Quotes from Rick Famuyiwa

Kendrick Lamar is from Compton, but his Compton and how he expresses that is completely different than NWA and Eazy-E even though they were from the same environment.

I was fortunate to write pretty much a year out of film school and start making movies in the Hollywood studio system. But with each progressive film it became more frustrating not being able to speak and say things I wanted to say.

In many ways the film business is behind what's going on culturally. We are a world that is becoming more diverse and there's no going back.

In many ways, a teaser trailer these days has just become a short version of the full-length trailer, as opposed to something that grabs you and teases you and makes you go, 'Whoa, what is this?'

We all would shudder if what we did, no matter what, in our 20s and early 30s were publicly displayed on a national stage.

People come to L.A. and they expect to see a ghetto like the projects, but that's not the way it's set up. Inglewood, in particular, is the furthest thing from a ghetto. It's a middle-class community, but it's gotten a bad rap over the years... because of 'Grand Canyon' and 'Pulp Fiction' and other films.

I'm probably going to be ashamed to say this... It was a Sir Mix-a-Lot album. I think I was 12, 13. I had just enough money for the 'My Posse's on Broadway' single, so I bought that single. That was the first thing I bought with my own money.

That's the one drawback of trying to keep up with technology, is that it changes quicker than films can come out.

Ultimately we're all moving towards a time when the races will be more and more mixed and we will all be brown to some extent.

We'll always be re-examining how we relate to each other in terms of race and gender, in terms of power and access.

This whole thing with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas happened during my first year of college. It was a cross-section of race and politics and gender that I feel is still going on today.

'Black cinema' I don't even know what that means. It's just cinema. When Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, we don't just say it's 'white cinema.'

When I first started working on 'The Wood,' these people couldn't grasp the concept that, one, there is a black middle class, and, two, Inglewood is a part of it.

'The Wood' was sort of like 'American Graffiti' for me in a lot of different ways.

It was titled 'Confirmation' very purposefully. I wanted the film to be about that process - about how Judge Thomas and Anita Hill were thrown into a situation that was difficult for anyone to navigate, no matter what the truth was. It's hard to know what the truth is.

So many kids that we label as 'thugs' and 'criminals' are often those same kids that end up in circumstances that are out of their own control.

It's insidious how Hollywood warps your values without you even realizing that it's happening to you. You get a little whiff of success and it whets your appetite, and before you know it you're going right down the road they've laid out for you.

Because of technology, there's no longer the social shaming that goes on if you're a black kid walking into a record store to buy Nirvana.

I felt like Inglewood, being the place where I originally found my voice, would be the place where I could sort of redefine my voice.

When I watch films and it becomes just about the reference and not necessarily a flow with how people naturally speak, that's when you're just saying, 'Okay, I'm trying to be cool and show off.'

Magic has lived an extraordinary life as a champion athlete, passionate activist, and highly successful entrepreneur. The impact of Magic's life on the game of basketball and beyond is undeniable.

Anita Hill has changed the history of how we deal with each other in the workplace. But it also was an interesting episode in how race and the history of race converged in this moment and got used and twisted and interpreted in all kind of ways.

I want 'Flash' to reflect the world we live in.

It could be why it's getting harder and harder to get people into the cinemas and multiplexes, because we're just seeing a world that doesn't reflect reality.