1. I did not go to university, and so every time I work, I look for a teacher in some way. I’m looking for people I can learn from and have the opportunity to work with people I admire. ~ Diego Luna
2. When I was very young, I used to lie a lot. Now they pay me to do it. ~ Diego Luna
3. When I was growing up in the theater, all these amazing girls would tell me about the guy who broke their hearts. And I always wished it was me. ~ Diego Luna
4. Many of my favorite hotels are in London. I like the Covent Garden Hotel and stayed at Blakes the last time I was in London. I like the warm and homey feeling in both places. ~ Diego Luna
5. I don’t have this feeling like, ‘Oh, I want to live in the United States and make movies and be famous just because the money is here.’ I like to make movies that tell stories that matter to me. ~ Diego Luna
6. I have two small children, so the holidays are not the same as they used to be. Now there are two types: family vacations and vacations that you need from that vacation. ~ Diego Luna
7. All your actions affect all people, people you don’t even know. So we have to live responsibly. We have to live knowing that we are not the only ones here and that you are always affecting someone else. ~ Diego Luna
8. Many times when you are a tourist, you can stay on the surface and not really experience the place you are visiting, which will probably leave you disappointed. Everywhere there is something interesting; it’s about being curious enough to find it and scratch where you need to scratch and stay longer and walk more. ~ Diego Luna
9. Every time I come to the United States, I want people to react to war the way they react to tobacco, for example. Because war really kills a lot of people in a second, thousands of people. ~ Diego Luna
10. As a teenager, I went on a three-day organized tour of Rome. It was the worst experience of my life. I promised myself that I would never travel like this again, with someone telling me what to see and what not to see. ~ Diego Luna
11. I think that the cinema should ask questions, not give answers. I believe that cinema should challenge people to reflect, debate and come up with the answer for themselves that suits them. ~ Diego Luna
12. In the theater, you are there, you have a character, you have a play, you have a light, you have a set, you have an audience and you are in control, and every night is different depending on you and the relationship with the other actors , It’s as simple as that. ~ Diego Luna
13. Directing is definitely what I like the most because this is where you can use everything you know. It is the most personal process of all. It is the most demanding, but again, rewarding. ~ Diego Luna
14. I think that cinema is a world of directors. The theater is a world of actors. ~ Diego Luna
15. I hate fights. I try to discourage people from fighting if I can and if they start I run away. ~ Diego Luna
16. I grew up watching movies in my country that didn’t tell stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models, had nothing to do with us. And I am very glad that it is changing. ~ Diego Luna
17. Consumers have to send a message every day of what we want and what we don’t. ~ Diego Luna
18. With a lot of things in life, you’re there because there’s a cute girl you want to date, and you end up finding magic. You end up not caring about the girl but wanting to stay there because of what you found. That happened to me with ‘Amarcord’. ~ Diego Luna
19. My father was a theater designer, and I spent a lot of time hanging around the dressing room listening to what the actors were listening to, which is where I heard “Pink Floyd” for the first time. ~ Diego Luna
20. The first time I heard “Mars Volta”, I had the feeling that I was experiencing something that people must have felt when they first heard Led Zeppelin. They have the same kind of power. ~ Diego Luna
21. Most people live a life they don’t like. They go to work where they don’t want to work. ~ Diego Luna
22. I’d like to forget the music that happened to me between the ages of eight and eleven, so I’m going to say that the first album I bought was the special edition of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. ~ Diego Luna
23. Julio César Chávez is the most important sports figure we have ever had. ~ Diego Luna
24. In a movie, you work three months to tell a story that happens in two hours. In a Mexican soap opera, you work one day to make a story of an hour and a half. So you can see the difference in project quality. ~ Diego Luna
25. Becoming a father is the biggest change you experience in life, at least from what I have been through in life. ~ Diego Luna
26. I wasn’t a fan of boxing, I was a fan of Julio César Chávez. All of Mexico stopped to watch his fights. Old, young, left, right, and center. ~ Diego Luna
27. I believe that cinema can change lives. Making ‘Milk’ changed mine, for sure. When I see someone like Harvey Milk change his life and the lives of many others in just eight years, I feel powerful. I walk out of the theater saying, ‘Maybe there’s something I can do too.’ ~ Diego Luna
28. I hope we see more stories where the heroes are real heroes, real people who don’t need weapons or superpowers to change people’s lives. ~ Diego Luna
29. I can sing ‘Love Me Do’ very well. ~ Diego Luna
30. Everywhere you look, especially on TV, someone promises to make you rich and famous. ~ Diego Luna
31. You don’t want to disappoint anyone, but you know you lose your voice trying to please everyone. ~ Diego Luna
32. You have to accept who you are to make someone happy and be happy. ~ Diego Luna
33. When I was 12 years old, I used to be best friends with the most beautiful girls, but only best friends. They would always come to me to cry over a guy who broke their hearts, and I was just sitting there thinking, ‘I wish I was the guy and not the best friend. ~ Diego Luna
34. You don’t want everyone to know everything about you. ~ Diego Luna
35. I don’t want to do a history lesson. I don’t think movies should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions. ~ Diego Luna
36. I was six years old when I started working in theater. I chose to be an adult before I was. ~ Diego Luna
