Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not a very religious person.
Everybody wants to watch the underdog win.
I like to hear conversations that are debates.
I generally don't think of prospective actors when I write.
There's no limits other than my imagination, which is fantastic.
Unlike a lot of people, I'm not afraid of the unknown. It intrigues me.
'Lovecraft Country' is reclaiming all these pulp genres for people of color.
The horror genre has long been used to uncover the dark underbelly of things.
When you have 10 people in a room, you're always able to come up with new ideas.
I'm a huge history buff, so I just love to research, and I'm also slightly lazy.
I just wanna keep making stuff that - in a very selfish way - I find interesting.
Sometimes you don't find out why you needed to tell a story until you're telling it.
We usually center our narratives that come out of Hollywood from a white male center.
The Underground Railroad was a spy network for the North and that story has never been told.
I wanna do mystery, I wanna do sci-fi, I wanna do horror, and I wanna do all of those things.
If the actors aren't reacting the way people would react, that's where you step into disbelief.
When people walk into our casting room, we do think about what you do outside of being an actor.
The casting process starts off really scary, especially when you're trying to find a Harriet Tubman.
It's no secret - I've said this before - people have mistaken me for a P.A. on the set. On my own set.
When you have people from different parts of the world coming together, it just makes it so much richer.
Oppression is not limited to people of color, but if you feel guilty that's something you should confront.
When I first read 'Lovecraft Country' I knew it had the potential to be unlike anything else on television.
I think that's when I get excited in the writers' room - when people are yelling back and forth at each other.
Horror is my favorite genre, but it works best for me when it's a metaphor on top of something we can all relate to.
It's hard for me to say what viewers will take from a thing because I try not to think about that when I'm making it.
You can't keep letting people live their happy little lives in oblivion. To move forward they have to be uncomfortable.
I was working at Talesai, which is a Thai restaurant on Sunset. I actually worked there through selling my first script.
We're coming to see the revolution. And the revolution isn't always happy. It's not always pretty. But it's always satisfying.
The story of the Underground Railroad is the story of American heroes, and who doesn't want to hear a story about American heroes?
I do think that Lovecraft is very influential to the horror genre, but I also didn't want to ignore the fact that he's a major racist.
I mean, you can't help but imagine it a little bit... like, 'What would I do with a Black Canary show?' It'd be exciting, I know that.
One of the reasons I love horror so much is - when it's done well - you can keep peeling away the layers and see something new every time.
What's so interesting is taking kind of all these horror tropes and really finding black history and American history to layer on top of it.
I have read H.P. Lovecraft, and I understand why he has influenced so much of horror writing. But because of his history, I wasn't a huge fan.
On 'Underground,' we had used contemporary music to pull you into the present and not just look at it as a portrait on the wall and in the past.
I think that's what we like to explore and see on TV these days especially in long form, is complicated people who have to make tough decisions.
Music has this ability to bridge time. You can hear a song from the 1920s and still be like, 'Oh, that's it. That's the feeling I have right now.'
Stephen King's 'It' is my favorite book of all time. I was that kid that would come to the library and be like: 'There's more Stephen King? Great.'
'Get Out' definitely brought it to the mainstream, but you can look back at the original 'Night of the Living Dead' and that's definitely a commentary on racism.
For me, a theme that's always circling around in my head - which is why I love the horror genre - is what we're ready to do for metaphorical and physical survival.
I don't want to say you should censor yourselves, but the storyteller should be able to defend why a narrative needed to shift that way or should only be told this way.
In 'Underground,' you have to write for everyone, even the bad guys. People need to laugh and love and have voices and do bad things. Even slave owners need to be people.
I was like, 'Oh, let's do a show about the Underground Railroad.' I never come up with great titles, and I thought, 'Underground' is a fantastic title. I got really excited.
That's what the best art does, it starts the conversation. What you may see in a scene or a line isn't what I might see, but that conversation we have, that's how we move forward.
For me, I feel like horror space has always been a space of the other, even when it's not people of color or black people. That has always drawn me to it, and I've been a big fan.
The story of the Underground Railroad is a thriller. These are people who are basically in a heist movie, and it's the most precious cargo ever, your life. You're fighting for your freedom.
I got a dollhouse when I was six, and my sister would always say, 'You realize you're just talking to yourself. What are you doing?' That kind of opened up this creative need to tell stories.
In an homage, you always want to subvert it and have fresh new takes. You don't want the audience to say, 'Oh they just did 'The Amityville Horror' there,' you always want to add something new.
I think, because you look around in Hollywood, and there are no 'me's. There's nobody that's as young as me, as black as me or as feminine as me. I think that's the problem. Representation matters.
It's easy to let ourselves off the hook and say, 'Oh, I would never own slaves.' Because this is in the DNA of this country, like we saw in Ava DuVernay's film '13th.' The cycle keeps repeating itself.