Lin-Manuel Miranda Quotes

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

Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant? How about a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase?

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.'

My husband and I are writers, and I wish I could write faster. There are not a lot of movies made with black actors in mind.

The studios gotta start making more stuff where black folks get quality stuff. But I can't trip about that because I've been making movies for 35 years, and I've played everything from an old lady to a donkey, so I can't be on here talking about, 'They don't give us enough roles' and diversity.

I know a lot of brown actors who play terrorists because they're physically intimidating. For me, it was like, 'O.K., you'll be the nerd.' So I've played the nerd. I've played food-delivery guys. But I always tried to find something in the characters so that they weren't just defined by what they looked like.

I don't think people realize what it's like for people of color to audition for film and TV.

If a filmmaker is making a movie about a nice Midwestern family or a story that needs a very white character or a black or a Chinese, then I don't expect to go up for it. But I know, especially in places like New York, there's no excuse not to see various colors.

I was shocked that I even got the opportunity to audition for 'A Wrinkle in Time.' Meg Murry is a Caucasian girl in the book.

People obsess about casting and representation, but really, all the real work is behind the camera. Casting an Asian American into a bad role where they're shoehorned into these stereotypes is worse than not having cast them at all.

In Australia, there just weren't strong roles for actors of colour. I was often being asked to turn up for commercials with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder. I thought, 'Are we in the '60s?'

When I first started, all the media I ever got was, 'Hey! There's this Indian girl. And even though she is Indian, she gets views and stuff.'

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.

A film centered around the Second World War with a predominantly white cast would not have the pressure on it that 'Red Tails' has.

I would like to see more films being made with people of color behind the camera and in front of the camera, because the more times at bat we have, the better we get.

'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.'

It's an ongoing joke that a black man is always the first one to get killed in movies.

Film was something I didn't really think about when I was young, because if you looked like me, you weren't a film star.

I just hope that there's a market for somebody who looks like me as the lead of a rom-com, you know?

Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.

If you're going to make black movies only about black people, that's as bad as white movies only about white people.

In most science-fiction pictures, the black guy is either an engineer or a radio operator, and he is the first guy killed - gone from the movie.

People just can't wrap their heads around two young black women in a major production.

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

Just speaking for myself, when I'm complimented for being Vietnamese-American in television - the only one - that doesn't make me feel happy, that makes me feel really lonely, actually.