When writer and director Dito Montiel first met the family his forthcoming feature Live Like That is based on, he was positive there was no movie to be made—not because they weren’t worth representing on film, but because their decency and empathy seemed almost foreign to his understanding of the world around him.
“The jaded part of me that watches the news too much just thought, ‘Yeah, a young guy got murdered in Pomona, and then there’s another story,’” Montiel says. “It’s awful, but I just didn’t imagine there was a movie there. It was fighting everything that I want to see in movies, but everything I like in the world.”
The faith-centered drama was inspired by the killing of Pomona youth pastor Daniel Diaz and his family’s decision to respond with forgiveness. Montiel wrote and directed it, and Sony Pictures’ AFFIRM Films and Mucho Mas Media have the movie slated for a February 2027 release.
Montiel’s filmography includes gritty crime films The Son of No One, Empire State, and Riff Raff, and the writer/director says making a movie about faith and forgiveness required him to find a personal connection, the way he does in anything he creates. In Live Like That, Montiel recognized his father, a Nicaraguan typewriter mechanic, whom Montiel describes as “probably the most humble human being I’ve ever known.”
“It was almost hard to understand at times,” Montiel says of his father’s humility. “He would just move on. Nothing would faze him.”
The writer says he understands that finding his own connection points in a film is inherently selfish, but it’s necessary for him to tell the story he wants to tell. He has to draw something personal from it, or he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He jokes that it’s his weakness, but it’s more likely his strength.
Read about Montiel’s life, and you find incredible dialectical tension. There was the gritty New York hardcore music that fortified him; then he’d wind up modeling for Calvin Klein. There is the idea of success in the movie industry, an industry that seems predicated on losing big. There are the actual “products,” inherently personal films nonetheless created for a mass public.
“My friend says it’s [the movie business] a multimillion-dollar corporation run by a bunch of dreamers that’s going out of business in four months,” Montiel says. “It’s built to fail.”
Montiel says one has to be delusional to see a project through. It’s just part of the process. But he has to try his hardest, because there are people other than himself relying on him to finish. There are people putting up money and time, and as long as he fights to the death for the project, as long as he feels proud of it, then he’s accomplished something.
“At that point, it’s on to the next one.”
