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.

Film school was a privilege I could not afford.

On my very first show, my partners in it, Oprah Winfrey and her network, and studio, Warner Horizon, who doesn't get enough credit, said, "Lady, we're going to let you call the shots the way you want to."

When you force sleep, it doesn't happen.

I make films about Black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a Black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.

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

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.