It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.

Film school was a privilege I could not afford.

I just remember not having access to films as a young person who loved films but living in Compton. In order to see the film, I had to get on the bus and travel quite a ways to get to an arthouse theater - none of which you're gonna find in black and brown communities - to see anything that was outside of what the studios fed me, and that's not the case anymore.

It was easy for me to show the films to the studio and the network and say, "This is who I'm hiring."

We're living based on laws and ideas that we, as a society, embraced back in the days of slavery.

There's no reason not to employ, seek out and take a chance on a woman filmmaker that you might not have been looking at her direction. She's not done it before because you've not given her the opportunity to do it before, and I'm just happy that folks like Jessica Jones' Melissa Rosenberg and folks like Ryan Murphy are also embracing this idea.

Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker.