THEODORE MELFI

For me, as a feminist, as somebody who wants to lift up women - because I do; I come from a single mom who raised three boys on her own - I feel like, you close the door on women, you close the door on humanity.

If you don't have comedy in a movie, you don't have a movie.

I think the commercial world is a lateral step from features. Some people see it as a step down, but I've never understood that.

If you don't infuse humor into a subject matter, no matter how dark, the audience can't accept the message of a film. It closes them down. Humor can open them up.

After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.

My wife says I have happy delusions. I'm delusional that way. I just say, 'This is how it's got to be, and it's got to be.' I don't take no. I just don't like no. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's just how I am.

Life is laughter.

The fact is this: NASA was desegregated by a white male. NASA was not desegregated by a black male. NASA was not desegregated by white women.

NASA didn't give a crap what gender you were or what race you were. If you could do the math, you were valuable.

I try not to write for actors because A, they're not the character, and B, it's really depressing when you don't get them.

I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.

The concept of 'family' has changed so much. It's not just 'mom and dad' anymore. It's 'mom and mom' and 'dad and dad,' and it's kind of beautiful.

A Sunday matinee is a good time for families to go to a movie.

I was a good student. I started college at 16 years old and did okay.

We're very, very flawed, myself included.

People live in the middle. I think everyone does. Good is on one side, bad is on the other side, and we live in the middle.

I can't stand toe-to-toe with Bill Murray. It's very hard, because just looking at Bill - he's 6'3", and he just stares at you, and you have no idea what's going on inside that mind of his.

I have to shoot and work out and play and discover all the time.

Floyd Thompson, a white man, desegregated NASA. Period.

The journey of making 'Hidden Figures' has shown me the automatic privilege that all white men are afforded in America in 2017 and in any and every year before that.

You know what the truth is? You don't find Bill Murray. Bill Murray finds you.

Family is just the people you care about. We can bond with people that we have nothing in common with, even if it's just for a moment.

We're all humans. Any human can tell any human's story. I don't want to have this conversation about black film or white film anymore. I wanna have conversations about film.

You have a responsibility to make inclusion a daily thought, so we can get rid of the word 'inclusion.'

As a director, you're open to any kind of criticism.