I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.

It gets dangerous when you start allowing people to validate your work.

I had a great education. From kindergarten to John Dewey High School in Coney Island, I am public-school educated.

My cousin Malcolm Lee is also a filmmaker.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

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.

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.