When I'm marketing a film, whether its mine or someone else's, I work with a great deal of strategy and elbow grease until the job is done.

For far too long, independent voices have been relegated to places where these ideas are not seen on a mass level.

These are dark times for a lot of people who believe differently than our incoming administration [of Donald Trump], but there's also joy there, and there's also something in unifying around the things that we do believe in.

When I went out to shoot for the first time, I thought this was going to be about the prison industrial complex, purely about prison for profit and the ways in which there's an industry making money and profiting off punishment.

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

What we tried to do in 13th was get to the bottom of that. What were they motivated by? But certainly the attention that the Attorney General's office paid to it allowed for there to be some dialogue across the aisle that I think were the first steps then in change.

By the end of the documentary [ '13th'], you really understand what prison is, what the prison industrial complex is, where this whole Black Lives Matter movement comes from, the history of resistance, the history of how politicians have used criminality over the decades for a particular political gain. It's to give people an understanding of it so they can make their own decisions about how they want to be in the world.