Making films has got to be one of the hardest endeavors known to humankind.

Any film I do is not going to change the way black women have been portrayed, or black people have been portrayed, in cinema since the days of D.W. Griffith.

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are.

A spine to my films that's become more evident to me is that many are about the choices people make, and the reverberations of those choices. You go this way, or that way, and either way, there's going to be consequences.

I am trying to stay away from this position of me "returning to my roots." As if my roots are that I'm only comfortable working on low-budget, small films. That's not the case at all.

America doesn't have the moral right to tell other people what to do. To say the whole world has to fall into line is you-know-what. I hope more people will rise up.

I'm a storyteller, and there's some genres I like. I don't think I'm ever going to do science fiction, but I want to do a musical one day. I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.