The patriarchal society has made women believe, first of all, you're only valid and valuable when you're young.
When we see society telling women that they have a certain time, that they make women compete with each other, the older generation competing with the younger generation. They've made us believe that there's not enough men out there for us or that we're only hired because of our looks and not because of our abilities.
I've been transformed by stories, and I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. I take it very seriously because my life has been changed, whether it was a movie, a play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting.
Family is something that I grew up with, and the Mexican culture has a lot of, you know - Sunday is the day you spend with your family, and you have 40 to 50 people at your house, the uncles and the cousins, and I grew up with that.
I also have to be careful of what it says about women. I get a lot of scripts that only talk about women's appearances and what they look like. I think we're tired of having to meet this standard and not being asked what our talents or abilities are.
Something I was adamant about was that the movie [Everybody Lovess Somebody] wouldn't end with, oh, marriage saved [the main character]. They're married and she's OK. I was very pushing on having the ending be that she made an inner growth of healing so that she can then have the ability and the space to love and be loved by someone else, and that love is open-ended and doesn't mean they're going to get married tomorrow and all her problems are solved.
What I do feel with the different scripts that they give me where I feel like this is done for one of those reasons, I share my point of view. I don't just say, "No, thank you." I say, "I feel that this represents Latinos in a wrong way, in a bad way."
Until they hired a Latina to write for Laurel [in How to Get Away with Murder], I was scared that she was going to fall into stereotypes.
Sadly - and I think this is why it's so important that we do this more - I don't have that guiding light. You know, "Oh, that Sleepless in Seattle bilingual something," like, it doesn't exist. I don't have it in my memory, and that's why I thought it was important to make it.
Mexican food is one of the best culinary experiences that people can have.
I know that [Sunday is the day you spend with your family] is a tradition that I want to keep alive and I also want to share.
I guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can.
I think it's not an easy task because there's not enough Latino writers that are being given opportunities to write things - and I say this because I've been given a lot of bilingual movies in the past because of my career in Mexico, and they're like, "Oh, it's going to make sense for her to do this." A lot of studios want to hit that demographic, but they sort of do it without starting in the right way, which is having someone who knows the culture, and enjoys the language as well, to be able to write these things.
Our society really needs to take a better look at what we're selling, because I think women being empowered will be as beneficial to men as it is to us.
The music in the movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] is very much hand-picked specifically because it's our history and our traditions. The themes are universal.
When I was asked to change Laurel into a Latina for How to Get Away with Murder, I was terrified, because I thought, no one's going to know how to do this because the American take on my culture is never accurate.
I love that in this movie [Everybody Loves Somebody], you almost want to go and hang out with this family.
I feel that the power that storytelling has to change people, to bring them together, to have that cathartic sort of experience, is something that definitely has helped my life be worthwhile and better.
I should have asked for credit - but he has no idea how amazing it is that a character that was written as a boy can be equally written for a girl. It's like you said, just write a character as if it were a man, and then turn it and make it into a woman. It's like, we're human beings, after all.
I love family. In this movie [Everybody Loves Somebody], my character is a successful OB-GYN and yet she goes back to her teenage years when she's with her parents. Like, that's me.
I think Shonda Rhimes came to change television for women forever.
This movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] is as much for the general market as it is for Latino audiences. That's a really exciting prospect.
[The main character] is in a forever-growing process. I feel the movie [everybody Loves Somebody] did that very well and not finishing off as "a woman's life ends when she finds the right guy".
I told my friend - we were working on a movie together - and he gave me a script and asked me to give him notes. And they were all male characters, and I said, "You know what would make this character more interesting?" And he asked what - and it's this road trip between three guys, basically, one older man, one 30-year-old and a 13-year-old mechanic. And I said, "If you make the 13-year-old a girl, and you make her an Indian-American mechanic." And he said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Yeah, don't change anything in the script about him, and just make it a her."
I felt really strongly about this script [ Everybody Loves Somebody] because, like you said, it's a very specific way of life.
