“I told Blumhouse, ‘Look guys, this is a great idea, but I promise you, if you hire me, I’m going to make this so Mexican, I’m going to make this so Mexicano, it’s going to be appreciated, and here is a two-page sheet with all my proposed changes,’ and they let me go for it,” says Guerrero. Guerrero wanted to direct Culture Shock enough to take the biggest risk of her career: criticize the creative before she had the job. “It was lacking strong Mexican characters.” “I read it, and while I knew deep in my heart that this was the movie I had to make my first feature, it was lacking was a lot of authenticity,” says Guerrero. This previous experience piqued Blumhouse’s interest, and after they screened El Gigante, they sent Guerrero the script so that she could pitch them on it. It’s a topic that Guerrero - a Mexican immigrant to Canada - had dealt with in 2014 in her critically acclaimed grindhouse short film, El Gigante. One of Blumhouse’s scripts (then titled The Crossing, and ultimately titled Culture Shock) dealt with the mistreatment of migrants at the Mexico-United States border. It was a bold move for Guerrero, at the time an emerging Vancouver filmmaker who’d recently signed with an American agent and was in the midst of her first negotiation with a big-deal Hollywood production house - in this case, Blumhouse, who was producing an anthology series of feature-length horror films for Hulu and was on the hunt for directors. Gigi Saul Guerrero read the original script for Culture Shock and told the studio it wasn’t Mexican enough, and it needed to be.
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