I don't understand how people live without creating.

When the riots happened in L.A., they didn't go to Beverly Hills to trash Rodeo Drive. They trashed their own neighborhoods. It's one of those tragedies that we always see in riot situations, where the only thing that they can lash out against is the stuff that's right there in their own communities. They destroy the very things that help them survive in their own community. There is a level of futility in that.

When I saw the script [of The Man], I saw the character and knew I could do the character. It's a relationship movie, which is also what I love to do. That's what attracts me to projects.

We need to change America's image round the world. America has lost some lustre in terms of how folks aspire to be like us.

Everybody likes an extraordinary person or likes to think that they would be great with a superpower in an ordinary world.

It was actually a lot more helpful to have Calvin Hart, a cop, as my template. He was also my technical advisor on Shaft. This time, I kinda got to go to Jersey City with him, and hang around, and watch him interact with other cops, people in the projects, and see what it means to be him. People call him 'Big Daddy' and he's this larger-than-life hero to a lot of people.

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.