Lulu Wang Quotes

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'

There needs to be more film directors of colour. They bandy about the word 'diversity' a lot, but when I say 'of colour,' I mean Asian, black - I mean people of all colour. We need to have those voices given the opportunity, not told that their films will not be distributed or will not sell well abroad.

When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like 'Bird,' I use 90% black people.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

If you get into multicultural sort of casting for no other reason than to diversify, then it seems false.

My work has always been controversial within certain segments of the Asian-American community. This is a community that is generally not represented well at all on the stage, in the media, etc. So on those few occasions when something comes along, everybody feels obligated to make sure that it represents his own point of view.

I think what we need, especially in publishing, is more commissioning editors and editors who are people of colour.

I look forward to the day when indigenous actors can play Hamlet and Ophelia and not just Othello and Desdemona.

It's not enough even to have one black Barbie... because black women are not a monolith.

I have lots of hopes for black actors in general, whether they be on TV or on stage or in movies, and that is that we move beyond the tokenism of what it means to be black in a particular set of circumstances.

I have a responsibility to diversity onstage, but one of the things I've heard about our production of 'Boys' is that it's a bunch of white guys. Well, race is a component of this play. You can't just drop people in willy-nilly and say, 'Well, we're going for diversity.'

Our culture today that we live in is getting so diverse, yet in Hollywood, there's not a lot of diversity.

I grew up figure skating, and in figure skating there is only a handful of black people at the time figure skating with me.

We need to encourage the presence of more Asian writers and executive producers so they can fight for normalizing the casting of Asians in traditional American roles.

It's odd to say we had our first African American president before our first African-American-owned movie studio, but we're making progress.

In Australia, there just weren't strong roles for actors of colour. I was often being asked to turn up for commercials with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder. I thought, 'Are we in the '60s?'

I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.

I think I would like to see more roles for South Asian performers that are more inclusive and part of the American Diaspora, the American tapestry, perhaps the way that African American and Hispanic roles have developed.

I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.

I also have a film coming up called Breaking Up, and my part in that was not written for a Latina, and my character is not particularly pretty or sexy or exotic.

We need more people working in the publishing industry itself who are people of colour.

My hope is that shows like 'Fresh Off the Boat' open the door for even more of those kinds of characters for Asian actors and actresses.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.

Every child deserves to see themselves in stories they can enjoy, but it isn't the place of white people to decide how and why those stories are created and marketed.

Casting ethnic characters is a very hard thing to do, but it's important. It's also interesting.