A Quote by F. Gary Gray

I know a lot of people who enjoy rap music who aren't black. You can't just say it's black music. To segregate films the way Hollywood likes to segregate films, ultimately everyone loses.
I've been composing music for feature films since 2007. I've been creating music for films for 13 years and I totally enjoy and love doing that. However, I have a lot of music inside me which I want to share with you all in a different way.
Even though it's called Music Of Black Origin, it's not just music for black people. Music is for everybody. I think it's good that black music is acknowledged, and it's open for lots of artists, including white artists who have been inspired by black musical heritage.
I personally don't enjoy films that bring black people down. I find that a majority of the films that black people are starred in nowadays, are ones focused on gang violence or dancing.
Blaxploitation films were black films targeting black people. They were films made to appeal to a culture in a way that was supposed to be unfiltered.
Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.
If you are going to call a film a 'black film' then you have to make a film that represents everyone that's black, which is almost impossible. That is why white films are not called white films, they are just called 'films.'
In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.
I'm to trying to say I'm something I'm not. Black people understand that. I'm just doing my raps, my way. Rap is black. I recognize that and respect that. I'm just a white guy trying to rap, and I got lucky.
If you take the '70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to keep the lights on until they could reestablish themselves.
I want to remind people that black music is amazing. And there are all forms of it that we've forgotten, you know? Rock music is black music! Don't forget that's what it is.
A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.
You don't do background music the way a lot of more conventional films do. The music is often kind of a character in your films to the extent that sometimes you stop and watch someone perform a song.
Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.
I wanted to make sure the focus [in The Land] was on human beings themselves and their decisions, but still connected to the urban environment that people associate as being black. I think I was able to make a film without commenting on "black this or black that" and you still feel the presence of it. There's no one character who's saying "we're all black and we're all in this struggle." It's that you just feel it. Some of that is because we get the sense from a lot of independent films that black people struggle all the time.
Hollywood is so fixated on keeping it that way because it's generating the buzz, but that representation isn't right. I definitely feel like it's getting better - it's not only for blacks, but for people that are of all different skin colors. It is very important that black independent films get seen. We need to start getting used to black people. They exist. And they've been around for a long time. It's amazing that people still feel, "Oh my gosh, it's a black guy."
It really upsets me that the media insists on turning 'Do the Right Thing' or 'Boyz N the Hood' into 'black films.' They are American films. They may open the window on the black experience, but they had things to say to everybody. That's why they were so successful.
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