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.

Success is really when you create a space, a piece of art, and people come in and say, that's my story - when they claim it.

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.

I am not interested only in telling a story, but I want to tell it my way. I don't want my accent, my temperament, my narrative style to be compromised to fit into a mold of the Hollywood type.

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.

It's not always expected of filmmakers to do stereotyped stories. But one has to be willing to travel to festivals and hook up with people, engage people intellectually about your passion and the kinds of films that interest you, and sooner or later you find people that have the same affinity that you have.

I really do not care what the white world is doing. I care about black people building the monument on slavery.