Eva Longoria calls out Hollywood double standards for men

Eva Longoria is calling out Hollywood’s double standards for female directors after making her directorial debut with the 2023 film ‘Flamin’ Hot’.

The film details the inspiring story of a Frito-Lay janitor who invented Flaming Hot Cheetos. The film won an audience award at the SXSW Film Festival.

The ‘Desperate Housewives’ alum was joined by University of Southern California Annenberg professor and researcher Dr. Stacy L. Smith during the Kering Women talk at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Here, she brought up the double standards women entering the film industry face.

On being a female director

As a female director, a first-time director and a Latina director, Longoria said she “felt the weight of my community” and “the weight of every female director” when production started on “Flamin’ Hot.”

While speaking with Variety chief correspondent Elizabeth Wagmeister, Longoria noted that Hollywood does not play fair when it comes to films directed by women flopping versus male directors. There can be no margin of error for a director like Longoria, as one flop could cost her another directorial gig, she says.

“We don’t get a lot of bites at the apple,” Longoria said about Latina directors. “My movie wasn’t low budget by any means — it wasn’t $100 million, but it wasn’t $2 million. When was the last Latina-directed studio film? It was like 20 years ago. We can’t get a movie every 20 years.”

One time chance

“The problem is if this movie fails, people go, ‘Oh Latino stories don’t work…female directors really don’t cut it.’ We don’t get a lot of at-bats,” Longoria continued.

“A white male can direct a $200 million film, fail and get another one. That’s the problem. I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap.”

“You really carry the generational traumas with you into the making of the film,” Longoria said. “For me, it fueled me. I was determined.

“The illusion is that Hollywood is progressive,” she added. “The reality is that we’re still far behind in equal representation.”