Growing up, my mother was a very strong woman who was not very big, about 5'1'', but boy, you grabbed a tiger by the tail if you messed with her. I know grown men that messed with her, and through her wit and intelligence and her no-quit, she never lost a fight. That's very influential on me when I'm telling stories. I love exploring that.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

The movies I make - the goal isn't a mass audience. They're not expensive films. So the attempt is to reach a much more limited audience - one would say an audience that enjoys films that challenge them emotionally and intellectually.

Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.

We've said from the very beginning Black Lives Matter is a network and also, as a broad set of individuals, is an organization moving to transform the way our society values black lives. It's not an 'Internet movement.'

The fan base that I've had all these years has come along. Some of them are not as plugged into the digital world, so they want to go out and buy the CD at Walmart or something.

Big companies often use their leverage to take stakes in would-be suppliers, especially in the technology business.

We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free Internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble.