Mathieu Kassovitz Quotes

You cannot act a color. Do not tell me I'm acting black, because I'm not. I'm acting whatever you want to call it - urban. I don't even have a name for it. I just call it 'me.'

Nas always been my favorite rapper, but 50 Cent, he changed my way of thinking about music 'cause he was so detailed in his music, I knew that wasn't lying. I never felt Tupac that way; I never felt Biggie that way. I love Nas music, but I never felt and believed like, 'This is for real.' 'Cause I grew up that gangsta lifestyle.

How did we suddenly become entranced with gangster culture? I saw it this morning on campus. When did the black community say we should all look like criminals?

Did people think I sounded black? Totally, but that was a marketing tool as well, but also this is how I grew up and these are my influences.

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

I'm just disillusioned with the hip-hop sound right now. It's too materialistic. You know, I'm the kind of guy ... I can't do that. If you track my movement, you'll never see a picture of me with any girl that wasn't mine, or my own car. My jewelry, my clothes. What kind of gangsta rapper has a stylist? A stylist?!

Sometimes when things you love get really commercial, you end up feeling betrayed by it.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.

I couldn't possibly have lived all the things that Ice-T on the records lived.

Rap is from the streets and I'm from the streets. That's why a lot of people accept me.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

There's so much material out there that's unnecessarily racist. It takes a shot at what is 'urban' or demonstrates blackness with some sassy, neck-jiving character that's not even relevant to the plot. I see it time and time again, and it doesn't move the story forward. It just kind of cryogenically freezes us in this old racial paradigm.

Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times.

I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.

Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.

I certainly would never presume to play another race of a person. Diversity is important in Hollywood, and I would never want to feel like I was playing a character that was offensive.

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

Usually when you hear about rappers in Asia, they always try to be like gangsters and stuff like that and I don't get it.

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.

Gangsta rap was the most important movement since the beginning of rock n' roll.

I'm just a Harlem dude that can rap, and people dig my style and persona.

There's a lot of other rappers that aren't what they claim to be, and they get a pass because they're black.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

I had a lot of respect for Prodigy. He brought the hood to the booth. When we were trying to shape this rap thing into something, he was one of the cats I respected for bringing the hood into the booth.