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From the moment she read Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s acclaimed YA novel about two Mexican-American teenagers who fall for each other in the late 1980s, Aitch Alberto knew she wanted to adapt the love story for the big screen. But nothing could have prepared the filmmaker for the nine-year journey that would become her life’s work.
Written and directed by Alberto, the Aristotle and Dante movie — which premiered to rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and arrives in theaters today, Sept. 8 — follows Aristotle “Ari” Mendoza (Max Pelayo) and Dante Quintana (Reese Gonzales) over the course of two life-changing summers in the borderlands of El Paso, Texas, where they form a transcendent bond that opens each other up to discoveries about themselves and the universe around them.
“I really wanted to make something that was nuanced, that wasn’t rooted in what we often see when it comes to Latin stories and queer stories,” Alberto tells Teen Vogue on a recent video call from her home in Los Angeles. “It’s having a fresh approach [that] isn’t solely fueled by identity, but more so all the other things that give us the perspective that we have. We’ve seen so many stories about Latinidad and the Latin community in a way that feels really violent and redundant, and I think it’s because often our stories are not told by us. I just really wanted to give people a different option.”
Naturally, Alberto says, “there was a lot of resistance” to telling a queer Latino story that wasn’t simply steeped in violence or tragedy — so much so that the adaptation, which was initially attached to more established directors, took seven years to finance and another two to debut in cinemas across the United States and around the world.
Alberto was even told by some potential producers, early on in the development process, that she wasn’t the right person to helm the movie. “I didn’t understand why I wasn’t ready, but somewhere, subconsciously, I knew what the answer was, because it was always the thing that was holding me back from really achieving some sort of success,” she explains. “It was me not allowing myself to see myself fully for who I am or pretending [and] trying to hide it.”
Instead of being like Dante, a free-spirited aspiring artist who is in touch with his feelings, Alberto likes to say she has really always been more like Aristotle, who is more emotionally repressed and lives in a constant state of unease and resentment toward his family and the world around him. It wasn’t until Alberto, who is transgender, decided to transition that she felt she had a very specific understanding of how to approach her feature directorial debut.
After reading the source material at the suggestion of a friend in 2014, Alberto discovered that the film rights were still available and wrote a spec script before flying to El Paso to meet with Sáenz, who showed her the quintessential places that he had described in the book. At the end of their four days together, seated opposite each other in a Mexican restaurant in New Mexico, the author gave the aspiring director his blessing. “These boys were mine, and now I give them to you,” he told her.
From the outset, Alberto wanted to cast young actors who didn’t have a lot of experience to reflect the naïveté and innocence of their onscreen counterparts. With the help of casting director Alan Luna, she held a three-month open call and auditioned hundreds of actors before settling on Gonzales, who performed a live reading of the script at Outfest in 2018, and Pelayo. “I think Max is naturally shy and internal, and Reese is an extrovert and a theater act kid and has this vibrant way of looking at the world, which is what the characters are,” Alberto says.
Tasked with distilling a nearly 400-page novel into what would become a 96-minute film, Alberto says it took her 30 drafts over the years to settle on the right adaptation of Aristotle and Dante. Despite the fact that she “wanted to honor the fans” and “didn’t want to veer off too much from the book, because I think that’s where adaptations often waver or fail,” Alberto gave herself permission to tell her own iteration of the story.
For instance, Tía Ophelia (Marlene Forte), Aristotle’s aunt who lives with another woman but whose sexuality has rarely been openly discussed in their family, “became a bit more prominent, so we gave an anchor to Ari and [made him feel] seen early on, even if he wasn’t seeing himself,” Alberto says. “I think one of the biggest challenges in the book was, how do you externalize Ari’s very internal struggle without leaning into the trope of having voiceovers throughout the whole movie?”
The answer to that question, as it turns out, was born out of the fruitful collaboration with producers including the Hamilton and In the Heights creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who had previously narrated the Aristotle and Dante audiobook. On New Year’s Day in 2018, after sending him the script through formal channels, Alberto decided to take matters into her own hands and tweeted Miranda about her film. Twenty minutes later, he responded and offered to read the screenplay. Three months later, he met Alberto in Los Angeles and officially boarded the project.
“I was so impressed with how she captured the world and the individual struggles of each boy’s coming-of-age story so vividly,” Miranda writes in a statement. “Aitch has always had an incredible vision for this film and deep compassion for these characters. I knew her directorial debut would be a beautiful, heartfelt and magical piece of art.”
