One's ability to communicate a story visually, honestly, is a bridge of communication that transcends language because the true mark of a good film is that you can turn the sound off and watch it and have some understanding of what you're seeing.

Harlem is filled with moments of history.

If you're black living in the community and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.

I mean, we should only be talking about the merits of film ["Moonlight"] because one of the great things about the visual language is that it is the great equalizer.

The Academy Awards for people in Hollywood is like the Super Bowl, the presidential inauguration and winning the NBA championship rolled up into one.

One picture and one win cannot right a million wrongs. It's a step in the right direction.We have to get to a point where a movie like "Moonlight" winning [Oscar] or Barry Jenkins being nominated and winning, you know, for a screenplay or being nominated for best director - that it's just commonplace. They shouldn't be a novelty.

If you think about black art, all black art, whether it's Invisible Man or whether it's James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, or Richard Wright, they all deal with elements of identity and trying to humanize our experience and our struggle in the world where people have been indifferent to who we are and what we are. It's basically just saying that our lives have meaning.