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" You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look. "

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" Contemporarily, we struggle with people worried about representation sometimes. It's a burden, as artists, that we take on that limits the work. It limits the characters people play. It limits the roles they want to do. "

" Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes. "

" I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else. "

" I remember one summer I played, like, with the granddaughter of this known Klan member. Like, all summer we caught cicadas. And we had grown close, and so it was, like, time for her birthday party and I said 'Oh, like, what time do I come for your party?' And she's like 'Oh, no, you can't come to my house 'cause my parents don't like black people.' "

" I had originally written 'Pariah' as a feature, and we shot the first act as a short film, and then we used the short as a marketing tool to fundraise for the feature. "

" Knowing what you want is not a shortcoming. Let people deal with their own anxieties. "

" I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer. "

" People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination. "

" My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur. "

" There's a line that runs between everyone and their ancestors, and you cannot sever that. Maybe disassociate from those ideas but not how you are connected to them. But, you can realise how you've benefited and change how you raise your kids. "

" We have to create a range, and we have to let there be possibilities. And basically, by showing there are different types of people, you write down the monolith. You stop having to represent for all black people when you allow there to be different types represented. "

" The only advice I can give is to surround yourself with people who are friends and people who believe in you and your material and who are going to help you take it to the next level. It doesn't mean you don't listen to criticism, but you listen to it and edit it, and you figure out what you can take. "

Surround Yourself

" I thought I'd get an MBA, and then I could be anything. And I'd write on the side. That was the idea. "

" When I'm on set, I know what I want. "

" For 'Pariah,' people were surprised Kim Wayans was there, but comedians have a dark streak; they're comedians for a reason. "

" I definitely felt the desire to, like - I definitely knew there was an elsewhere. I definitely knew that, like, if I were going to be free, I needed to be away from, kind of, like, Nashville and kind of get out of the South and get out of the country. "

" I think art breaks down otherness. "

" Having to stake out your identity and have people question whether or not you're being yourself was a tension that I could relate to. "

" I was interested with exploring the idea of who gets to be in possession of the land - how it's sometimes impossible to go back home, how family can be the thing that drags you down. "

" Coming-of-age stories, people roll their eyes. "

" It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds. "

" Filmmaking in general is my second career. I thought that writing wasn't practical, so I went to business school and got an MBA, and I worked three years in grant management. "

" I thought that marketing was a way to be creative in business but quickly learned all creative stuff happens at the ad agency. "

" I'm interested in telling stories about characters that are interesting and who are challenging in some way, one that will make you think about them afterwards. "

" I think 'Mudbound' reveals the interconnectiveness of our stories. You can't separate out threads of history and race as economic construct. 'Mudbound' makes it very plain. Race is about commerce; it's not an actual thing. It's a fiction that was created to basically divide resources unequally. "

" It's okay to be yourself and to love and accept yourself however you are. "

" If I can go three grandmothers back and find a slave, that means someone else can go three grandmothers back and find a slave owner. When you interrogate your histories, it forces you to rethink who you are and where you are. "

" For me, books were my source of affirmation. Alice Walker, Audrey Lord - it was these authors who wrote about their experiences. It was this weird thing where I was censored in terms of what I could watch but not in terms of what I could read. "

" I had this thing where I only wanted to work on original material, no adaptations, and obviously, that changed. I really wanted to have the resources and have the space and the time to tell stories that I've really cared about. I've kind of changed my approach, but I've gotten to do that, to tell stories that I really care about. "

" 'Mudbound,' you know, is about home. 'Mudbound' is about what it means to be a citizen, and 'Mudbound,' in fact, is set in this post-reconstruction era that we haven't really explored. You know, not since 'Sounder' have we even really explored that experience. "