I'm not a huge big fan of music video.

You should be able to criticize civil servants for what you think is wrongdoing without being painted as a cop-hater. I don't feel the police are all corrupt, however I do feel they are suffering from institutional racism and there needs to be a top-to-bottom examination of the way they practice and the way they criminalize young black and brown males. The fact that they seem to have backed off from it seems to suggest they realize they overreacted on me and it looks bad.

I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you're not that good. You just reached the level here. I don't ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.

Between men and women, all the time there is tension. I feel it. A woman walks down the street, and I'm going back, and suddenly there is this tension. I just walk down the street, we were just on the way. And she thinks I'm a rapist. And now I feel guilty, even though I'm a damn poor did not.

Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.

I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out.