It was easy for me to show the films to the studio and the network and say, "This is who I'm hiring."

I know that there are a lot of great women that have gone before me, so it's important to acknowledge them.

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.

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

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.

We [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just "I have a dream." They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids.

Stop asking, start doing.