Don't let a culture or society's rules define who you are you define who you are.

I'm a girl, and I celebrate being a girl, and it was really important to me to celebrate the beauty that I could create in a movie like the one I did, aesthetically, in terms of the costumes and the production design. I wanted something big and lush and beautiful and unashamedly feminine.

Don't take no as a full stop, treat it like a comma.

What I hope is that this wider pattern of films about slavery that's emerging isn't just a fad but evidence that we've turned a corner as filmmakers of color and that we're moving forward in our confidence and in the film industry not being afraid of our telling these stories and in giving us the opportunity to bring our vision to the screen.

As people of color, we're left out of history. History is sort of told around us. We're bystanders, we're passive, we're observers. We're never the center of our history.

What is right can never be impossible.

The key quality all successful people share is the ability to inspire, to transfer our passion to other people and to bring them along with us in pursuit of our vision. I have to be able to inspire investors, actors and crews on a daily basis. What I recognize in other successful people is a similar ability to make their passion infectious.

People assume thoughts and processes about you that may have nothing to do with you whatsoever, but they make political assumptions and assertions about who you are based on your choice of partner.

There are important differences that mean we appreciate each other, not tolerate each other. Race creates this idea that there's this massive difference. So when you use race as a means to explore politics, it's a very interesting way of looking at difference, yet similarities.

Sitting in the back row of a full audience watching one of my movies, and hearing them cry and hearing them laugh in the right moments, particularly when they laugh at a line I've stolen from one of my family members and put in the film. That excites me a great deal.

The reality is that we’re in very politicized times. The complete antithesis of Obama is Trump. We are in very polarized times. People are taking a very strong view after a period of time, I think, where people fell asleep on politics to a certain extent.

When you're in political times, you want to reflect those political times, and sometimes going back to our past is the best way to look at our present.