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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you unite a couple on a joint fight, the question is, "Does it unite them literally, or does it weaken their love?" And if it weakens their love, is that true love? And if this is true love, then you know they should be united by their separation. It's their fight that brings them emotionally together while they're physically separated, and so, though there's physical separation, there is mental and emotional closeness.