Top 117 Quotes & Sayings by Justin Simien - Page 2

I think I'll always be making movies that intend to say something new.

There are a plethora of ways of being black, just like there's many ways to being white.

I know it's 'Dear White People,' and you can imprint all kinds of concessions about what the show might be about on the title, but my goal was never to, like, educate white people. My goal was always to create characters that you can relate to and fall in love with.

I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was a kid. I always did things that took me a little closer to that.

There is a difference between being offended and being prejudiced and even being bigoted against. There's a difference between that and racism.

If you examine any aspect of the human condition long enough, you really do have to start laughing at it. Because the business of being human is kind of ridiculous.

Part of my struggle with being gay was that a lot of my homophobia was internalized because of the cues that I was - received. I didn't see anybody like myself in the culture. RuPaul was the closest to a gay, out black man that I had growing up.

I think we all have identity crises throughout our lives.

There was a time when a studio executive would really love something and have no proof at all that it would work and just do it because they believed in it. That's how 'Star Wars' happened.

Hollywood is a world where the only thing that gets green-lit is something that made money the last year.

I took an internship at Focus Features while I was in film school. I was really interested in how specialty movies were marketed and found their audience despite being about topics that were outside of the mainstream.

Here's the thing: I come from a filmmaking background, so this concept of sort of overseeing a television show but not directing was, in general, not weird, but I had to get used to what that felt like. My initial instinct was, 'I want to direct as much of this as possible.' But the logistics of making of TV, that's just not possible.

For whatever reason, gay characters, or characters that deal with sexuality issues, who are black, in 'black films'... are typically not dealt with with any sort of complexity. They're exoticized: their being gay is sort of the point.

I find myself listening to Blood Orange and Janelle Monae and artists like that.

When you're part of a society where you're constantly having to define your identity and sort of negotiate with what the mainstream culture thinks you are, you have less energy and time to figure out who you are when you go home at night.

We like to think of the '60s as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and a little bit of friction - no, there were all of these different groups. There was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, Martin and Malcolm, but also the Whitney Youngs of the world, the Bayard Rustins of the world.

America is a different country, and it will forever be a different country after the election of Donald Trump.

I went to a school called Chapman University, which is a wonderful film school. It was a great program, but it was very white, and it was a culture shock for me because I grew up in Houston, Texas, and I went through what they call magnet schools, so my friends were like a Benetton ad.

Hip-hop isn't dead by any means, but it's not something I define my black identity with.

The further away you get from being a straight white man, the less freedoms you have to figure out who you are and negotiate what you mean to society.

I think art is much more valuable when it's honest. If it's not honest, it's just propaganda.

Any time a black person has the audacity to tell everybody else that they're also human beings, they are confronted with all kinds of malice and violence and ill will. It's been that way since black people were brought to this country.

I love great prestige television, but because I make television, sometimes I don't want to, like, you know, fall into a very heavy cerebral drama.

We get caught in our little silos and end up working against ourselves. And I think social media culture really encourages that, because you're really just shouting into a void hoping someone picks up on what you're saying.

Black people are experiencing a systemic disadvantage, and it goes back to slavery, which was not that long ago.

You know what, man, that's part and parcel of being a black person in this country: everything's harder. It just is.

Films with predominantly white casts can come in any form, tell any story, big or small. For black films, you have the light, fluffy rom-coms or 'Madea' movies, and then you have the black-torture awards movie.

If I just wanted to put clean, perfect images of black people on the screen for an hour and a half, first of all, there are other people already doing that, and they're making a lot of money doing it.

One of the most powerful lessons I learned is when you make an argument in a film, you have to make sure both characters are right.

I think I have a threshold for taking things too seriously.

Racism is over in the 'Star Trek' future, but they found a way to comment on sexism and racism in the present day in such a subversive and smart way, you know?

There is no monolithic black culture. It's completely different for someone born in Harlem to someone born in Houston or London with one exception, which is that people contributing to black culture have the experience of being black.

It is a fine line between making fun of the right thing and making fun of the wrong thing. And the language oftentimes is the same.

Usually, with 'Star Trek,' you always trust the captain. The captains are always going to pull us through; the captain's always going to win.

To surrender your ego, you have to have one first.

I don't doubt that straight white men have identity issues and identity complexes and struggle with defining themselves.

Every movie has the thing it's about, and then, deep down, it has this thing that it's really about. 'Star Wars' is not really about a space opera, action, and the galactic quest. It's about self-doubt.

My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?

I definitely have fun commenting on the real world and interpreting through the 'Dear White People' lens.

I love films from all these different points of views that used the idea of the school as a way to talk about the American experience. It took me a while to figure how to write a movie like that, because that's not something you learn at film school

I love when scenes are intentionally and meticulously planned so we feel like this is a handcrafted scene that only works in this moment and this movie, and that's the way I approach my films.

I love being entertained sure, but the movies that I live for, the movies that I buy and think about and stay in my mind are the movies that entertain me but leave me with something a little uncomfortable to grapple with in the lobby.

America is a different country, and it will forever be a different country, after the election of Donald Trump.

If the characters [in a movie] aren't real, if their lives aren't realistic, if you call bullshit at any point in their journey, then the rest of it is invalid.

As a person of color, I was just really tired of the fact that I wasn't seeing my story in the culture.

I am more than a black guy. I am a person, I'm storyteller, I'm a son, I'm a friend, so I am all those things so it is frustrating to a degree to be limited by other people's perceptions of me but at the same time, it is true that I am a black guy and it's like I'm rooted in, but not bound by. That sort of mentality, that's the one that I hold to be true.

One of the facets of growing up the way I did, I never had the experience of being solely in the black community. Even my family, my mother is what they call Creole, so she's part French, part black, and grew up in Louisiana. It's a very specific kind of blackness that is different than what is traditionally thought of as the black community and black culture. So, I never felt a part of whatever that was.

What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.

As a director, I try not to implement a way for working, for every single actor, across the board. I try to work with each one, on an individual basis.

It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall, black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.

I'm very interested in clans and the way people group together, and there's a lot of group shots. There's a lot of people in positions that people feel like they're in attack mode, kind of pointed at each other in the frame. I'm not a big fan of shooting something that looks like it could belong in any movie, I'm not a fan of okay, "wide shot, wide shot, medium shot, close-up, close-up, we'll figure it out in post." I hate that.

Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.

I love the art house, and when I say the art house, I don't just mean little, independent movies but movies that really aim to be about something and say something and I love those movies.

White people don't have that problem, they get to go through life never having to fit into a box, and it's really more so true for white men because even just being a woman, you sort of have to walk around other people's assumptions of you and it's so exhausting and there's a sense, especially among young people of wanting to just live your life, not having to wear the weight of that pressure - pressure that people of color feel, that gay people of color feel, that women of color feel.

Racism is wrong, racism is very dangerous.

I have this natural thing in my head that when I sit down to write something serious, I tend to make jokes. I can't help it. I can't help but desire for the narrative to be as complicated and as truthful as possible. That's just the way my head works.