Those titles, Executive Producer or actor, are unimportant. I always try to approach my role as an artist. The first thing you want to do, that you attempt to do as an artist, is to have some sort of input into the material that you are working on. That is how my process begins; I say to myself: "I want to do this kind of work or I want to do that kind of work."

We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions

The black power movement was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuation of this whole process of democratization.

You have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality.

I never thought about being an actor. I was just going to play music and baseball. That’s all I was going to do. To this day, that’s what I do. I just added movies to it.

Today's cinema is a proliferation of comedies, which are in some ways creating caricature images. They're one-dimensional.

Democracy is about criticism.