If your work is solid, it really doesn't matter what people you know because good work starts to rise to the top.

I know how to make films and now I'm able to make films with the resources and the tools that match my imagination, and what filmmaker doesn't want to do that? I feel very fortunate to have that. I don't take it for granted.

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.

[ Age Of Trump] was something that I really wanted to do, and I also really wanted it to feel evergreen, so we made a lot of attempts not to bog it down in the campaign fight, even though we were right in the middle of that. I wanted it to be something that could live on and be a conversation piece long after this inauguration, whoever it was going to be.

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

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.

It's very nourishing and collaborative - kind of the true essence of what one would want an artistic collaboration to be [the collaboration with Oprah Winfrey].