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.

The reality is that we’re in very politicized times. The complete antithesis of Obama is Trump. We are in very polarized times. People are taking a very strong view after a period of time, I think, where people fell asleep on politics to a certain extent.

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

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.

Sitting in the back row of a full audience watching one of my movies, and hearing them cry and hearing them laugh in the right moments, particularly when they laugh at a line I've stolen from one of my family members and put in the film. That excites me a great deal.

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.

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.