I ran into Woody Allen shooting a movie on my block. I can't believe this is my life!
When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction.
I am not interested only in telling a story, but I want to tell it my way. I don't want my accent, my temperament, my narrative style to be compromised to fit into a mold of the Hollywood type.
There are filmmakers like me in different parts of the world that have a story they want to tell, and it's a story that comes out of a certain historical reality within their own life. Then you get committed all the way and however long it takes, stay very committed.
Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.
The true story is that black people need to tell their history. Very few films are made by black people about slavery. That itself is a crime because slavery is a very important historical event that has held our people hostage. Forget white people's role in it. In the end what's important is black people remain and live with the scars and psychological issues.
For any movement to emerge, it has to be innovatively independent from the mainstream cinema, and I don't see that much.
Two billion people watched the royal wedding. Clearly, they're interested in that - the outside of what appears to be lives that have a certain amount of privilege. They have gifts, they have history, they have a sort of unusual and separate position, which maybe involves paying a price.
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
As the sun shines both on the cedar and the smallest flower, so the Divine sun illumines each soul.
As a man I'd been a cool customer. As a woman I was a hot tamale.