Keiko Agena Quotes

When you're doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it's most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we're all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

There needs to be more film directors of colour. They bandy about the word 'diversity' a lot, but when I say 'of colour,' I mean Asian, black - I mean people of all colour. We need to have those voices given the opportunity, not told that their films will not be distributed or will not sell well abroad.

I'm trying to get my next job as a biracial action hero.

The studios aren't lining up to make films about black protagonists, black people being autonomous and independent.

I always say it's hard to cast an African-American film sometimes because those kinds of actors just aren't out there.

In the tennis world, there weren't a whole lot of Asians playing. You see it a little bit more now. The same can really be said for basketball.

I always think it's really hard if you are Asian or Chinese to be really in Hollywood. There are not so many really great characters for you.

I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'

The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message - finally.

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'

When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like 'Bird,' I use 90% black people.

I will be the first black James Bond.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

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

Simultaneously, the movie business now experiments with a colorblind approach to casting.

It's not enough even to have one black Barbie... because black women are not a monolith.

I think it's a little much to expect the organisation to solve the problem of racial parity. We do see a fast-increasing influx of Asians, black folks. I actually see black folks out here, unlike some of our liberal critics.

In England, you feel like a member of the revolutionary guard the minute you even mention race. But I do think that the OscarsSoWhite phenomenon will have to reflect back on England. What people are essentially saying is that they want to see more diverse stories. It's not about putting three black people in the back of the shot.

I have lots of hopes for black actors in general, whether they be on TV or on stage or in movies, and that is that we move beyond the tokenism of what it means to be black in a particular set of circumstances.

In my opinion, it would be a lot better for the culture - meaning the culture of America - if there was more diversity in terms of storyline. In terms of the kind of content that you see about Americans of African descent on the screen.

I want to see more Asian. I want to see more Latin. I want more Indian. There's more than Mindy Kaling out there, guys! There's more than Bai Ling.

I want authenticity. And rarely do actors - more specifically, black actors - get a chance to be authentic on film and television.

White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.

All films are a challenge and they are a harder challenge when dealing with characters of color.

I grew up figure skating, and in figure skating there is only a handful of black people at the time figure skating with me.