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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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