Producers should have the courage of their convictions. See your project through to its fruition. Seek help and be generous enough to take on collaborators and not be territorial as you're learning.

As a producer, it's your job to bang on the table and convince studio heads why great movies should be made.

Winning an Oscar attracts the attention of directors and other actors and creates a boost in salary, particularly for someone like Halle Berry. For an established star like Denzel Washington, the benefits are less tangible.

The film world is always looking for great source material, and Broadway has traditionally and historically been a place to go.

I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting.

The Huxtables laughed and bonded and debated and lip-synced. They were glamorous and simple and extraordinarily human. And affluent. And educated. And so many different kinds of black. You'd think that all of that would make them the Howard University of African-American family life. But white people wanted to matriculate, too.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

I grew up in one of the most socially conservative neighborhoods in Ohio, and my parents were traditional Catholics. But in her old age, my mother got her home health care from a guy who was gay, who was wonderful to her. Before she died, she rode a float in the Cincinnati Gay Pride Parade.