Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.

I don't need the audience, but sometimes it's nice to have a gauge - not so I know how I feel, but so I get what is or isn't working for moviegoers.

Ultimately the social change has to come from the people who make the movies, so the people who make the movies have to look at the landscape and say to themselves, "Well, you know, these things are changing, and I'm okay with their having changed, and I think it's okay to start reflecting those changes through the movies we make."

All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black.

I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer's voice and the writer's point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.

I like Nora Ephron. She wasn't a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time.

I don't see a lot of studio executives caring at all about what the culture is telling us. They think they make the culture. They're not out taking the temperature of things and using the results of whatever sort of cultural surveying they're doing to make movies. They're interested in doing things that people are already comfortable with, and taking those properties and filling them.