A Quote by Stephen Frears
This black hole that people talk about in my career in the '70s, when I didn't make any films - in retrospect, what I was doing was learning my job.
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One of the big mysteries about the black hole at the center of the galaxy is, 'Why don't we see emission from matter falling onto the black hole, or, rather, the black hole eating up its surroundings?'
Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard. What you’ve really got to do is focus on learning as much about life, and about various aspects of it first.
My life is a black hole of boredom and despair." "So basically you've been doing homework." "Like I said, black hole.
I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people.
It's really a great luxury to have, to be able to go from big films to indie films, too. Because I'm on the job learning as an actor, and independent films is where I'm learning to act.
I've really dreamed of doing television. All of us do television, coming up. But when I was coming up, television was a black hole for actors. Now, television has a certain cache. Now everybody wants to be on TV because they're doing adult dramas. If you're an actor, it's like, "Well, get me on television," because it's the only place you can do it and also make a living at it. If my kids need shoes, I better do a TV show because I damn sure don't make any money with independent films.
How many black people are there in the higher echelons of any industry? We can talk about journalism, we can talk about politics. So why should football be any different?
I don't have any advice at all. I think we all make the films that reflect the kind of people we are; we all make such different films. There's not just one way of doing it.
People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.
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.
A lot of times, we talk about black people as if being black is all they are. They get up, go to work... and are as complex and interesting and variable as any other group of people. We don't often capture that or write about it.
One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.
I definitely don't intend to only make films about Nigerians or Africans. I want to make films about people, any people.
The studios aren't lining up to make films about black protagonists, black people being autonomous and independent.
I think doing research is probably the most valuable thing you can do for any career you're interested in pursuing, and not just a career on YouTube or in media. Really take a look at people whose careers you admire and learning from their successes, but also their mistakes.
Yes, you can have art films about the triumph of the human spirit and all of that, but you'll have it done with a big-budget icon with a $20 million salary. You'll have Julia Roberts, you'll have Robert Redford, you'll have Russell Crowe doing those films, because if they're going to cost $90 million, they're going to make that movie for a public that's very large and mainstream. They're not going to make it for three or four million black people.
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