[on the cinematography of Moonlight (2016)] Cinema is a little over 100 years old, and a lot of what we do is built around film emulsion. Those things were calibrated for white skin. We've always put powder on skin to dull the light. But my memory of growing up in Miami is this moist, beautiful black skin. So we used oil. I wanted everyone's skin to have a sheen to reflect my memory. [2017] Show less «

[Moonlight (2016) playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney] and I are this kid. We are Chiron. And you don't think that kid grows up to be nominated for eight Academy Awards. It's not a dream he's allowed to have. I still feel that way. I didn't think this was possible. But now I look at other people looking at me and if I didn't think it was possible, how are they going to? But now it's happened. So what I think of possibility, let's take it off the table. The thing has happened. [Feb.2017] Show less «

[on My Josephine (2003)] I went to school in Tallahassee, Florida, and it's different from going to school in New York, where you have the whole city as a backdrop. Down in Tallahassee, you have to work to make the background interesting. 9-11 had happened, and it was on my mind as something I wanted to make a film about, in Florida. Through watching all those foreign films, especially as someone who didn't speak any foreign language or know any foreign people, I got opened up to the possibility of language in cinema. At the time, people were saying being a Muslim or an Arab was 'the new Black.' So I decided to take my experience of feeling like an 'other' as a Black man in the South, and use that as a way to empathize with my characters. That's where I discovered that there was a different way to approach the form, and it all came together in that short, which is kind of out there. [Dec.2016] Show less «