Aitch Alberto greets me with a hug when I arrive for our interview. It’s the day after her debut feature film Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe made its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival 2022 as part of TIFF’s Drama programming, and she’s joined by her leads Max Pelayo and Reese Gonzales. That our interview is housed on the 19th floor of the city’s Fairmont Royal York hotel, in a room that soars above the downtown core and peeks over the lake and beyond, is somewhat allusive to Alberto’s climb — a seven and a half-year journey, in fact — to get the film made.
“There were other directors attached [to the film]. There were a bunch of false starts,” Alberto says, detailing a process that involved writing a spec script for Benjamin Alire Sáenz, author of the eponymous novel on which the movie is based, followed by 30 drafts of the script and meetings with different producers. “I like to joke that the Latinx mafia had to show up in order for the movie to get made,” she adds, referring to producers Lin-Manuel Miranda (whom she tweeted at, per Variety, to get things rolling), Eugenio Derbez, and Eva Longoria, “because let’s be real: the reason it took so long is because it’s a story about two brown kids directed by a trans woman.”
Aristotle and Dante is a queer coming-of-age story about the titular Aristotle (Pelayo) and Dante (Gonzales), who meet in the summer of 1987 in El Paso, Texas. Whereas Aristotle is introspective and keeps to himself, harboring deep feelings he doesn’t often know what to do with, Dante is free-spirited and moves through life to his own beat. They couldn’t be more different, and yet, when they meet at the local pool, an instant connection forms, one that inspires in each of them a journey of self-discovery.
On Casting Aristotle and Dante
Alberto, who pulls double duty as the film’s writer, first met Gonzales in 2018, when they were doing a live-reading of an earlier version of Aristotle and Dante‘s script. “I cast him off a headshot because I thought his essence is so Dante, and then I met him and was like, oh, this is a real-life Dante.” Pelayo later came into the mix when casting for the film was officially underway. As soon as Alberto saw his self-tape, she knew he was Ari. “It was undeniable. They are these characters both off and on the screen.”
It wouldn’t be until Aristotle and Dante‘s chemistry read that Pelayo and Gonzales would meet, but it was there that magic seemed to have been made. “We immediately became buddies,” Pelayo says, which isn’t unlike how it plays out for their characters in the film. Gonzales adds, “Once we got cast, I FaceTimed him, and we had a long conversation. I got really lucky because it was effortless to get to that place with him.”
Indeed, sitting in front of Pelayo and Gonzales, it’s clear there’s an ease between them. It’s perhaps why, when you see the film, you instantly believe and are drawn into their connection on-screen. “I trusted that that would happen,” Alberto says of her actors’ finding, trusting, and leaning on each other. “[Aristotle and Dante‘s] intimacy would [only] exist between two people that are these characters.”
On Discovering Their Own Secrets of the Universe
“There are a lot of secrets of the universe I’ve been discovering recently,” Gonzales says when asked about his own journey of self-discovery. “One of the biggest ones is that once you start loving yourself, then you open yourself up to the love of everyone else in the world around you and [the possibility] to give that love [back]. That’s where your life really starts.” Meanwhile, for Pelayo, it’s the “faith that everything is going to work out just fine. It’s hard to get to that point, but once you get there, that’s when some real magic is possible.”
“The most invaluable secret of the universe that I discovered,” Alberto says, “is that there’s no arrival at anything. There’s never a landing on something; it still keeps unfolding. Even when you think, oh, this thing is going to make it better for me, and this thing is the answer, there’s so much more to discover past that — which is very freeing.”
Earlier this year, Sáenz published a sequel to Secrets of the Universe called Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World, which The Harvard Crimson dubbed “a stunning sequel.” When asked if she had any plans to adapt that novel as well, Alberto says, “We don’t have plans right now. The book exists, so I think, innately, there’s a plan for a sequel, but I think we’re seeing [first] how this one lands.” Of course, there hasn’t been a movie based on an LGBTQ+ novel like hers, one that navigates young love and male vulnerability, and champions tenderness and compassion — one that, based on the energy in the film’s premiere screening, is already so beloved and will likely be even more so when it sees a wider release — so I respectfully suggest that she start planning.
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