?
Freddy Robles: I have pretty much always been a Stephen King fan since I was around 12 when I first saw The Dead Zone but I didnt know it was King at the time. The thing that I actively seeked out that was King related was the IT miniseries because at one point my school was threatened online by this instagram account that these clowns were going to attack the school. So becuase I didn’t believe it I decided to watch something with clowns in it and IT was the first thing that popped up.
SKSM: What are you working nowadays?
Freddy Robles: Right now, I’m still writing short film screenplays two of them being spy films and another being a stalker story so I’ll be finishing those up to see which one gets made.
SKSM: What is one thing people would be surprised to know about you?
Freddy Robles: Something interesting about me is that I survived a flood in Mexico when I was a kid. I remember waking up out of nowhere and my parents were saying that the whole town was evacuating. We packed ourselves in our truck and tried to get out but the flood was getting worse on the roads so at one point we went off road through the back of town and drove away to safety.
SKSM: What is in the top 5 on your bucket list? (Everything is possible and nothing is too strange)
Freddy Robles:
1. To direct a Scream film
2. Make this Dollar baby
3. Travel to the Pyramids in Egypt
4. Have dinner with Mike Flanagan
5. Start my own production Company
SKSM: What advice would you give to those people who want to be filmmakers?
Freddy Robles: The biggest thing I would say is to keep making films that feel like the most you and figure out how this idea could be marketable. Then I would also say to find like minded people that are into the same things you are and nurture those relationships by making things together constantly no matter the quality.
SKSM: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Is there anything you want to say to our readers?
Freddy Robles: I would like to say that everyone should take an interest in these projects to try and hopefully one day bring back this program because I think it is such an important tool for filmmakers who are in search for a good story to bring to life.
