RICK FAMUYIWA

I felt like Inglewood, being the place where I originally found my voice, would be the place where I could sort of redefine my voice.

There are constant challenges about what's 'mainstream.' These kids in 'Dope' are as mainstream as the kids in 'Superbad' or 'The Breakfast Club.'

Now being 41 and looking back on my career... It became natural for me to revisit Inglewood and to revisit the coming-of-age movie, but not wanting it to feel like a period piece completely about nostalgia but wanting it to feel like something that was relevant today and also forward-looking.

I've been a fan of Wendell Pierce for a very long time. He was in one of my early movies and he brings such a level of heart and humanity to his roles.

I wanted to try and change the idea of what we call mainstream. So many times what we call mainstream is upper middle class white suburbia. And anything outside of that is considered niche.

Societies are being interconnected and we have to adjust to that fact.

I was always this weird outcast kid.

There's a generation that doesn't care if Tom Cruise is at the top of the movie. They want authenticity.

Kendrick Lamar is from Compton, but his Compton and how he expresses that is completely different than NWA and Eazy-E even though they were from the same environment.

Why is it when a woman makes a film or a movie stars a female cast it is labeled women-centric because it is not white, male and middle-class men?

I loved films like 'When Harry Met Sally' and 'Annie Hall,' but these were very specific, white Manhattan experiences. You don't see a single person of color anywhere, but somehow these films are universal. As a filmmaker and creator, I was frustrated with that idea.

We all would shudder if what we did, no matter what, in our 20s and early 30s were publicly displayed on a national stage.

It would have been more comfortable for us as a society if Anita Hill wasn't as intelligent, poised, and credible as she was.

We've all seen these projections of how society is going to look in 50 years. We're all going to have to deal with each other culturally.

When you're young, you sort of have an idea that this is how it's always gonna be as a filmmaker. And then you have the ups and downs of trying to get your art created in an industry that doesn't traditionally make films with you and people that look like you behind the camera.

I think the younger generation's view on race is slightly more evolved. It's a category far down on the list of how they see themselves.

All films are a challenge and they are a harder challenge when dealing with characters of color.

I remember growing up watching John Hughes movies and watching these white kids from suburban Chicago. I connected to them even though I didn't live in their environment.

Anita Hill has changed the history of how we deal with each other in the workplace. But it also was an interesting episode in how race and the history of race converged in this moment and got used and twisted and interpreted in all kind of ways.

'Black cinema' I don't even know what that means. It's just cinema. When Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, we don't just say it's 'white cinema.'

I was a political science major before I transferred into film school.

I consider 'Dope' a part of the new mainstream.

We don't discuss race, so just the discussion of race has become racist. We've been trained that it's such a lightning rod that we don't even want to say the word.

You might go into 'Dope' feeling you already know what this movie is because, all right, there's kids, they're from Inglewood, oh, it's drugs.

'The Wood' was sort of like 'American Graffiti' for me in a lot of different ways.