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.

For me, I think [art] exists in a cave. I am in a cave. I have my own editing place, but I'm not powerful enough to amass the resources to keep doing movies every two or three years.

The true story is that black people need to tell their history. Very few films are made by black people about slavery. That itself is a crime because slavery is a very important historical event that has held our people hostage. Forget white people's role in it. In the end what's important is black people remain and live with the scars and psychological issues.

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.

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.

I think once you have films in certain festivals you begin to have name recognition, and there are possibilities.

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.