Sandrine Holt Quotes

There are many projects I couldn't get off the ground because they didn't have white heroes. It's a problem that everyone who's been working in Hollywood has been facing.

Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they're not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier.

Why do we always have to see black people in hindsight? Why are the Hollywood movies always historical? What about the contemporary image of black people?

I think Australia focuses on people that had a big start at home, like 'Home and Away' or 'Neighbours' graduates, and the truth is those shows are pretty white for the most part. The diverse actors go straight to the States because that is where more diverse stories and opportunities are being presented.

There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character?

People are tired of mainstream media's limited and confined portrayal of people of color.

I believe I can do it, but one of the reasons I don't really get into the debate is people keep talking about a black James Bond: how a black man should play him.

When I was growing up, all these superheroes were white. On some level, you put that out of your mind... but as you get older, you realize it's a very one-sided affair. So I'm very glad to see that these movies are becoming more diversified.

If you watch any show that stars white people, white people aren't coming up to them like, 'Thank you for showing my face on the big screen.' Because they see their faces in popular culture all the time.

The way Hollywood and TV is, black people don't have any choice but to see ourselves in white-dominated television shows and stories and movies.

I loved films like 'When Harry Met Sally' and 'Annie Hall,' but these were very specific, white Manhattan experiences. You don't see a single person of color anywhere, but somehow these films are universal. As a filmmaker and creator, I was frustrated with that idea.

There's an inherent idea that if a Black executive producer and a Black director are going to do a movie based on a Black writer's book that everybody is going to be Black.

Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.

Any anxieties publishers have about putting a child on the front cover of a book who isn't white is very old fashioned.

I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.

I believe that we are still hovering around the realm of Asians playing all types of Asians. I do not see that changing any time soon just because there is a limited pool of Asian actors.

There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian.

In 2007, a very inspired New York University Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four per cent, were non-white.

It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.

When you go back to 'Friends,' and you look at that as New York, there's no black people. That's not real. You're in New York City, and there's no black people at all. That's a little funny.

On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?

What does it mean to be too black for Hollywood? It's self-explanatory. Hollywood has certain kinds of blacks that they like.

All the networks have always been willing to have ethnic people as the third or fourth lead or the best friend to the white person. But to actually let a black family or an Asian family carry a show, that's something where there hasn't really been a precedent set in terms of a real financial gain.

Jesus was not born in a manger in central Pennsylvania. He was a man of color. And the fact that we have represented him for centuries literally as a white man speaks to the entire history of white supremacy.

Why is the world that I see around me mixed, and why is the world I see in movies filled with all white people? Why does it have to be like that?