The first time you see the film it takes you right back to those times and those moments. It's very difficult to be objective about the work because you really have to remove yourself and see it a couple of times before you can really involve yourself in the story.

I was just a very torn child, very wounded in so many areas, with no family support. I happened to the be the fifth child of my family. So everybody was already grown and had left home already.

I am happy, and I have many reasons to be extra-happy nowadays. Life is calm, and the career is good and taking its course. And things are moving, things are moving ahead.

America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.

School bored me. Being educated and being intelligent are two different things. I thought I was smart enough. And I wanted to be an entertainer. I stopped going to school as a way of saying I was mature, a way of saying I was going to choose who I was going to become.

There is a real problem with the lack of diversity, specifically in genre films and the superheroes our kids grow up watching and emulating, they can't really identify with. When you see the same thing, over and over again, and it seems not to speak of you and your heritage and your culture, it leaves you out of this world, a little bit. It gives a certain social distance with your world.

The gym can serve as an excellent place where kids and young men and women can really empty their issues right on the floor.