What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

If the characters [in a movie] aren't real, if their lives aren't realistic, if you call bullshit at any point in their journey, then the rest of it is invalid.

One of the facets of growing up the way I did, I never had the experience of being solely in the black community. Even my family, my mother is what they call Creole, so she's part French, part black, and grew up in Louisiana. It's a very specific kind of blackness that is different than what is traditionally thought of as the black community and black culture. So, I never felt a part of whatever that was.

It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall, black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.

I'm very interested in clans and the way people group together, and there's a lot of group shots. There's a lot of people in positions that people feel like they're in attack mode, kind of pointed at each other in the frame. I'm not a big fan of shooting something that looks like it could belong in any movie, I'm not a fan of okay, "wide shot, wide shot, medium shot, close-up, close-up, we'll figure it out in post." I hate that.

I love the art house, and when I say the art house, I don't just mean little, independent movies but movies that really aim to be about something and say something and I love those movies.

As a person of color, I was just really tired of the fact that I wasn't seeing my story in the culture.