Karla Souza Quotes

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.

In the movie [Everybody Loves Somebody], the sister tells my character, "No, don't you want to be with someone?" I think the family - especially in this movie - they know that the reason that Clara doesn't want to have an emotional, intimate relationship is more because she was hurt so badly from heartbreak that she's then being closed off and cynical.

Romantic comedies, if done badly, can be catastrophic.

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 not enough of those inclusive projects where I feel like I'm interpreting a human being and not just a statistic or a nationality.

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."

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.

I love that in this movie [Everybody Loves Somebody], you almost want to go and hang out with this family.

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."

Mexican food is one of the best culinary experiences that people can have.

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.

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.

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.

[Everybody Loves Somebody] one really loves both cultures, represents them in a very accurate, genuine, authentic, fun, fresh way, and it includes so many more people because it has that language aspect to it.

I hope that we start trendsetting [with Everybody Loves Somebody], you know, like having bigger movies also include that. Because I think it'll definitely change a lot of what's going on right now.

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.

The patriarchal society has made women believe, first of all, you're only valid and valuable when you're young.

[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".

All the products that are sold to us - those anti-aging products - are telling us that there's a due date.

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.

["When are you getting married" in Everybody Loves Somebody] is funny because it's put on by women and men. Society makes women feel like, oh, you're getting old.

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.

Wisdom and white hair might not be as valued [in our society] as in different cultures.

I would get very frustrated reading scripts that were bilingual but maybe not bicultural.

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 also really pay attention to whether the script embodies a full female character or if they're just wanting a two-dimensional objectified woman. So I also have that aspect to take care of as well.

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.

[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.

There's a lot of lies out there that we should catch and that have taken me a lot of time to sort of see, and reading up on it and getting educated on it. I'm reading a book that's about how images of beauty have hurt women along the decades. It's a very educating but infuriating thing to see, how we don't have equal opportunity because they're demanding so much more.

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.

I felt really strongly about this script [ Everybody Loves Somebody] because, like you said, it's a very specific way of life.

I think that, for sure, we as women should try and realize that it's more about having someone to share.

[Everybody Loves Somebody] was a different take on that immigrant sort of life.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 explain that as Latinos, we can also be professionals.

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.