Blue Beetle Director on Latino Representation & Easter Eggs

Hi, I'm Alison with FlickDirect and I am here with the director of Blue Beetle. Hello, Angel. How are you? Hi, Alison. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. So this was the first Latino superhero lead in a movie. Live action. Live action. Yeah. Live action. Sure. How much pressure did you feel to quote unquote get it right? Yeah, you get some pressure, you know, especially because, you know, we, the Latino community is a lot of monoliths and we all want our voices to be heard and we'll have our own particular issues and situations.

And so it's hard to, it's irresponsible to claim this to be the all encompassing Latino experience. But we, the writer who's Mexican from Querétaro and through Puerto Rico, we were able to find a lot of common grounds, a lot of similarities that sometimes they, a community can feel like, oh my gosh, like this belongs to me, but you know what? Yes, it belongs to you, but we're connected through it.

So by being able to find the things that connect us and celebrating those things that connect us, we felt very comfortable being able to showcase something that at least opens the doors to more stories to get told from our community and by our community. And how did you feel the community responded? Do you feel as though you did get it right with their reaction to it?

It, you know, overall, I can say that the majority consensus was that finally somebody got it right and that finally they can see themselves or family members represented or shown in a light that they haven't had the opportunity to be seen, you know, see them in spaces that we have often been left on the sidelines and appropriating them with our own flair and magic that speaks to different generations.

And that not only goes from the characters because the music also speaks through, it's a very pan-Latino banda sonora score, I'm thinking in Spanish, sorry. That's okay. Like our musical choices are very pan-Latino. They go from Mexico to Puerto Rico to Argentina. And by doing stuff like that, situations that we can all understand and relate to, it made it very accessible.

Sure, not every Latino family looks like this, but maybe you do know a Latino family that looks like this. And that goes to like a lot of other communities that have similar relationships with their families. As we get into the home entertainment release, what are you most excited for people to see that maybe they didn't notice on screen in the theater or some of the extras?

Tell me what's most important for you. So there's a ton of Easter eggs in the film. Love extras. Yeah, like it's not only, you know, we do have Easter eggs for the DC fans, but we have a lot of Easter eggs that go from real political situations in Latin America all the way to movies that inspired us and that we wanted to emulate one way or the other.

Because those are the movies that made us. And for us, it was like, okay, so we're here making a movie. We're taking space in the superhero genre and this action movie and everybody in our film has the opportunity to be the action hero. They've, like, we love growing up. And just recently, somebody caught one and posted it online. So I think it's fun.

Like, there's a scene where Kajita, when they're attacking the house, you know, she deploys a gun and he's like, no, no killing. And then it goes to a blaster. That gun, we were able to use the same gun from the Fifth Element, the V of D. Okay, I'm gonna have to look for that. Yeah. So that's one that happens in the middle of an action that if you're not paying attention, you're not going to catch it.

And, you know, it goes from Aliens to Indiana Jones to Star Wars to Kronos, like Macario, like we had a lot of fun being able to see our people, you know, appropriating those spaces. Well, I can't wait for the home release. I enjoyed the movie so much in the movie theater. I can't wait to see it again. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. It was delightful to talk to you. Thanks.