I never did one thing right in my life, you know that? Not one. That takes skill.

Those are the rules. To improvise in a movie with other people, when they're following a script, everybody has to know what's going on. I think a line or two we might change. Certainly, I do. But I wouldn't call it improvising. I'd call it fudging the lines.

I said to George Lucas, "I'd like a purple lightsaber." And he said, "Why?" and I said, "I just want to be able to find myself. I'm the most powerful Jedi in the universe, and I think it would be an interesting thing for me to have a different color lightsaber than anybody else."

I understand the rural south because I spent a lot of time in it when I was a kid and my grandfather’s brothers were farmers and I spent time on the farm when I was a kid with them walking through the fields and working and hanging out.

I'm pretty focused on what I do. I think directing is a very specific talent, and I'm not real big on putting puzzles together, which is basically what a film is.

I was Gator in Jungle Fever, and Chris Rock played Pookie, and those showed two very different dynamics of what crackheads were. Mine was more about the family relationships. So when people sat there and got that, they can sit there and say, "Oh, man, that's my friend." Or "That's my brother." Or cousin or somebody. They empathize, or they had something that they could latch onto, in that particular movie, of my story, and go with it.

Not everything's made to win an Academy Award.