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Rarely do celebrities and actors speak up for what they believe in.
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My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Empire' also as a movie.
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I have a partner, Danny Strong; he's an incredible writer and, really, my backbone. So when we don't see eye to eye, it's painful.
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Some of my friends don't have a cell phone. Patti LaBelle doesn't have a cell phone.
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My mission is to let black kids know that their dreams can happen.
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I knew that I'd end up directing because I'm so hands-on with my films.
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I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.
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I came to Hollywood to write and found out I don't have the attention span.
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I don't profess to be Shonda Rhimes by any stretch of the imagination, or Dick Wolf. They're icons. I'm a filmmaker.
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What attracts me to material are characters that I know - characters that I know people don't know but I know - and bringing them to the screen. Spotlighting voices that have not been heard before on screen.
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I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.
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I always question if somebody else is going to love my films. I think that's what art is about - it's so individual.
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While I am not a musician, I love music. I have over 15,000 songs on my iPod. Everything from hard core rap to the soundtrack from the original 'Cinderella.'
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I've had all types of beautiful girls tell me that they ugly when they look in the mirror, as if it's someone else's reflection they see.
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I started casting. I cast music videos, but I kept getting fired from jobs because I was iconoclastic in my ways of casting.
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America is fickle. You never know what they're going to go for.
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My kids tell me to Instagram, so I do that. I have a few thousand followers.
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It's hard for me to accept love. I wish I could lie to you and tell you that it's easy for me, but it's not.
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I'm not really vegan. I'm vegan-ish. I have a piece of lamb every now and then.
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I believe in life that you know that everything prepares you for the next thing - whether it's a hit, whether it's not a hit, whether it's a... your failures are your accomplishments because it makes you prepared for whatever it is that you are going to do next.
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I love actors, and I'm very protective of them. I trust them. It's a mutual trust.
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The rules are: The only ego is the film, and you have to serve the film.
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I think it's very important that we don't sound like militants. Often what we do is we give a comment, and because it comes across with passion, then we're 'angry black people.'
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I don't read the reviews, the blogs, or anything else. Instead, I feel the audience when I show the film.