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Making a movie with people of all different ethnicity, all different skin color and different backgrounds, meant that the movie can literally play all around the world. It's not just a blanket whitewash film like most Hollywood films tend to be.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

Even though we are a nation that's becoming a minority country, we still have this view where everything is seen through the prism of the dominant culture, which really means white.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

If you are going to call a film a 'black film' then you have to make a film that represents everyone that's black, which is almost impossible. That is why white films are not called white films, they are just called 'films.'

I was always told that I'd have to do a movie with a white guy in order to get the money. That's the way it was. That made me feel that I should have chosen some other profession, so I could have gotten my just deserts.

It's near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.

You always make a film with the hope that all types of people will want to see your work and that it doesn't matter about your color, but unfortunately it still does.

All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.

I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.