There’s something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It’s a different perspective. It is a reflection as opposed to an interpretation, and I think we get a lot of interpretations about the lives of women that are not coming from women.

Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.

The terrain of the face is the most dynamic thing you can point the camera at, to me. I love production design and bells and whistles and all of that. I love a technograin as much as the next gal, but a great actor's face? What else should we be looking at?

Stop asking, start doing.

I always go into a blocking rehearsal with an anchor, with a blocking plan. And sometimes they'll step into the room and they'll be in costume and you're like, "That sucks, that's not going to work. Let's think of something new."

When I look in the mirror, I see a woman who is happy.

All these women had directed movies that I loved on the film festival circuit, but couldn't get a job making television. That's how locked down TV is.