Zitat des Tages von Lee Daniels:
I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.
I love black women. I live for them. They are everything to me. I'm obsessed with them. They are sophisticated, resilient and smarter than me.
I definitely caught the acting bug, but that lasted for about two seconds when I found my way to L.A. and found that my talents were better suited behind the cameras.
Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.
Most of my friends are dead. I watched friends die in my arms at 5, 6, 8. When I grew up, the rest of my friends died of AIDS.
I don't know what gives me more pleasure: watching my story unfold or going in and watching a room full of black people talking for me and writing words for black people.
Most actors want the audience to like them, and that leads to bad acting.
I started casting. I cast music videos, but I kept getting fired from jobs because I was iconoclastic in my ways of casting.
I had 'Push' and 'The Paperboy' next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels.
My kids tell me to Instagram, so I do that. I have a few thousand followers.
The rules are: The only ego is the film, and you have to serve the film.
'Precious' is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I'm prejudiced. I'm prejudiced against people who are darker than me.
I've had all types of beautiful girls tell me that they ugly when they look in the mirror, as if it's someone else's reflection they see.
Putting on a movie is like going to war - for me, at least. It's all about time; time is money, and we don't have it. So it's all about getting to know each other intimately quickly. You are with family members that you like or don't like, but you can't leave them because you're stuck with them.
I don't know - I haven't seen any of my movies after I finish them. I leave the editing room; I don't go back.
I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.
I don't profess to be Shonda Rhimes by any stretch of the imagination, or Dick Wolf. They're icons. I'm a filmmaker.
Here's the thing: I think the media underestimates the intelligence of the moviegoer. We need to be fulfilled. People want to sit down and think, and I try to make people think.
When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.
I see the world from a very specific perspective. It is how I grew up. It is what I am proud of, and I vocalize it. And for those who have not experienced my experience, it is odd, and it's not mainstream.
If you really spend time with movies, it's three years of your life from beginning to end. I started out planting the seed with 'Monster's Ball' about independent cinema and raising money and that whole thing as a producer, and then it becomes easier for me.
I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.
I think this last film I finished, 'The Butler,' is the closest I will come to as a work-for-hire.
As a film director and as film actors, you get used to a certain rhythm that's slow. But with TV, it's hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. It's a different pace.
To come into my world, I've got some M&Ms and some potato chips, and I'm asking you to move furniture. We're making a movie. We're making it like we're putting on a play.
My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.
The ratings board is completely different when it comes to film versus the television arena.
Rarely do celebrities and actors speak up for what they believe in.
'Shadowboxer' was based on my life.
I went to school at Radnor High School. And I went to a liberal arts college in St. Louis, Missouri, called Lindenwood College.
I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.
I want to see movies I can walk away from and say, 'Wait, what happened there? Hold up, what did I just see? What?' and then it connects to something that you personally, unequivocally know to be truth.
I was always in trouble. I was mischievous. And movies were always a part of my world.
My dad was a cop. My mom worked at various jobs - she worked as a homemaker, a bank teller, a bartender.
I don't know whether everybody likes the films that I do. I know that I love them, and I believe the way that I raise my kids that they will love them, and that's what most important to me.
