I have a very simple mantra and it's this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music. That's my big goal. The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.

I'll try to record the spiritual quality of the things that strike me.

I'm always making things, and I have this ongoing practice of compelling stuff that strikes me. Over the course of my life doing this, I've trained myself to do the opposite of what's human nature, and that is to recoil from things I don't like.

I've pushed myself to push toward things that disturb me. I've developed a habit of recording these things because these things often disappear.

Most of what we see are white people.

I don't see race. I don't see color.

It's a muscle that everybody needs to develop: the ability to see themselves in someone else's circumstances without having to paint that person white, make that person straight, or a man.