To me, entertainment is really the new plantation. It's the new sugar, the new cotton, that black people work for somebody else to be richer than them.

There's no other way but struggling, forging ahead to do the film.

To me the industry has always said that the lovers and haters and principal characters will always be white in Hollywood, and black people will always be appendages of those kinds of dramas, or they will be comedic outlets. It will never change.

When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction.

Most, especially the young filmmakers, do not see strength in communal or collective existence. They just think they're going to conquer the world as individuals. There is no world like that. In cinema it's always, even in Hollywood, a collective surge.

The system knows how to cherry pick black people. It's like affirmative action - once a year, one is recognized. But what has to occur is self-emergence so if they ignore you, you don't have to disappear.

You have to have a very strong cash flow for a film to really stay in theaters. You have to have the advertising capacity to sustain and follow the kind of press coverage.