After founder, CEO and Editor in Chief of TheWrap Sharon Waxman shared her opening remarks at the 2023 Changemaker’s Dinner on the eve of TheWrap’s 2023 Power Women Summit, prolific songwriter Diane Warren played “The Fire Inside” from the film “Flamin’ Hot” (2023) on the piano while Shayna Zaid sang vocals.
Warren, who also performed at the close of the 2022 Power Women Summit with Sofia Carson last year, spoke to TheWrap before the dinner began and explained the “double meaning” behind the song.
“You know the story about Richard Montañez, he was the janitor who literally called the chairman of the company from his janitor’s room. Everybody told him ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do that. It’s never gonna work,’ but he did and it worked,” Warren said. “It’s the fire inside that no one can stop you when you truly believe in what you’re doing. Like to all these women here, all the people in this room.”
You can watch Warren sitting down at the piano to play her spicy song live in the video above.
“I feel like I’m just starting. I’m doing more than I ever have right now,” Warren said.
Fresh off a victorious night at the 38th Imagen Awards for “Flamin’ Hot,” where the biopic swept the final three awards of the ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, “Flamin’ Hot” director Eva Longoria also stopped by the Changemakers 2023 dinner to share in the Power Women Summit festivities. She marked the premiere of “Flamin’ Hot,” her directorial debut, as the biggest change she experienced this year.
“It was historic,” she told TheWrap. “We were the first film to be on Hulu and Disney+ ever. We were the first film to break streaming records for Searchlight. It’s the first film by a U.S.-born Latino director in the last 20 years. We can’t get a movie every 20 years for a major studio so there was a lot of history breaking this year with our community, with our film. We had an entire Latino film and Latino cast.”
Jesse García won best actor for the feature film, and Longoria won best director in addition to the film’s Best Feature Film trophy at the Imagen Awards.
“To prove to the industry that, when you do a diverse hire, you’re not compromising the film, you’re making it better,” she added. “All of that is historic and important, and it’s a historic film.”
Longoria left the Changemaker’s Dinner to accept her Critics Choice Award for Breakthrough Director Tuesday night.
The Changemaker’s Dinner also included speeches from “All the Light We Cannot See” breakout star Aria Mia Loberti and Ela Shani Kozin, a 14-year-old survivor of the Oct. 7th Hamas terrorist organization attack on the community of her Kibbutz Be’eri in Israel.
For all of TheWrap’s Power Women Summit 2023 coverage, click here.