A'Lelia Bundles Quotes

I go into any movie that's historical fiction thinking, 'OK, I'm here to watch a work of art, something delivering a series of opinions, and if it's a good work of art, these opinions become so deeply embedded in complexity and richness that I won't even be bothered by the opinions. I'll make my own mind up.'

The question is - did Richard Attenborough have a right to make 'Gandhi?' And did Danny Boyle have a right to make 'Slumdog Millionaire?' Quite honestly, if they didn't have the right to make these films, I had no right to make 'Elizabeth.'

'Rome' plays on universal human emotions that hopefully people can relate to. Historians are always going to be offended by it.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

I've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.

This practice of skinny actresses donning fat suits is essentially the new and acceptable blackface in Hollywood.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.

Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question.

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

The problem with doing [painting] Nixon is that if you make him look nice, he doesn’t look like Nixon anymore.

One of the occupational hazards of reviewing year-end biopics with Oscar ambitions is pointing out discrepancies between the real subjects and their on-screen avatars.

We know that the elements in play in a show like 'Confederate' are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called 'Westeros,' which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show.

Why can't black women on stage tell stories that can affect white men in the audience?

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

I think it's fair to ask how truthful a film is as opposed to how factual it is.

Alex, who I play on 'Quantico' - that part wasn't written for an Indian girl. So they changed her background to make her half Indian and half Caucasian.

There's racist casting, and there is normal casting. Normal casting, to me, is a process that strives for representation and, in many cases, strives to simply portray the world as it actually is instead of as falsely non-inclusive. And sadly, sometimes that involves removing the whitewash that exists on history.

We are in a diversity age. I talk about the lack of diversity for black Americans, but what about the Asian Americans? You don't see them very often. They have a show called 'Fresh off the Boat.' No one is talking about that show. I saw it, and I found that show completely offensive, but I'm not Asian American.

For a while, I was feeling like I was always playing characters that weren't specifically Korean or specifically Asian, even - that they were characters who were originally written white, and then they would cast me. And I used to consider that a badge of honor because that meant I had avoided stereotypes.

I've heard about productions where it still happens: yellow face, taping up the eyes. It's hard to talk about it in a constructive way.

The mini-series 'The Bronx is Burning' thoroughly embarrassed me the way the story was told.

The truth of the matter is, I am a black woman, and I am an actor. I don't try to get caught up in being a black actor; I'm just an actor who is a black woman. It's not about forgetting that you're black, but you don't need to be hammered over the head, either; it just is what it is.

All Blaxploitation is, is the opportunity for an African-American cast or lead actor or actress to do the same things that a white action hero gets to do.