Director Alejandro Montoya Marin’s new comedy film, “The Unexpecteds,” screened at Austin Film Society on Oct. 23. Starring Matt Walsh and Alejandro De Hoyos, the plot follows a ragtag team of friends as they seek revenge on a cryptocurrency scammer. The Daily Texan sat down with director Marin and cast, Chelsea Rendon, John Kaler, and Alejandro De Hoyos to discuss the film.
Daily Texan: Alejandro, what inspired you to come up with the idea and the purpose behind such an underdog story?
Alejandro Montoya Marin: Being an underdog. Being an artist in a family with no artists. Being Mexican American. Not being a nepo baby. I think it’s the difficulties of wanting to do what you love, and how slow it takes to get there, just so you can be copacetic. … I wanted to make a movie that’s not pretentious, but with real characters, where the everyday man or woman can have a chance.
DT: The film has a lot of Hispanic heritage to it, and with cast members like Chelsea, Alejandro, John and Sonya, all impressive in their own right, tell me more about the casting of the film.
AMM: As an ESL (English as a second language) person, I think a lot of us, from any language that’s ESL, we try to over-communicate. … It was important to me to get a cast that looked natural, but not just to me, but (someone a) regular audience member can identify with. … We were inspired by movies from other countries and other customs and other things so why not a good pozole (traditional Mexican soup) of culture.
Alejandro De Hoyos: When (Marin) approached me to do this thing, he had most of the cast in mind. … He was very organic. He was like ‘Chelsea will be really good for this character, and Metal Mike and Jordan.’ He was really never about, ‘Yeah, let’s do the Latino, the Chicano,’ it was about the characters.
DT: The crypto scam and the underdog story of the film seem to be something audiences are really needing. What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
John Kaler: Hope. Hope that the right thing is going to happen, do the right thing. But at the same time, these underdogs were screwed over, and at the end, they got to fix it. … Everyone ended up at the end in a better place.
Chelsea Rendon: For me, there’s so many Latinos in the film, but yet it’s not a Latino film. … I really hope that people watch it and just remember, everybody’s a human. Everybody bleeds blood. And just to have a little bit of compassion.
DT: What advice would you give to student filmmakers or students who want to work in the industry?
JK: I’ve grown up my whole life in Texas. Die-hard Longhorn fan, so (I’m) excited to be working with UT. Hook ‘em. But what I will say (and) what I’ve learned from Alejandro is, how bad do you want it? When you go home and you’re gonna go out and have drinks and go watch some sports game, there’s someone back at the table writing a story. There’s someone working on the craft. … So how bad do you want it?
