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I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious.

I do a film if it interests me, has a connect with the audience and some entertainment value. The rest doesn't matter.

I always gravitate towards the independent side of things, just because those are the stories I always fall in love with, but you don't really get paid, and living in Los Angeles is expensive, and I have a mortgage to pay. So it's good to jump onto a studio film and then in all my other time do small passion projects.

Almost any film that you do is an opportunity to open you up and make you more aware of an area that you might not be thinking about. That's what is kind of cool, or one of the cool things about this profession.

I think, for an actor, the whole world is a place of work because if you focus on characters and on stories, they are everywhere, so yeah, I feel very privileged to have had this great opportunities in the international cinema and especially in the American cinema.

I was attracted to filmmaking in college because of my love of storytelling. You can have such an impact and reach a broader audience than conventional journalism.

I wasn't a kid who moved out from Iowa with aspirations of becoming a famous star - I was intrigued by the idea of filmmaking and by the idea of what it would be like to play a character in a movie.

My interest as an artist is to illuminate the lives of black folks. I definitely am focused on films that illustrate all that we are and all our nuance and all our complicated beauty and mess, and when you're telling those stories, you gotta have black actors.

It's amazing what you can do without in terms of filmmaking when a story is really important.

I truly believe in cinema's potential for cultural impact. I have a clear idea what I want to do - to enrich people's lives.