If you want to be in Hollywood, and if you want to make big international movies, you have to be able to make movies that don't have anything to do with social status or politics. To limit yourself to just do these little small movies and call it black cinema itself is a mistake to me.
The first movie I ever saw was a blaxploitation movie. It was called 'Monkey Hustle.' Like I said, just listen to the name. That's a blaxploitation movie. It had these incredible, bigger-than-life images of people who looked like I did. Or who looked like I wanted to look like.
Nothing will ever top 'The Wire.' It was historical. It was black cinema.
My two favorite movies are 'Coming to America' and 'Boomerang'.
I imagine it was much different in the 1970s. That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now.
There have been so few decent films involving Negroes that right away everybody expects every film to do everything. But when you make a flick, there are maybe two things you're trying to put into that flick. You can put the other things in another time.
Films with predominantly white casts can come in any form, tell any story, big or small. For black films, you have the light, fluffy rom-coms or 'Madea' movies, and then you have the black-torture awards movie.
One of the scariest moments was being on Tyler Perry's first movie, 'Diary of a Mad Black Woman.'
If you take the '70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to keep the lights on until they could reestablish themselves.
There's something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It's a reflection as opposed to an interpretation.
Hollywood, it seems, recognizes black film and black filmmakers, but like a distant lover, never close enough or long enough to forge a meaningful relationship.
Black movies don't have real names, they have names like Barbershop. That's not a name, that's just a location.
Any film I do is not going to change the way black women have been portrayed, or black people have been portrayed, in cinema since the days of D.W. Griffith.
What happened when 'Sweetback' made all that money, the studios were in a very difficult position. They wanted the money, but they didn't the message. This marked the advent of the caricatures which became known as blaxploitation.
My cousin was Ron O'Neal, who was 'Superfly.' Films like 'Shaft' and 'Superfly' were the biggest things out there in the early '70s. It's hard to remember just how big they were - how much impact they had on the culture, the music, the fashions, the hair styles.
'Do the Right Thing' has been a big influence on me. I saw it when it first came out in 1989. I was about 18, and it blew me away on many levels - I had never seen anything like it before.
When I started at Pratt, Spike Lee had his 40 Acres and A Mule studios down the street. You'd see Rosie Perez walking around going to Mike's Coffee Shop. So it was this black bohemian.
At some point, all black movies became biopics. All the good, serious ones became biopics. 'Ray,' 'Ali'... those types of movies, those are the opportunities available for mostly men. Those are the opportunities for a black actor to transcend 'black' movies. They have to play a black icon.
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.
'Moonlight' is a story that hasn't been told. Whether placed as queer black cinema or urban male cinema, the lack of coming-of-age films featuring people like Chiron and set in places like inner-city Miami is pronounced and unfortunate.
Many times, I get young people asking, 'What do you think about black movies?' And I say, 'What are you talking about? You mean Hollywood movies that have black people in them?' It's gone back to that, and that's not the same thing as a black movie.
It's so important to create roles and characters and projects that feature black people in a way that's not specifically targeted towards the niche market, which is, like, a black movie is created, and it's produced and pitched so that only black people will watch it.
In many ways for black actors there's been two leading guys: It's Will Smith vs. Denzel [Washington].
And it's ironic that in my career I've done the black shows from 'Moesha' to 'Fresh Prince' to 'Hangin' with Mr. Cooper,' and then a lot of black films like 'Biker Boyz' and 'Love Don't Cost a Thing.'
I think a lot of black filmmakers have done very well.
