My parents [are my hero]. They've helped me be who I am.

We have to find new ways to work without permission, new ways to turn corners and go through doors that are closed off to us to create our own audiences and our own material independently.

I've passed along some advice that Oprah [Winfrey] gave to me: When something bad is happening, it's not happening to you; it's happening for you.

I'm making and marketing my films, by any means necessary, and enjoying life while I do so.

Is there deeply embedded change within our industry? And I would say, as a black filmmaker, it's easy for me to focus my attention on black work, but true change would include brown work, and it would include work by Asian-Americans, and it would include natives, and it would include women, and it would include more LGBTQ voices.

I thing for female filmmakers a big issue is making their second and third films. You see the statistics, and the dropoff on the second and third [films] , are dire.

The fact that we have people who have headed up oil corporations now assigned to places in cabinet.