Quote collection
111 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I make films about Black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a Black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman."
"I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians."
"If you have the ability to do something, you should do it."
"We're a new world and it's not pretty. It's going to be for the brave to figure out how to survive in this."
"Hollywood needs more women directors, and Mama Ava needs a carafe and a half of that sweet vino divino."
"[ Age Of Trump] was something that I really wanted to do, and I also really wanted it to feel evergreen, so we made a lot of attempts not to bog it down in the campaign fight, even though we were right in the middle of that. I wanted it to be something that could live on and be a conversation piece long after this inauguration, whoever it was going to be."
"I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry."
"When I'm marketing a film, whether its mine or someone else's, I work with a great deal of strategy and elbow grease until the job is done."
"Netflix represents, as well as all the streaming services, something that I've been talking about being so important to inclusive voices around films."
"Folks can look at this issue and read it and it can feel like medicine, it can feel epidemic. We wanted this to hit people in their gut, and the hope is that by doing that, we can get more people to think more deeply about these issues."
"These are dark times for a lot of people who believe differently than our incoming administration [of Donald Trump], but there's also joy there, and there's also something in unifying around the things that we do believe in."
"Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker."
"At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy."
"I know that there are a lot of great women that have gone before me, so it's important to acknowledge them."
"What we tried to do in 13th was get to the bottom of that. What were they motivated by? But certainly the attention that the Attorney General's office paid to it allowed for there to be some dialogue across the aisle that I think were the first steps then in change."
"For far too long, independent voices have been relegated to places where these ideas are not seen on a mass level."
"We [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just "I have a dream." They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids."
"I always go into a blocking rehearsal with an anchor, with a blocking plan. And sometimes they'll step into the room and they'll be in costume and you're like, "That sucks, that's not going to work. Let's think of something new.""
"I just remember not having access to films as a young person who loved films but living in Compton. In order to see the film, I had to get on the bus and travel quite a ways to get to an arthouse theater - none of which you're gonna find in black and brown communities - to see anything that was outside of what the studios fed me, and that's not the case anymore."
"I'm not to say that my male counterparts do, but certainly, it feels very special to me because I know that so few women have had the opportunity to do what I'm doing, so I'm thrilled by it every day."