I've had the acting bug since I was, like, five. But growing up, I saw how people treated me differently when they knew who my father was, even the stuff I did on the field. Sometimes I'd rush for 100 yards, and the headline would be, 'Denzel's son runs for 100 yards.' That's where the suppression of that bug came from.

The injury that ended my time in football turned out to be serendipitous. I tore my Achilles while training for a pending tryout with the New York Giants, and when it snapped, so did my career, basically. That's what led me to gain the confidence to get into the acting world on my own terms.

Coming from a football background, when everybody is doing their job and operating on such a high level, it only motivates you to do the same.

I was ignorant before I did my research of a lot of African American police officers out there who are doing their job and doing it the right way.

There are all sorts of inventive ways to get your film out there: sometimes via the Internet, sometimes via viral screenings in people's living rooms across the country.

Once computers can program, they basically take over technological progress because already, today, the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming.

People don't change very much, and the things life ends up being about don't change from generation to generation. Life is about love. And people's stories don't really change. Your environment changes dramatically, technology changes, but people don't change, in the way our minds work.

Unfortunately, the higher you climb in social media, the more people will want to throw stones at you. But don't retaliate publicly.