I think not many young people are willing to pay the price of telling their own story.

You have to be willing to put everything you've got towards the project. That to me is very important. And it may not be part of the fad, being the clichéd kind of film that's going to be successful.

Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.

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.

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

I think once you have films in certain festivals you begin to have name recognition, and there are possibilities. Especially for independent filmmakers, it's always good to try the international market because it doesn't have the same kind of baggage.

I think not many young people are willing to pay the price of telling their own story.