I'm shy to call myself a director still. When someone says, 'What do you do for a living?' I don't know if I've earned that.
Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.
Yes and, you know, I can't use the nice words anymore because I used to chicken out by using them. I used to call myself plus size, used to call myself chubby. I used to call myself overweight.
I'm always looking for opportunities, even when they're not offered to me. I will have no hesitation to pick up the phone and call a director or call a writer.
I don't consider myself a flashy director. A lot of times, people will look and don't even know what I do.
I've always laughed at the term "female director" or even "black director." A director's a director.
I majored in religion for my entire undergraduate career at Duke University and then I went to seminary for a year unsure whether or not I really had the call to be a minister. I spoke with a pastor of my home church and told him I was going to seminary. He said "Do you feel the call to be a minister?" and I said "Honestly, I don't. I know it's the greatest call you could have but I'm not feeling that call myself. He said "Well, you know, you're wrong. It's not the greatest call. The greatest call is whatever calling God has for you."
I don't consider myself bossy, but I do know what I want. You know, I have a gut feeling about a piece of material, but I've never envisioned myself as the director on top of the hill with a megaphone in my hand, screaming at 1,000 extras.
When I realized that nothing is perfect and no one is perfect, I was able to overcome my initial fears. I was holding myself to some weird standard that I was putting outside of myself, i.e., the director or casting director - they're not expecting perfection. I had all these strange trappings I would put myself in.
I never really saw myself as a comedy director, and I still don't. I see myself as a director.
'Aashiq' is a romantic film, even though my character is a rather aggressive guy. You could even call it an intense romance. And working with Indra Kumar has been an excellent experience. He is a great director.
It's an interesting partnership that we have, friendship, whatever you want to call it. We don't even know what to call it. But we know that it's special and we're celebrating that.
I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I'll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I'll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.
You know, people do call it homophobia, and even that term alone is interesting to me. Because I don't even know how they call it homophobia, because that's a fear of the same. It's more heterophobia. It's a fear of something different from yourself.
From my side, I don't put pressure on the director to cater to a certain image. I am happy to do different films, and I have to stick by my director. I like to completely surrender myself to the director - that way, I think, I don't get to do the similar roles.
You know, I love plays. I love the smell of a theater. The old rooms and the carpet and all that stuff. I love to tell stories. Even before I was doing music, I saw myself as a director.