I'm not giving up acting, I'm definitely not going to stop
Historically, you've had really muddy, unforgiving, unintentional images of black people.
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.
I actually study boxing - my dad was a Golden Gloves champion so I learned how to fight at a very young age. Growing up in Brooklyn you always had to watch your back, so I pretty much learned to protect myself.
I had an opportunity many, many times to go to the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner. Jerry Buss asked me many times and you know what, looking back that was stupid of me not going there.
People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear. Although the moment that it happens might be terribly sad and moving, five minutes later, if you're asked to remember that person, you go, "Oh right, yeah, yeah!" 'Cause you're just moving forward.
I see behind each mask that wonder a kindred soul.