Jim Brown Quotes

Many times, I get young people asking, 'What do you think about black movies?' And I say, 'What are you talking about? You mean Hollywood movies that have black people in them?' It's gone back to that, and that's not the same thing as a black movie.

Now that the black experience isn't viewed as box-office death, people are catching up to untapped auteurs.

What happened when 'Sweetback' made all that money, the studios were in a very difficult position. They wanted the money, but they didn't the message. This marked the advent of the caricatures which became known as blaxploitation.

A film actor is just a victim of directors and editors.

By the time I was 21, I knew what I wanted to do, and that was to direct films.

I'd like to do a film in Canada, but it's too difficult. National Film Board funding takes too long, and there's too much paperwork; by the time the film is approved the topic is dead and gone.

At first I was always cast as the girlfriend. It was a long time before I got to play characters who were people.

I liked 'The Help,' and I love Viola Davis. But I didn't think that film was a great film; I thought that was a very uneven film. I thought the Southern women were so caricatured that it was kind of like 'Harper Valley PTA' or something like that.

Often, people who want to make interesting films simply don't have the money to do it.

If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to. People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation.

Every time you work, it's a new film, and generally when you work with auteurs, people that write and direct their films, there's always an originality.

I've been around the music business for a long time now, and I've had a lot of chances to do movies. But I didn't really want to do any until I found stuff that started to hit me in the right place.

You end up giving up half your salary every time you make a movie because you need the money to make the movie you have in your head.

The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.

In my opinion, the true pioneers are those artists who make manifest in their works the new content, the determining characteristics of life in our time.

Film making is an expensive, as well as a serious business. We should be able to entertain our audiences, who are fully aware of what they want. Every filmmaker has a different point of view and presents facets of society.

Shows in the '70s and '80s were a lot more provocative. Shows that are coming out now - like 'Black-Ish,' 'The Carmichael Show' - are showcasing people of color in a new way. It's not stereotypical.

The movies 'Dope' and 'Straight Outta Compton' blew me away. I love seeing directors and writers of color make amazing slices of pop culture.

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.

The first movie I ever saw was a blaxploitation movie. It was called 'Monkey Hustle.' Like I said, just listen to the name. That's a blaxploitation movie. It had these incredible, bigger-than-life images of people who looked like I did. Or who looked like I wanted to look like.

I want to put something on the screen that audiences have never seen black actors do before, roles that will widen views of who African-Americans are.

Film was something I didn't really think about when I was young, because if you looked like me, you weren't a film star.

The kind of films I want to make are struggling to get made. And if they are getting made, they're getting made on shoestring budgets with not enough time.

If you're going to make black movies only about black people, that's as bad as white movies only about white people.

It's so important to create roles and characters and projects that feature black people in a way that's not specifically targeted towards the niche market, which is, like, a black movie is created, and it's produced and pitched so that only black people will watch it.