Find the audience, be excellent, and you will be fine.

I have a bee in my bonnet as to how few black historical figures one sees on film; incredible stories, stories from which we are living the legacy and which just don't get made.

Whether we like to admit it or not, as artists, we do project our own worldview on to what we do.

I was sometimes called 'coconut' when I was at school.

I'm very aware that people find my wife and I's marriage disagreeable. But all I have to do is look at my four kids, and the love I have in my heart for my wife after 18 years of marriage, and the ugliness does fade.

I think the notion that we are different just because of skin color, and that we should be kept apart or kept from interbreeding, is very hurtful.

Because I was aspirational, I did my work, I was respectful to my teachers, I experienced a lot of bullying from the black kids. My friends were largely white or Asian.