So it's hard to be an artist and be true to the reality of the world you want to create and also make it entertaining and successful financially.

Movies are so hard to get made - every step of the way of making a movie has obstacles. If you don't have that passion, if you don't have that vision, if you don't believe it's a piece of art worth making, then you probably won't get it made - you won't have a chance for it to be something special.

Some men don't gel when it comes to work - you have different work ethics, different opinions, different points of views, different methods of filmmaking - and we didn't gel.

Not harder than it should be, no. We're about the business, we're about the work. It's all about the work, always. We have fun and laugh and there're days that are more intense than others, but we're there to make it better. He's always going to try and make it better, I'm always going to try and make it better. So you accept anything, you accept whatever it takes to get it up on the screen and make it worthy.

Tupac Shakur is something that, of course I want to make the Tupac movie, I love Tupac, but when that movie was announced, we didn't even have a script yet. It was just being written. People announce things too soon. If you go to any filmmaker - Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Ben Affleck, Michael Mann - you go in their offices and there are scripts everywhere and there's about four or five of them you really want to make.

It's a dumb question, because I don't look at things as a black director, just as a director, so ask me as a director first and we can segue into the colour thing later.

Sometimes violence in a very real way is much faster and more impactful because it feels real and you're watching it happen and you're watching your star do these things, so it's not like he's doing superhero moves.