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.

I tell [scriptwriters] I think [their scripts] has too many stereotypes, that even the way they come in and out of Spanish doesn't really make sense, it feels forced.

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 guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can.

I think, especially with this show [How to Get Away with Murder], we have Viola Davis and Pete Nowalk as the showrunner.

I knew that [director/screenwriter] Catalina Aguilar Mastretta had an amazing take on the female psyche and the modern woman and the modern immigrant woman living in the U.S., and I really saw the need for a story told of our daily lives without being a statistic and without just trying to hit a demographic, and I felt that with this one.

People follow my movies for a reason, and that's because I believe in them, and I don't want to just make movies for the sake of making movies.