Stereotypes in Film Quotes

Most books and movies that are handed to teenagers are filled with stereotypes.

From a young age, [James Baldwin] was watching all those different films. He's watching John Wayne killing off the Indians. He came to the point that the Indians were him. You had to educate yourself because the movies were not educating you. The movies were giving you a reflection of you that was not the truth. That's the trick. The movie was also giving a reflection of what the country is. Basically, a country that wanted itself to be innocent. That's the ambivalence of Hollywood.

We're in a world where every single movie, if it has a woman in it, is usually wrapped around the woman wanting to be liked in some way, either in her life, or she's young, she's an ingenue, she's a hero, she's the lover of somebody, she's the grandmother, she's a chef.

I was clear: "I don't want to play businessmen with bifocal glasses and cameras, so if you're going to give me an Asian bad guy to play, then I'm going to give you the baddest Asian bad guy you've ever seen, and you're not going to forget that I was in the film."

I don't think there is a guy that played more gay characters than I have done in my life.

I'd love to be in a period drama - that's my obsession. But being a mixed-race actress, there aren't so many roles you're right for.

Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

I think it's very repressive for a woman to be constantly told that she has to make films about women to better represent women, but then the reverse is not found.

There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime.

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