After La Misma Luna broke opening-weekend records for a Spanish-language movie, making $2.8 million at just 266 theaters, I thought it would be great to publish an interview I had with the movie’s Mexican director, Patricia Riggen. She had some surprising things to say about the movie, her career, motherhood, and pitching movie ideas to studio execs when you’re seven months pregnant.

You recently had a baby girl. What’s her name and how is mommyhood treating you?
Francesca. It’s my first time and I was very worried when I got pregnant, being a woman director, about my career, how that would affect it and if I wasn’t gonna be able to do my career because of a baby. Now, I can tell you it’s not a problem at all. Babies are very wise somehow and they don’t interfere with careers. They make you smarter, more focused, more interesting, more complete.

How so?
Because you’ve lived the most amazing experience of your life. So you’re better because you have this huge, amazing thing that you care about. You still have your career, but you’re even better. Of course it’s hard, of course you sleep less and you work twice as much, but it’s so worth it.

Congratulations, your movie made me cry. I really enjoyed it.
What do you think worked about it? I always like to ask people.

You kept it from becoming schmaltzy. It was emotional but the emotions rang true and I never felt manipulated.
I really looked at it as a story about two lovers being separated, a mother/child love story. Not as an immigration movie. And in fact, there are moments, like when Rosario’s writing his name on an oven she’s cleaning, like he’s her lover. It was a challenge that in the movie, I don’t ever have them in the same shot. It was a challenge to create the love and make it strong and keep that emotion going.

What kind of Latin movies, what kind of movies that explore our culture and issues would you like to see on screen?
I think we wanna see good movies, first of all, and I think that is why Latin directors are having such success in Hollywood—because they’re first of all concerned with the craft. If this movies reflect our own people and our own stories and our own experiences, that’s great. But if they’re not good then we’re not gonna watch them. At the same time, I think mainstream U.S. audience is more open to Latin experience stories and that’s gonna help us be able to make more of them.

What Latino directors and actors and writers have you been inspired by?
One of the first moments that I realized that Latin movies could be good is when I saw Amores Perros for the first time. It was before it had any buzz. It had just opened in Mexico City, and that first super-mega, energetic scene, I thought, ‘oh my God. this is a real movie, we can really make good movies.’ That was a huge inspiration for me.

What’s your next project?
I am developing a period drama about Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. It’s his love story with a deaf girl. He fell in love with his deaf student, whom he married. It’s a very nice love story. I’m also working on a screenplay for a romantic comedy.

Will any of those projects deal with Latino subjects or have a Latino cast, like La Misma Luna?
I haven’t been offered any Latino projects, which I think is very good, not because I don’t want them, but because that means I haven’t been typecast in the Latino niche.

That has to be liberating. And it’s interesting that that has happened after such a Latinocentric movie.
Exactly. Before La Misma Luna, I was being offered stories about little Chihuahuas crossing the borders. Now, I’m just being offered regular projects. However, I always will try to bring in my female sensibility and my Latin sensibility—warmth, humor—into what I do. And I still want to develop Latin projects, if they’re good.

You started out as a producer and screenwriter, then later on figured out that you wanted to be a director. Was it daunting for you to chase such a huge dream?
It took a long time. I never allowed myself to think I could be the director and there are very few women directors in Mexico. It’s like being an astronaut. But I think it’s very common for women to take longer to decide and it has to do with not allowing ourselves to believe that we can do things. Men don’t have that problem. They wake up and say I wanna be the president or I wanna be a director or I wanna be an undercover cop and instantly think they can do it.

Do you think it’s even harder when you’re a Latina?
Many of us had families that were very conservative in which what is expected from you as a woman is to get married, sadly. You can go to school and all of that, but the ultimate goal is to marry a good guy with a good job. They don’t tell you get a good job yourself.

Did you have to tell yourself that?
All the time. My whole life has been about unlearning things that I was taught. For example, I have so much trouble telling someone what I want because women are emotionally impaired to be the boss, to be strong. The hardest thing for me is firing somebody who is not doing their job right, even if they are mistreating me. I feel like a battered wife coming back to the same person. Men don’t have that problem.

How have you been trying to get past that?
The thing is that women are good-hearted people. We think of the other person before ourselves. But we have to get a balance—we shouldn’t let people mistreat us or stick with people that are not good to your project or to you.

How tough was it to break into Hollywood?
No. I think the Ligia’s [Villalobos] screenplay helped a lot and I think people had seen some of my previous work and were impressed. In fact, when I finished the movie and got pregnant, I was getting the movie jobs. I had this big, seven-month belly and I was thinking oh my God, they’re never gonna give me this job! I would go in to pitch something in front of like eight older men and they couldn’t care less that I was pregnant. I realized: ‘I’m the one who doesn’t believe in me.’ It never crossed these people’s minds that I wasn’t gonna be able to do it. They thought, you know, she’ll have the baby and she’ll be able to keep working.

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