A Quote by Michael K. Williams

I grew in a community where I saw the process of how one becomes a drug dealer or a gang banger or a stick-up kid. There's a series of events that happen. People don't just wake up and decide they wanna be that.
No one wakes up one day and decides they want to become a drug dealer or they want to be a stick-up kid. Those decisions are made after a series of events have happened in one's life.
You wake up, you wake up, another day, you wake up, you wake up, traffic still moving at the same speed, our eyes looking at the same speed, our minds thinking at the same speed, I wanna see movement, I wanna see change. I wanna wake up for real. I wanna wake up. I wanna wake up. We were meant to live.
I'm not a guy who goes into the neighborhood, gets beat up by the bully's gang, and then now I want to join their gang. That's just not me. I wanna fight - let's go! I mean, I'm gonna stand up for myself. That's just the competitive nature of where I come from, the era I grew up in.
There are many dreams which I never wanna wake up from. Actually, I don't like waking up, full stop. So no matter what the dream is, I just don't wanna wake up and get out of bed.
I'd just find a story in Canada and come and do it. Combine harvester banger - actually I've done that: banger racing up in Red Deer [in Alberta, for his 1998 doc series Extreme Machines].
You take up for your buddies, no matter what they do. When you're a gang, you stick up for the members. If you don't stick up for them, stick together, make like brothers, it isn't a gang anymore. It's a pack. A snarling, distrustful, bickering park like the Socs in their social clubs or the street gangs in New York or the wolves in the timber.
I've had the opportunity to play the drug dealer who gets gang-raped, and I'm like, "For what reason? Doing it just to do it? To just show people that I can be sexy or dark?" I don't want to do something just to make that point. It needs to happen organically, and I'm really confident it will. I'm a pretty patient person, and I'll wait until we find the right stuff.
I grew up a skinny Asian kid who was often ignored or picked on. It stuck with me and branded my soul. As I grew up, I tried to stick up for whoever seemed excluded or marginalized.
I grew up listening to the quartets and I loved that so much that I wanted to see if I could make music and make it happen. It was just a series of events ... me going to concerts and saying "I think I can do that".
I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. But I had gotten in a lot of fights 'cause in the neighborhood I grew up in, that wasn't equated with bad behavior almost. I mean, we'd fought like it was another game. 'You wanna play stick ball today?' 'Nah, let's go fight.'
I wanted to be a visual artist because I grew up around a lot of painters and photographers and had a very artistic upbringing. And I fantasized about being a drug-dealer when I was a kid. I thought it would be a good opportunity; I knew that the market would be strong. Is that bizarre?
My mother taught me this trick: if you repeat something over and over again it loses its meaning, for example homework homework homework homework homework homework homework homework homework, see? Nothing. Our existence she said is the same way. You watch the sunset too often it just becomes 6 pm you make the same mistake over and over you stop calling it a mistake. If you just wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up one day you'll forget why.
You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.
I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.
Wake up, America. The insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America. The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing. Wake up, America. The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America. They want to take your Social Security. Wake up, America. Multinational corporations took over our trade policies, factories are closing, good paying jobs lost. Wake up, America. We went into Iraq for oil.
We sent out tapes to the others but they didn't wake up. It was worth it just to have one kid wake up. I got to meet him after he woke up.
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