Storytelling is always evolving, but if you allow people with new voices and perspectives to come in, you open audiences up to different walks of life.
I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that you go see from Pixar, we're hoping is a little bit of a surprise.
I think the main struggle for women in Hollywood and women in my position is to fight for true representation in the media and accurate representation of our many diverse qualities in stories.
There's even more blending of genres happening. They blend sci-fi with action, or family drama with a mystery show. People don't want to just do the same thing that everybody's done a thousand times before, and that's probably a big part of it. I think you're also seeing television and features speak to each other. You see it happen in movies, and it starts to get reflected on the small screen.
We have to stop thinking about diversity and start thinking about inclusion. That's what you can take from August Wilson. That there are whole cultures out there living experiences exactly like yours, and their stories can be just as dynamic, sold in the foreign market, put as many butts in the seats as any Caucasian movie out there.
I think we have a long way to go in the entertainment industry, particularly in movies, but I feel like in television, there's somebody is finally saying, 'Hey, women have stories to tell, and oddly enough, women want to hear them.'
I think what Hollywood is learning at large is that there is profitability in stories that are culturally specific and that you can only address the universal through the specific.
A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.
You know, it shouldn't just be about women as heroic figures overcoming things, it just needs to be about women in general getting the opportunity to play a multitude of roles, telling a multitude of stories - just to express human experience from a woman's perspective. I hope, someday, we can get to that point. I'm all about representation.
When 93 percent of our stories are told by white men, it's an issue. And if those white men go on and tell the stories the way they see their world, which is all white, then it's an even bigger problem.
I think as you have a more diverse group of people working in the industry, you automatically have more diverse storytelling. That's definitely to be celebrated for sure.
Whether you look at 'Glee' and its normalization of gay identity or you look at the work of Martin Scorsese and the Italian-American community, American culture is able to take these stories, which are seen as marginalized, and just turn them into American stories. And you don't think twice about it.
I think it's very improtant and healthy to tell differnt stories than the corporatist narratives we are being asked to swallow hook, line and sinker.
It's interesting because diversity doesn't just happen by garnishing your omelet with a little bit of parsley. Diversity happens because the people that are telling the stories - the writers, directors, storytellers - want to tell their story.
In my opinion, I feel like all versions of 'Deathstroke' are valid. Just like with 'Black Panther,' I felt like it wasn't good for a writer to say another writer's work was invalid or never happened.
I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.
I try to keep each different book different from the last. So 'Sag Harbor' is very different from 'Apex Hides the Hurt;' 'The Intuitionist,' which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from 'John Henry Days.' I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.
There are so many stories from the Midwest that should be told. L.A. tells one story, and it's often about itself.
I try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.
I can't compare these movies (Vampire Academy/Twilight/Harry Potter). Every single one of them has their own mythology.
I would like to do more millennial, Latina, complicated stories.
I'd like to see more female heads of studios because what's also being crucially lost is the female perspective: 50% of the population are not having their stories told.
I would like to see more female stories out there, particularly older female stories.
Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
