Africa is trying to find its way back to a sense of itself, when much of that was lost through colonization.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

For me, I'm always looking for opportunities to work with people who are better than me, who are more experienced than me, people from whom I can learn. And who could I learn more from than someone with an unprecedented movie star career that has spanned over thirty years whose name is Tom Cruise?

When you reflect upon the significance of Dr. King to this nation, it's criminal that he hasn't had a feature film that was centered around him until now. That, in and of itself, was emotional. But when you're doing scenes on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, with people still living in Selma and now in their 60s and 70s who had actually marched, who were there that original Bloody Sunday, that's humbling... that's deeply moving. You're no longer acting at that stage, you're just reacting, because it takes the filmmaking process to another dimension.

I think that having a black president in America has been a seismic shift, in terms of what has been going on racially in America. I think that America is now engaging with how we have come to this point.

Considering how pervasive interracial marriage is, certainly in American society, it is rare we get to see it depicted on film.

You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.