We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.
— J. K. Rowling
Fulfilling Black Movie quotations
When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.
I miss my Dad. My Dad loved cheesy monster movies, so we'd have Godzilla movie marathons. Those are some of my favorite memories, laughing at how the monster outfits were so bad, like black garbage bags for heads.
One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie.
I really wish Hollywood would stop labeling movies, especially movies with predominantly black casts. Then, it makes others feel like, "Oh, well, that's not for me." At the end of the day, everybody understands love, loss, pain and heartbreak. That's not a color.
You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant? How about a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase?
I've always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.
I've been identified with pink throughout my career, but I'm not as crazy about it as I've led people to believe. My favorite colors are actually neutrals — black and white — but then who thinks of a movie queen in black and white? Everything has to be in living color.
It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.
I liked speed. I was on black beauties all the time. Nothing bad happened to me. I didn't become a drug addict because I always had to make a movie. We weren't stoned when we made them; I was stoned when I made movies up. I did them all.
When you're first starting out, you want to keep making good movies.
When you're young and you're black, you do a bad movie and you're through.
They allow us to disrespect our Black woman.
A lot of these things would be considered criminal if it were to be carried out in the streets. That's like when they tell you after you buy your VHS and you rent movies they tell you not to copy the movies.
Black movies don't have real names, they have names like Barbershop.
That's not a name, that's just a location.
We have our classic hood movies, right? Like "Boyz in the Hood.
" We have our classic conscious films like Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," or "Stand By Me." Even beyond Coogler, there are black films that are just voices. So the intention behind this ["The Land"] was to capture today's.
It's so important to create roles and characters and projects that feature black people in a way that's not specifically targeted toward 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 ... I want to see dynamic characters and roles that everyone wants to watch.
Making a movie is like a chess game. It's about constantly changing patterns, adapting to new things. It's not just black and white, as you know.
Mother loathed the all-black B movies Hollywood made for the "colored" audience, where the stereotypes were broader and more offensive to her, and where the musical interludes did no justice to real talent, she said, but trivialized it.
I imagine it was much different in the 1970s.
That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now.
Naturally we need black men to give this movie serious credibility.
White people made up the n-word, they knew about racial jokes before anybody, and in their old movies and old cartoons they made fun of everybody, especially black folks. Racial jokes were not new to them.
I have a theory. An audience doesn't need to get wrapped up in blackness every time they see a Negro actor. And a movie doesn't have to be about race just because there's a Negro in it.
The whites have always had the say in America.
White people made Jesus white, angels white, the Last Supper white. If I threaten you, I'm blackmailing you. A black cat is bad luck. If you're put out of a club, you're blackballed. Angel's-food cake is white; devil's-food cake is black. Good guys in cowboy movies wear white hats. The bad guys always wore black hats.
Period recreation is very difficult unless you make a black-and-white movie.
I love to unwind and watch movies, especially those from the classic black-and-white era.
The other two things are... well, I had a huge appetite for old black and white movies on BBC 2. At the weekends they used to run matinees, and the more romantic the better.
It's hard to find black roles that are just whimsical and fun and colorful.
And I think, in many ways, that can be just as powerful in making commentary about race through movies.
My first feature film was a movie called 'A Gunfight,' with Kirk Douglas, Johnny Cash, Karen Black, Jane Alexander, Raf Vallone... It was shot in Santa Fe, Mexico, in 1970, and it was directed by Lamont Johnson. It was the first gig I did when I got to California from having done 'Hair' in New York on Broadway for a year. It was a Western, though! But that film was not a successful release.
What!? You tell people that, I won't get no more black movies?
Racing does to white guys what movies do to black guys.
I was born a poor black child.
It's very difficult to get any movies done about Black heroes - Haitian or American - in Hollywood. The argument in Hollywood is that there is no market for those movies, and that is not true.
Black and white is much closer to the condition of dreaming.
It links you to the subconscious and I think that was part of the great appeal of movies originally.. this strange otherness.
I've done movies for certain reasons;
I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'
I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.