Rick Famuyiwa Quotes

Rick Famuyiwa

Profession : Director

Birth : June 18, 1973

We all would shudder if what we did, no matter what, in our 20s and early 30s were publicly displayed on a national stage.

Rick Famuyiwa

This whole thing with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas happened during my first year of college. It was a cross-section of race and politics and gender that I feel is still going on today.

Rick Famuyiwa

It would have been more comfortable for us as a society if Anita Hill wasn't as intelligent, poised, and credible as she was.

Rick Famuyiwa

As filmmakers and as actors, you have to find truth.

Rick Famuyiwa

I've been a fan of Wendell Pierce for a very long time. He was in one of my early movies and he brings such a level of heart and humanity to his roles.

Rick Famuyiwa

Inglewood is a microcosm of Los Angeles. It's a city by the airport. It's the first city when you're coming into L.A., and the last city when you leave.

Rick Famuyiwa

I think 'The Wood' was probably more concerned with the parts of Inglewood that aren't usually seen on film - the areas that were middle-class, or upper-middle-class - and that idea that these worlds do exist, and should be accepted as part of Inglewood itself.

Rick Famuyiwa

'The Wood' was sort of like 'American Graffiti' for me in a lot of different ways.

Rick Famuyiwa

I'm probably going to be ashamed to say this... It was a Sir Mix-a-Lot album. I think I was 12, 13. I had just enough money for the 'My Posse's on Broadway' single, so I bought that single. That was the first thing I bought with my own money.

Rick Famuyiwa

For me growing up when hip hop was forming and maturing and coming into its own, I just felt I was a part of something really exciting. I was a part of it as a consumer.

Rick Famuyiwa

For those of us who grew in the early hip hop era, that music shaped us in a way to be in a position to express ourselves.

Rick Famuyiwa

As a black man working in the business, it's a challenge sometimes to get some of these things and these stories told when they don't quite fit in a box or convention of what people expect of you or what you should be telling.

Rick Famuyiwa

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

Rick Famuyiwa

People come to L.A. and they expect to see a ghetto like the projects, but that's not the way it's set up. Inglewood, in particular, is the furthest thing from a ghetto. It's a middle-class community, but it's gotten a bad rap over the years... because of 'Grand Canyon' and 'Pulp Fiction' and other films.

Rick Famuyiwa

The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.

Rick Famuyiwa

I always say it's hard to cast an African-American film sometimes because those kinds of actors just aren't out there.

Rick Famuyiwa

Broadway doesn't mean anything in Los Angeles.

Rick Famuyiwa

When you're young, you sort of have an idea that this is how it's always gonna be as a filmmaker. And then you have the ups and downs of trying to get your art created in an industry that doesn't traditionally make films with you and people that look like you behind the camera.

Rick Famuyiwa

Kendrick Lamar is from Compton, but his Compton and how he expresses that is completely different than NWA and Eazy-E even though they were from the same environment.

Rick Famuyiwa

That's the one drawback of trying to keep up with technology, is that it changes quicker than films can come out.

Rick Famuyiwa