A lot of work was done with one of my best friends and editor, Spencer Averick, who's edited everything I've ever made from the very, very first documentaries; the very, very first films I made were docs, so we learned the form together.

I think that women definitely have a special bond as friends that is hard to describe to men, and we don't often see that portrayed narratively.

We've had these bursts of cool years here or there but that's not change. That's a trend. You only hope that this could be the beginning of true change.

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.

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'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

I don't want to say that in a place that's negative about what the fear is. I just want to be a realist.