I'm always moving forward.

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.

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

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.

There are so many famous people now that are not really gifted or talented at doing anything other than getting made up, putting on tight dresses, acting badly, getting married. I mean, what the hell? I don't know where we are going with this here in America. And we are setting a tone for the world, because everyone looks at what we do.

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.

You have to examine a scene on the page first. Then you get into the basics of acting: Who are you? Who are you talking to? How do you feel about that person?