Eva Longoria On How Scorsese’s ‘Casino’ Inspired a Key Scene for ‘Flamin’ Hot’

Flamin’ Hot was the best surprise of 2023. People talked about how last year was the year of the origin story (Tetris, The Beanie Bubble, Air, etc.), but Eva Longoria’s film stands leagues above those strong films for how it mashes up genres and tones. It is a comedy that shares the genesis of one of the most addictive snacks out there, but Longoria soon discovered that this was a rich portrait of a man who everyone else counted out.

In her directorial debut, Longoria tackles a deceivingly complex story. Yes, Richard Montañez created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, but, at this point of his life, he was determined to make something of himself for his family. We can all relate to that in some way or another, and that, ultimately, makes Longoria’s film a universal one.

“I read the script–it was one of the original versions before it was rewritten by Linda Chávez–and I fell in love with the story,” Longoria says. “I think I cried four times just reading it, and then I went down a rabbit hole of the real Richard [Montañez]. He does motivational speeches and TED Talks, and he’s so funny and he’s had so many miracles in his life. I knew the movie had to be in his point of view and literally his voice.”

What took me by surprise immediately is how Longoria balances the tone. She leans into the darkness of Richard’s situation but never forgets how to pull it back before it gets too hopeless. The comedy never undercuts the drama–the tone is perfectly telegraphed to us without it being condescending to the viewer. Longoria is a performer who can deliver an acidic line but then bounce right back into the tender drama of a scene, and she has infused Flamin’ Hot with that same elasticity.

“It was a hard tone to nail for sure,” she says. “It honestly stems from the real Richard, because he is very smart but uneducated. I could really look to his kindness and his charm, but he was a cholo and a gangbanger. That underlines everything. While he is naturally funny, he’s also very vulnerable, so I had to find a way to balance all of that. I knew the movie was going to have heart, but I didn’t want it to be saccharine. The minute something gets serious, I throw in a joke–that’s my personality. Everything you see in the movie is what I pitched to Searchlight. I wanted fantasy sequences, and I wanted to show the three different decades. A lot of it was dictated by the north star of authenticity, and I didn’t want it to be formulaic. I wanted to have fun with the genre, for sure.”

When Richard gets a tour of the Frito-Lay factory floor, it feels like a moment out of The Wizard of Oz. Jesse Garcia gives Richard an infectious enthusiasm, and it should not go unnoticed how well Longoria establishes a space that one might assume would be just a standard factory. In fact, Longoria reveals that they had to literally create a factory from the ground up.

“We built that factory from zero,” she says. “In the ’70s and ’80s, the factories looked totally different, so even if we wanted to shoot in a Frito-Lay factory, it’s all mechanized now. There are no people. After we went from factory to factory to factory, our production designers, Cabot McMullen and Brandon Mendez, decided that we needed to build it, and we went through thousands of videos. Because of proprietary information, there were never any videos of the Frito-Lay factory on YouTube or anything. The only thing that we found was a video from a six year-old who went on a field trip who filmed everything. We finally got to see what the machines look like to see how the dough is shot out of a tumbler, and then seasoned in another. And then it goes to be weighed, bagged, and packaged. When Richard came to the set, he told us that he thought that we could make potato chips there, and everything thought it was a real factory. It was a tall order because I wanted it to feel huge and have depth and scale, but, also, it couldn’t make any noise while we were shooting. The production design team and the visual effects team really came through.”

Flamin’ Hot weaves a thread of faith all throughout, and it evolves over time. There are characters who symbolize literal religion, but it’s inspiring to see how Richard’s wife, Judy, never loses faith in him. She is the person that Richard can always turn to for love, but she never lets him off the hook. Judy knows his potential, but she knows how much they can accomplish as a couple and as a family.

“DeVon Franklin does a lot of faith-based movies like Miracles from Heaven, and the real Richard and Judy are faith-oriented,” Longoria says. “I think they attribute a lot of their success to the miracles that have happened. When first started talking about breaking down the script, I wanted faith to be a more underlying theme. I didn’t want to alienate people. There are a lot of lessons that people can learn from Richard’s life, but if we focused too much on the religion, it might deter people from watching it. It’s in everything, though. The first time we met the real Richard and Judy, we drove out to Rancho Cucamonga, and, on the way back, we just knew that it was a love story. Judy supported Richard so much, and she is the real deal. I knew right away that Judy would be the heartbeat of the film, and Annie Gonzalez killed it. In life, they met when they were super young, and they had an even tougher life than we got into in the film. They were in fights and selling drugs at an early age. It’s wild. I wanted to paint them with a stroke of love.”

One of the best sequences comes when Richard, Judy, and their son, Steve, race all around town to find every chile they can get their hands on to play around with the recipe. There is a rhythm to how the film is cut and how the scenes bounce into one another–it’s so entertaining, but it all furthers the story. When Longoria and I spoke about some of those long set pieces, she revealed an unexpected inspiration.

“A mentor of mine is Ron Howard, and he doesn’t think of movies in three acts,” Longoria says. “He thinks in sequences, and I wanted Flamin’ Hot to be a page-turner. If a movie is structured in the traditional three acts, it can drag sometimes. I wanted it to move and have energy. There are eleven montages, and I needed to get a lot of information out quickly, efficiently but also artistically. I am a huge fan of Martin Scorsese, Casino, and Goodfellas. How I filmed the making of the recipe was modeled after Goodfellas, and seeing the hierarchy of the factory was inspired by Casino. That scene where they say, “First you have the dealers and the pit bosses are watching the dealers and the floor manager watches the floor manager.” Scorsese lays out the land to understand the hierarchy in such an artistic way, and I wanted to do that with our factory.”

When you think of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, you think of cheesy, fuzzy fingerprints. We see it when Tony Shalhoub’s character makes a phone call, but Longoria lets us discover it for ourselves. That small gesture is a testament to her instincts as a director, because it could’ve been the focal point of the scene and it’s there as a detail or a flourish. The real fans will notice it right away.

“It was in the script, but Linda and I spoke about it,” she says. “It’s such an icon for us Latinos, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos truly belongs to our community. When we were spitballing things, we needed to show the red fingerprints everywhere. When I read the early drafts, it was always there. We shot it with this insane Macro lens and I kept wanting to get tighter and tighter–I wanted to see the dust. When we opened at South by Southwest, the roar of laughter, I swear, lasted for five minutes. People were hooting and hollering, and those fingers are such a cultural thing. You know what it is when you see it.”

Flamin’ Hot is streaming now on Hulu.