Top 50 Justin Simien Quotes

The thing about TV is you kind of have an endless canvas. You can always keep going.

There are a plethora of ways of being black, just like there’s many ways to being white.

You can’t get along in society without an identity.

‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ – I’m not a lesbian, I’m not French, I’m not a woman, but I saw so much of myself in those women and in those characters. I saw different parts of myself than I ever would’ve seen if I hadn’t seen that film.

Racism is over in the ‘Star Trek’ future, but they found a way to comment on sexism and racism in the present day in such a subversive and smart way, you know?

Part of my struggle with being gay was that a lot of my homophobia was internalized because of the cues that I was – received. I didn’t see anybody like myself in the culture. RuPaul was the closest to a gay, out black man that I had growing up.

I think I’ll always be making movies that intend to say something new.

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – I’d watched and hated it seven times before it provided the first ‘religious experience’ I’d ever had watching a film. Finally, I was able to pick up on what the film was transmitting almost entirely through dialogue.

I’ve always thought that ‘Dear White People’ should live on as a TV show, so I’ll leave it at that.

Everyone at a performing arts schools is weird. The weirder you were, the better. If you weren’t weird in some way, they’d look at you and be like, ‘Who’s that square?’

Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

I never liked ‘Donnie Darko’ quite as much as my film school peers.

I have different privileges because I am a man, and I have to acknowledge that and realize that another person of color who is also a woman is having a different experience than I am.

The further away you get from being a straight white man, the less freedoms you have to figure out who you are and negotiate what you mean to society.

It’s always kind of gratifying to go back to the place that launched you and show you did good.

Shonda Rhimes has figured it out, of getting multiracial casts on television and appealing to everybody.

There was a time when a studio executive would really love something and have no proof at all that it would work and just do it because they believed in it. That’s how ‘Star Wars’ happened.

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

I think art is much more valuable when it’s honest. If it’s not honest, it’s just propaganda.

The way Hollywood and TV is, black people don’t have any choice but to see ourselves in white-dominated television shows and stories and movies.

I went to a school called Chapman University, which is a wonderful film school. It was a great program, but it was very white, and it was a culture shock for me because I grew up in Houston, Texas, and I went through what they call magnet schools, so my friends were like a Benetton ad.

I saw ‘Beauty and the Beast’ at eight years old in theatres and spent hours trying to recreate the majestic imagery of that story in a drawing notepad at home.

When you’re part of a society where you’re constantly having to define your identity and sort of negotiate with what the mainstream culture thinks you are, you have less energy and time to figure out who you are when you go home at night.

You know what, man, that’s part and parcel of being a black person in this country: everything’s harder. It just is.

I’m not a big fan of shooting something that looks like it could belong in any movie. I’m not a fan of, okay, ‘wide shot, wide shot, medium shot, close-up, close-up – we’ll figure it out in post.’ I hate that.

I tend to take on too many projects at the same time, but as I’ve always done, I will continue to shift my focus onto whatever feels most urgent in the moment.

We get caught in our little silos and end up working against ourselves. And I think social media culture really encourages that, because you’re really just shouting into a void hoping someone picks up on what you’re saying.

Hip-hop isn’t dead by any means, but it’s not something I define my black identity with.

Hollywood is a world where the only thing that gets green-lit is something that made money the last year.

Everybody else was quoting 2Pac, and I was running around with Green Day in my Walkman. Racially speaking, I wasn’t cool or appropriate for any group.

It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people’s impressions of me because they see a tall black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.

Any time a black person has the audacity to tell everybody else that they’re also human beings, they are confronted with all kinds of malice and violence and ill will. It’s been that way since black people were brought to this country.

That is just the reality of being a marginalized person in this country: you have to deal with the psychological impact of your oppressor – whether that’s being a woman dealing with men or gay people dealing with straight people or trans people dealing with everybody else.

I think unless we have an honest conversation about race and identity in this country, we’re never going to get anywhere.

For whatever reason, gay characters, or characters that deal with sexuality issues, who are black, in ‘black films’… are typically not dealt with with any sort of complexity. They’re exoticized: their being gay is sort of the point.

I think I have a threshold for taking things too seriously.

‘Color-blind’ comes up – people say ‘Oh, I’m color-blind and therefore can’t be accused of racism,’ but I think that if we are going to have an honest dialogue about racism, we have to admit that people of color are having a different experience.

I definitely have fun commenting on the real world and interpreting through the ‘Dear White People’ lens.

If you walk out of a movie that’s meant to be about race in our country, and you’re feeling good and happy, then that movie didn’t tell you all of the truth. It’s too big of an issue, and it’s too complicated for you to feel good. It’s something you should feel like you need to talk about.

If I just wanted to put clean, perfect images of black people on the screen for an hour and a half, first of all, there are other people already doing that, and they’re making a lot of money doing it.

I remember distinctly not seeing myself. I didn’t see myself in black culture, white culture, mass culture.

One of the things that I love about Robert Altman’s movies is that, really, a Robert Altman movie is just a bunch of short films about various people told at the same time.

I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was a kid. I always did things that took me a little closer to that.

Everyone is very aware that, not only do we have a race problem, but it’s so pervasive that it affects national and global politics on a scale that I don’t think a lot of people imagined.

Self-doubt is a constant companion for a chubby, gay, black boy born in the South.

Balance, I think, and self-care is something I want people to really take to heart.

In the press, there’s this desire for the black audience to be this monolithic thing that always responds to the same stars. That’s a really reductive way of looking at the black audience.

It’s called ‘Dear White People,’ but really, it’s about these black characters and how they are involved or not involved in a racial scandal in ways that might surprise them and others, right?

To surrender your ego, you have to have one first.

Shows like ‘Empire’… one of the most profound powerful things is that there’s a gay male character who is loved. That character is going to save a lot of people’s lives. Black families are confronting the idea that a gay black character can be human.