37. I want parents at the end to think a little about how everything we do affects our children’s lives and defines who they will be. ~ Diego Luna
38. My father had to play the role of mother and father. ~ Diego Luna
39. We live in a classist, racist and homophobic society in which we are very assimilated, that’s all. I’m not really proud of that. ~ Diego Luna
40. I was the happiest child ever, but I chose to live with adults and today, now that I have a child, I don’t know if I would let him do it. ~ Diego Luna
41. I was raised as an orphan… My mother died when I was 2 years old. ~ Diego Luna
42. I always wanted to be a footballer, but I was never good enough. ~ Diego Luna
43. I always thought of documentaries as films through which you find your voice as a storyteller. ~ Diego Luna
44. Acting is therapy. It keeps you in touch with your feelings. ~ Diego Luna
45. It doesn’t make sense that this country has 11 million workers feeding themselves, building this country, making America what it is, and they don’t share the same rights as those who consume the fruits of their labor. ~ Diego Luna
46. Since ‘Y Tu Mamá También’, I started spending a lot of time in the United States, and my son was born there. ~ Diego Luna
47. There is a great debate in the United States about immigration reform. We need to reflect on who is feeding this country today, why this community has been ignored. ~ Diego Luna
48. When I saw ‘Fires’, it changed the way I saw my life… and my family. It was very strong. I think theater has that power. ~ Diego Luna
49. When you make a movie, it’s because it’s important to you, it means something to you. ~ Diego Luna
50. Before ‘Y Tu Mama’, I made 16 movies that only my family could see because I invited them to the premiere. ~ Diego Luna
51. In Mexico, you have to be a bulldog to make a movie because everything is set up for you to come home and get depressed and not make the movie. ~ Diego Luna
52. In Mexico, we call him ‘stubborn’: the guy who goes out every day, and every day they tell him no, and the next day he’s there, and the next day he’s there. That’s the kind of people who make movies in Mexico. ~ Diego Luna
53. There is a reality that the market is changing, and the stories of the Latino community must come out because there is a large audience that needs films that represent them. ~ Diego Luna
54. My first son was born in Los Angeles; He is Mexican-American. ~ Diego Luna
55. No makeup can replace faces that have really been in the sun. ~ Diego Luna
56. It is indifference and ignorance that prevents people from doing the right thing. ~ Diego Luna
57. My father took full responsibility for my education and raising me. ~ Diego Luna
58. Mexico is where I fell in love for the first time; it’s where my family lives… so no matter how much I travel, I inevitably return there. ~ Diego Luna
59. Cinema can be a tool for change; You can start a discussion. ~ Diego Luna
60. I am a terrible dancer. ~ Diego Luna
61. I started working when I was very young. For me, friendship is work, and work is friendship. The ones next to me who have been there for a long time are the ones who can work with me, play football with me, and watch a movie with me. ~ Diego Luna
62. There is no success you can celebrate more than the success of a brother. ~ Diego Luna
63. It is difficult to say where I live. There are some bills that come to the house in Los Angeles, some to the house in Mexico, and some to my father’s house, so I never let them out of my sight. ~ Diego Luna
64. I will always be working on my English, and I will always work on my English to be able to do different characters of different nationalities. ~ Diego Luna
65. We are all different, so I don’t want to repeat anyone else’s career. I want to do my thing. ~ Diego Luna
66. As producers, we choose who to work with and which films to participate with. There is no rule, but it has to come from an honest place. It has to come from a need. ~ Diego Luna
67. I always wondered why there were no movies about César Chávez. There are movies about other civil rights leaders in this country, but why not Chavez? ~ Diego Luna
68. In the cinema, what usually happens is that not many people work more than once. Normally, it breaks pairs. Don’t believe them. ~ Diego Luna
69. Acting is about communicating, reacting and sharing, and friendship is about all of those things too. ~ Diego Luna
70. The good thing about my job is that it allows me to dig into problems and then tell stories with that information. ~ Diego Luna
71. If your neighbor’s reality changes, yours will change too. ~ Diego Luna
72. You see Mexican cinema at festivals around the world, and you see Mexican directors who are recognized at Cannes, at the Oscars, in Berlin, but the question is: what is the end result of that in terms of the market? That’s where it’s missing. ~ Diego Luna
73. The beauty of soccer is that there are around 11 of them, and another five, at least, are sitting outside. You can’t be competitive. ~ Diego Luna
74. What we have in Mexico and Latin America is a great diversity of voices, but in Mexico, for example, we have not been able to bring many films to theaters. ~ Diego Luna
75. I would say that filming is about confidence and conviction. It’s about believing in an idea. ~ Diego Luna
76. As an actor, you have to believe in a director’s point of view; As a director, you need to be able to express his point of view and invite everyone to join you on that journey. So it’s always about opening up. ~ Diego Luna
77. There is a lot of freedom to do what you want in Mexico. It’s just that that freedom belongs to a few. It is a huge country with a great contrast. There is this great inequality, so those of us who have the opportunity to do things know that we are very lucky. ~ Diego Luna
78. When I was young, football and the theater were the only places where I was happy. I remember school as what happened among the things that I liked. ~ Diego Luna
79. I connect much more with theater actors than with movie actors, to the extent that one can speak of ‘movie actors’ in Mexico, because there is not a large movie industry. ~ Diego Luna
80. I don’t want to come and conquer American movies or the American market. I just want to make movies that interest me, stories that I like. ~ Diego Luna