It was Miranda who emailed Eva Longoria — who had heard Alberto’s pitch for the rewrite of Longoria’s feature directorial debut, Flamin’ Hot — about playing Soledad Quintana, Dante’s mother. “He sent her an email with the script [and] a letter that I had written,” says Alberto, who wrote the character with the Desperate Housewives star in mind. “I just loved her and I knew she loved me, so I knew it was gonna be a yes.”
When the time came to cast Jaime Mendoza, Aristotle’s laconic war veteran father, Eugenio Derbez — an acclaimed Mexican actor best known for his comedic chops — may not have been the most obvious choice. But Alberto was keen to give Derbez, who also produced the film, an opportunity to show his range as a performer and redefine the typical depiction of a macho Latino father. (Alberto jokes that the “Latinx mafia” — Miranda, Longoria and Derbez — were responsible for helping to secure financing and getting the film over the finish line.)
Although she has declined to disclose the exact length of the shoot, Alberto reveals that the cast and crew were forced to shoot seven to eight pages of the script per day — a high rate even for an independent film. While she concedes that a lot of the filmmaking process requires an ability to compromise in the throes of production, Alberto pushed back on any suggestion that Aristotle and Dante’s relationships with their parents, who are all radically supportive of their burgeoning romance, weren’t important to the arc of the film.
“Two of my favorite scenes in the movie are towards the end of the film, when Ari is in the car with his dad and they’re driving to [Ari’s] Tía’s place,” says the writer-director, who reveals that many of those familial scenes “were a lot longer” in the first cut. “My favorite scene is the scene on the porch with Ari and his parents. It was four takes. We had the most time we had for any scene … and by the end of that, everybody on set was affected in such an emotional way. It was that moment where [we realized] we were making something that matters, and the way it ended up in the film is also almost exactly what we shot.”
From the moment they first meet at a public pool, Aristotle and Dante develop an immediate connection that forces them to question everything they’ve known about themselves. “Ari never says he’s gay; Ari is just in love with Dante. [Ari] feels everything that he could be and that everything is possible when he’s around a specific soul, but Dante is the only person that ever says ‘I’m gay’ in the film,” Alberto remarks. The filmmaker, as a result, was looking to explore the fundamental question: “How does love transcend identity?”
“I think it’s undeniable how safe they feel with each other, and the oddities of how the world perceives them is not an issue at all when they’re together,” notes Alberto. “I really wanted them to feel like they were living this fairytale when they were together. The scenes are intentionally shot with them and not much around them, as if the world disappears when they’re together. … I think that’s what happens through their journey, specifically Aristotle’s, where he’s just like, ‘This is my home. How can I walk away from this or risk denying any part of myself?’”
It’s a realization that leads into the emotional climax of the film, at which point the tension between Aristotle and Dante comes to a head. “It was a really intense day, but we didn’t shoot it too many times. I didn’t let anybody talk to either one of them. It was just a very nurtured space for them to be as vulnerable as possible,” Alberto recalls of that key moment. (The scene, complete with a sweeping 360 shot, was also captured by an openly queer steadicam operator: “It was literally a queer lens that was capturing this very important moment.”) “That day on set, both of those boys were the most fearless and fear-ridden that I had ever seen them. It was because they knew that this moment mattered so much in the movie.”
In 2021, nearly a decade after the release of his seminal novel, Sáenz published Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World, which finds the protagonists navigating the early stages of their new relationship while dealing with major life changes and witnessing the role that racism and homophobia played in the AIDS epidemic. (A third book is also in the works.)
Alberto is well-aware that fans, many of whom have yet to watch her adaptation, have already been clamoring about the potential of a sequel. “I don’t know if Ari and Dante’s story is completely over, I’ll say that,” she says with a slight smile. “I would love to make a sequel, [but] I think it’s really dependent on how well this first one does.”
Having spent the better part of the last decade in the world that Saénz had created, Alberto has discovered a secret or two of her own about how the universe works: “We could externalize and blame the world around us, but I think it’s up to us to love ourselves fully despite any resistance that we get from external forces. I think that’s always the biggest challenge,” she concludes. “I think it always goes back to allowing yourself to see the love around you, accepting that love, and then knowing that magic is possible.”
