Don't let a culture or society's rules define who you are; you define who you are.

You can take me and then you can take a blond white man with blue eyes, and you could say, "Fundamentally, they're different." And then I could talk to that white guy about the first time he lost someone close to his heart, and I could tell him about the first time I lost someone close to my heart, and I can guarantee you that at least 70 percent of the experienced feelings will be similar. We are human beings.

People assume thoughts and processes about you that may have nothing to do with you whatsoever, but they make political assumptions and assertions about who you are based on your choice of partner.

As people of color, we're left out of history. History is sort of told around us. We're bystanders, we're passive, we're observers. We're never the center of our history.

I knew I wanted to make a movie that looked decadent and expensive. I knew we would have to make every penny stretch and put as much of the budget onscreen as possible. So it starts with your heads of departments - your production designer, costume, hair and makeup designers. Picking the right people who were as committed as I was to telling the story as I was.

When you're in political times, you want to reflect those political times, and sometimes going back to our past is the best way to look at our present.

Don't take no as a full stop, treat it like a comma.