Rodriguez tends to think outside the Hollywood box. Working 1,000 miles from Los Angeles in his native Austin, Texas, he treats moviemaking as his own cottage industry. Not only did he write and direct the delightful “Spy Kids” sequel, but the 34-year-old filmmaker also performed nine other jobs, including composer and editor. What’s more, he wrote and filmed “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” the final film in his “El Mariachi” trilogy, in just 10 weeks while starting “Spy Kids 2.” “It’s easier and faster if you do all those jobs yourself,” Rodriguez says, while supervising last-minute editing at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in northern California. “You don’t have to sit down and have a conversation with everybody. Technology has gotten us to the point where you can move at the speed of thought. You rock through the movie, and at the end, you turn around and say, ‘When did we figure out how to do that?’ "

And how did he figure out how to do it all so cheaply? The first “Spy Kids” cost $36 million–and grossed $112 million. The far more ambitious follow-up, opening this week, cost only $3 million more (some sequels cost double the original). In the new version, the brother-sister heroes, Juni and Carmen, go on a mission that leads to a mysterious island where strange creatures prowl. But only the young stars, Daryl Sabara and Alexa Vega, ever went on location in Costa Rica. The rest of the “island” was filmed in Texas. And when Rodriguez couldn’t get permission to film the opening sequence at a Disney theme park (even though “Spy Kids” is a production of Disney-owned Dimension Films), he designed a fictional park (and aptly named one ride the Vomiter). “I want my budgets very low,” the director says. “You have to keep challenging yourself creatively. If you don’t let the creative spirit guide you, you screw up.”

That creative spirit has guided Rodriguez away from the violence of such films as “The Faculty” to movies he can show to his whole family. “Having 50 kids on the set is the environment he likes,” says Antonio Banderas, a veteran of five Rodriguez movies, who plays spy dad Gregorio Cortez in the current series. Maybe that explains Rodriguez’s success: when you’re a kid at heart, nothing’s impossible.