“Everybody Loves Somebody” writer-director Catalina Aguilar Mastretta has a romantic comedy in the works at Amazon Prime. The streamer has ordered a pilot for the untitled bilingual project, Deadline reports. “Life Itself’s” Lorenza Izzo will star.
The story centers on family, both biological and chosen. The matriarch of her chosen family, Sara’s (Izzo) own parents moved back to Mexico City in her late teens. “She and her diverse group of friends and family attempt to master their careers and romantic entanglements while living together in Sara’s Hollywood Hills compound. Now, Sara’s mother, Ines, is moving back in and shedding a new light on the life Sara built for herself, pushing everyone towards a late-in-life coming of age,” the source details.
Mastretta will write and direct, and is among the project’s executive producers. The supporting cast includes Sarah Ramos (“Parenthood”), Georgie Flores (“Famous in Love”), Giancarlo Vidrio (“El Vato”), Ben O’Toole (“Hacksaw Ridge”), and Patricia Bernal (“Everybody Loves Somebody”).
“The Mexican film industry is more of an indie industry. There are also less female filmmakers but there are less filmmakers period, so the ratio in Mexico is actually way better than it is here, in my immediate experience. I know a lot of female directors in Mexico,” Mastretta has said. “The discussion around female directors in Hollywood comes exactly in the jump between festival filmmaking and studio filmmaking. The gap is everywhere, but it widens deeper when you get into big-budget films. In Mexico it’s a little easier because the stakes are lower, and that’s what’s scary — that when the stakes get higher the confidence is put on a man, simply for the fact that he is a man.”
She continued, “The protagonists in both of my films, [‘Everybody Loves Somebody’ and ‘The Hours with You’], are women, but no one ever said ‘Reservoir Dogs’ was a very ‘male movie.’ People write about what they write, and because I happen to be a women there are a lot of women in my films. Maybe that’s why. A lot of men write only about men and it’s never an issue. It’s not a conscious thing: ‘I’m going to write empowered women and I’m going to put them at the center of my film.’ I just do,” she explained.
