I prefer to make movies which not only have a message for "then" but a message for "now."

When I was young, to have a big nose, big lips or dark skin was the worst. You were the wretched.

If a person was accused of being a racist when he was young - he said some racially insensitive thing or someone had him on tape calling someone the n-word or whatever - and then you fast forward and he feels, Oh, back then I didn't say this or that. He's not thinking about the person that he hurt when he said what he said, or however it came out, or the effects that it could have had. He's not thinking about it. He's thinking about his own self and how he feels.

In all actuality, we got to do better about preparing our men for their interactions with women.

We kind of reduce our responsibility to not saying the N-word and to condemning the Klansmen, rather than saying many of our celebrated institutions are systemically racist. Many of our institutions that deal with law enforcement or controlling the bodies of Black people are systemically racist. Many of our educational institutions are systemically racist. Many of our corporate institutions are systemically racist. We don't have those conversations, so things don't change.

A lot of those old ideas are dying with the people who created them, and there's this new generation of filmmaker that's saying, "We're in this together, these are issues that we all deal with, let's just present issues to screen without bias and figure out what the audience has to say about them."

I was working in computers when this stranger approached me out of the blue, saying I should become an actor. I took it as a gift from God, because I had been praying for clarity about what He wanted me to do, since I wasn't happy in computers.