I'm always moving forward.

That's the only way I can control my movie. If you shoot everything, then everything is liable to end up in the movie. If you have a vision, you don't have to cover every scene.

Michael Ralph brilliantly plays the street prophet, a West Indian who foreshadows the Harlem riot.

If you just change one person's life, you feel like you've done something. But if you can change a whole lot of them and get them looking at themselves differently, it's amazing.

Failure: Is it a limitation? Bad timing? It's a lot of things. It's something you can't be afraid of, because you'll stop growing. The next step beyond failure could be your biggest success in life.

I didn't need the insurance. I do it again if my DP tells me it didn't look good in the camera or if the actors didn't hit their marks. But if everything was working why do it again?

My mother Vivian Ayers always instilled within her children that our opinions, our thoughts and our ideas about what was possible was important. My mother made me feel that I was important as a thinker at four-years-old. And I instill that within my students everyday.