I hate it when, by page 30, I know what the lead's going to do and then what the bad guy's gonna do. Mostly it's just scripts by the numbers where nothing's surprising, nothing's interesting.

If anyone ever said biopic I would say, "It's not a biopic." We're fighting uphill against the weight of history. I was like, why don't we just call it historical fiction?

Living by example - that's always a better teacher than trying to preach.

Water is an issue, and, clearly, what's happening with the filth in our environment and the levels of carbon monoxide in our atmosphere are the really scary issues right now, the very troubling ones.

I was brought into the curiosity of it because with Sony Pictures Classics, which bought the movie, they look into what the feedback is and base that off of how they release it, and you end up hearing the feedback and getting that early talk. So the reviews early on that were "bad reviews," they were kind of reviewing another movie.

I also believe that you are what you have to defend, and if you're a black man that's always going to be the bar against which you are judged, whether you want to align yourself with those themes or not. You can think of yourself as a colourless person, but nobody else is gonna.

I imagine it was much different in the 1970s. That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now.