In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

The fact that's why the prisons and stock in private prisons rose the very day after the election results [for Donald Trump] were announced. The fact that progress that was made for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, are all at risk.

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

Those [old] days are gone... accept the reality and do it.

The documentaries were something that I could do for a small amount of money, and then I felt like as long as I found the truth in the stories I was telling as a doc, I could teach myself filmmaking through doc filmmaking.

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.

I soon found I could not talk about that in a vacuum without understanding the historical, cultural, political context, and giving it some legacy and some roots, and so then it just started to have tentacles that just spread out in all these places, and already a vicious project became pretty overwhelming in scope, and so it was a lot of diligent, day-to-day fighting with the footage, trying to get it down to a place where it was manageable and emotional.