I love directing because you get to see your film come to life. You get to work with the actors. There's something magical about each piece of it.

In New York there's a lot of interstitial spaces; spaces in between spaces, where you're changing, and New York gives you the anonymity to be who you want to be.

I just want to tell stories that are meaningful and have inspiration to them; people can watch it and take away something or maybe they'll just think about themselves differently, or thing about the world differently. I just want to create characters that live on.

I look at Woody Allen's prolific career of 30 or 40 films, and I'm watching the clock. I'd love to work at a clip of a film a year. We don't get the benefit of the doubt, particularly black women. We're presumed incompetent, whereas a white male is assumed competent until proven otherwise. They just think the guy in the ball hat and the T-shirt over the thermal has got it, whether he's got it or not. For buzzy first films by a white male, the trajectory is a 90-degree angle. For us, it's a 30-degree angle.

Once your film is done, you can't explain to people what something was supposed to be. You can't give them footnotes. It all has to be there.

Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.

I love directing because you get to see your film come to life. You get to work with the actors. There's something magical about each piece of it.