I am more than a black guy. I am a person, I'm storyteller, I'm a son, I'm a friend, so I am all those things so it is frustrating to a degree to be limited by other people's perceptions of me but at the same time, it is true that I am a black guy and it's like I'm rooted in, but not bound by. That sort of mentality, that's the one that I hold to be true.

I love when scenes are intentionally and meticulously planned so we feel like this is a handcrafted scene that only works in this moment and this movie, and that's the way I approach my films.

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.

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

White people don't have that problem, they get to go through life never having to fit into a box, and it's really more so true for white men because even just being a woman, you sort of have to walk around other people's assumptions of you and it's so exhausting and there's a sense, especially among young people of wanting to just live your life, not having to wear the weight of that pressure - pressure that people of color feel, that gay people of color feel, that women of color feel.