Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not as cocky as I used to be.
I was always this weird outcast kid.
Broadway doesn't mean anything in Los Angeles.
I want 'Flash' to reflect the world we live in.
I consider 'Dope' a part of the new mainstream.
Maybe I'm more suited to making small independent films.
I've always felt that 'Dope' is a big movie in a little package.
Everything about who I am, negative and positive, is what shaped me.
I'm first generation American, and my parents were both from Nigeria.
Lots of people knew who Kevin Hart was a decade before he hit it big.
Societies are being interconnected and we have to adjust to that fact.
I was a political science major before I transferred into film school.
'The Wood' was sort of like 'American Graffiti' for me in a lot of different ways.
I grew up on Spielberg and Lucas. That was sort of what inspired me to make movies.
I felt like I was Ferris Bueller. I wanted to be those kids in 'The Breakfast Club.'
Love stories happen in communities outside of just the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
I met Forest Whitaker on 'Our Family Wedding' and we struck up a real bond and friendship.
But at the end of the day, the lottery of birth shouldn't determine your value to the world.
I can understand being in such a public place and having your intimate private life examined.
All films are a challenge and they are a harder challenge when dealing with characters of color.
There's a generation that doesn't care if Tom Cruise is at the top of the movie. They want authenticity.
Nineties hip-hop in particular really shaped what became the common pop cultural language that we all speak.
That's the one drawback of trying to keep up with technology, is that it changes quicker than films can come out.
I always say it's hard to cast an African-American film sometimes because those kinds of actors just aren't out there.
We all would shudder if what we did, no matter what, in our 20s and early 30s were publicly displayed on a national stage.
For those of us who grew in the early hip hop era, that music shaped us in a way to be in a position to express ourselves.
It would have been more comfortable for us as a society if Anita Hill wasn't as intelligent, poised, and credible as she was.
Ultimately we're all moving towards a time when the races will be more and more mixed and we will all be brown to some extent.
Wedding films are always about the differences between people. But they haven't quite dealt with African-Americans and Latinos.
Gangs are a part of living in Los Angeles, but you can exist in Inglewood or Culver City or anywhere else, without joining one.
I always wanted to make a coming-of-age film, or something about growing up, like 'The Wonder Years,' 'Stand By Me' or 'Diner.'
You can't control where you are born, and when you're growing up, until you've seen something else, you're just living your life.
The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.
I really love weddings. You are surrounded by people who are strangers and then after you say 'I do' those strangers become family.
I felt like Inglewood, being the place where I originally found my voice, would be the place where I could sort of redefine my voice.
I will continue to look for opportunities to tell stories that speak to a fresh generational, topical and multicultural point of view.
Comedy opens you up to ideas that a straight-up drama doesn't. You resist those messages when they come to you earnestly or dramatically.
Because of technology, there's no longer the social shaming that goes on if you're a black kid walking into a record store to buy Nirvana.
In many ways the film business is behind what's going on culturally. We are a world that is becoming more diverse and there's no going back.
So many kids that we label as 'thugs' and 'criminals' are often those same kids that end up in circumstances that are out of their own control.
I feel like geek is about obsession. I feel like I geek out on certain things and that just means it's a mad devotion or obsession to something.
Why is it when a woman makes a film or a movie stars a female cast it is labeled women-centric because it is not white, male and middle-class men?
There are constant challenges about what's 'mainstream.' These kids in 'Dope' are as mainstream as the kids in 'Superbad' or 'The Breakfast Club.'
'Black cinema' I don't even know what that means. It's just cinema. When Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, we don't just say it's 'white cinema.'
It wasn't that long ago that I was coming up, but it feels almost ancient that you had to go to the library and you had 'World Book Encyclopedias.'
DC is the foundation of what we all know about comic books and heroes. They've had great storytellers, great illustrates, as a part of that tradition.
I've been a fan of Wendell Pierce for a very long time. He was in one of my early movies and he brings such a level of heart and humanity to his roles.
Inglewood is a microcosm of Los Angeles. It's a city by the airport. It's the first city when you're coming into L.A., and the last city when you leave.
I think we've now gotten to this point where we're growing more and more distrustful of our institutions, be they government or corporations or otherwise.
It could be why it's getting harder and harder to get people into the cinemas and multiplexes, because we're just seeing a world that doesn't reflect reality.