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.

What is right can never be impossible.

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.

I was lucky enough to date my first love for five years. We had a very romantic, very dramatic teenage love affair. And it has impacted me because I have married a man who is simply the grownup version of my first love. So, I believe my first love was just preparing me for the man I'm married to today. And it has also impacted the way I write, because there will always be a love story in every movie I write. Always! I think having a positive first love experience before the heartbreak made me a more confident in who I am, a more confident female today.

What I hope is that this wider pattern of films about slavery that's emerging isn't just a fad but evidence that we've turned a corner as filmmakers of color and that we're moving forward in our confidence and in the film industry not being afraid of our telling these stories and in giving us the opportunity to bring our vision to the screen.

I'm a girl, and I celebrate being a girl, and it was really important to me to celebrate the beauty that I could create in a movie like the one I did, aesthetically, in terms of the costumes and the production design. I wanted something big and lush and beautiful and unashamedly feminine.

When I look in the mirror I see the woman I knew I wanted to be as a child. When I was a young girl, I had a vision of the woman I wanted to be. And I often reached out to women of color in America for inspiration. My mother would regularly buy Essence and Ebony. I would look at those magazines filled with images of professional, intelligent women of color who knew who they were, who enjoyed who they were, and who were surrounded by other people who enjoyed who they were. When I look in the mirror, I'm really glad that that's what I see today, but it took awhile to get here.