I mean, of course "King Kong" is a metaphor for the slave trade. I'm not saying the makers of "King Kong" meant it to be that way, but that's what, that's the movie that they made - whether they meant to make it or not.

I've always thought my soundtracks do pretty good, because they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at home.

My writing's like a journey. I'll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I'll make some of those stops and some of them I won't. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you're going to do. It's all the scenes where your characters really come from.

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn't mean I'm anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.

I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.

You're not going to have the police force representing the black and brown community, if they've spent the last 30 years busting every son and daughter and father and mother for every piddling drug offense that they've ever done, thus creating a mistrust in the community. But at the same time, you should be able to talk about abuses of power, and you should be able to talk about police brutality and what, in some cases, is as far as I'm concerned, outright murder and outright loss of justice without the police organization targeting you in the way that they have done me.

That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.