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 guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can.
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.
I think Shonda Rhimes came to change television for women forever.
I think, especially with this show [How to Get Away with Murder], we have Viola Davis and Pete Nowalk as the showrunner.
[Rhimes and Pete Nowalk] have definitely, from the pilot [of How to Get Away with Murder], brought forth a woman who is unapologetically herself, unapologetically flawed, and is as vulnerable as she is powerful. I'm grateful to be in that family.
There's not enough of those inclusive projects where I feel like I'm interpreting a human being and not just a statistic or a nationality.
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.
[Producers] promised me they wouldn't do that sort of "defining nature of my character is that Laurel is Latina [in How to Get Away with Murder] ." It has nothing to do with that. She just happens to be a Latina.
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.
This movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] is as much for the general market as it is for Latino audiences. That's a really exciting prospect.
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.
There's a lot of things, even the landscape that we show in the movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] of Ensenada in Baja is just spectacular. There's so much more - I wish we could have shown more, but I'm glad we didn't see the typical, you know, border-sombrero-tequila thing that we normally do.
[Everybody Loves Somebody] was a different take on that immigrant sort of life.
Mexican food is one of the best culinary experiences that people can have.
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.
I love that in this movie [Everybody Loves Somebody], you almost want to go and hang out with this family.
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 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.
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 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 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."
[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".
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.
I think that, for sure, we as women should try and realize that it's more about having someone to share.
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