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 keep yourself busy, you have to like the subject matter. If you do it for other causes, other reasons, it doesn't hold you for a long time. 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.

If you never did anything for your own freedom, you're not worth a human being in my view.

For any movement to emerge, it has to be innovatively independent from the mainstream cinema, and I don't see that much.

A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

I'm organizing documentary films, and whenever scriptwriting gets too tedious I go to my editing room and start to edit the documentary, even if I don't have the full funding yet. So you have to keep yourself busy, you have to like the subject matter.