All the news of home you read, more about the war and of bloody changes.
I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.
I'm a huge Dirty Dancing fan. I feel like I should be reading [William] Shakespeare, but I'm watching Baby not be in a corner.
My parents [are my hero]. They've helped me be who I am.
It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.
A lot of work was done with one of my best friends and editor, Spencer Averick, who's edited everything I've ever made from the very, very first documentaries; the very, very first films I made were docs, so we learned the form together.
Is there deeply embedded change within our industry? And I would say, as a black filmmaker, it's easy for me to focus my attention on black work, but true change would include brown work, and it would include work by Asian-Americans, and it would include natives, and it would include women, and it would include more LGBTQ voices.
The path to knowledge is a forced one. In order to learn, we must be pushed. On the path of knowledge we are always fighting something, avoiding something, preparing for something; and that something is always inexplicable, greater and more powerful than us.
After Princess Diaries, I was labeled a good girl, and for the first eight years of my career I had to fight to get any other kind of role. But I like fighting for a job, actually. Once you get it, you feel like you've emerged victorious from the scrap and you're like, "OK, this one's mine. Did it. Done. "
It is in an ennobled soul only that the universal powers can do their work, especially if body, mind and soul have been equally trained and developed.
I had no musical or athletic ability, and I wasnt particularly good looking. Comedy was something I could do for attention.