I've passed along some advice that Oprah [Winfrey] gave to me: When something bad is happening, it's not happening to you; it's happening for you.

I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.

As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.

Don't wait for permission to do something creative.

I just remember not having access to films as a young person who loved films but living in Compton.

Is there deeply embedded change within our industry? And I would say, as a black filmmaker, it's easy for me to focus my attention on black work, but true change would include brown work, and it would include work by Asian-Americans, and it would include natives, and it would include women, and it would include more LGBTQ voices.

I mean, if this [film Age of Trump] wasn't on Netflix, it would be playing at some lovely art house theater on the West Side once or twice or for a week or maybe two weeks if I was lucky and then it would go away, and I'd be lucky if I could sell the DVDs off my website.