Rick Famuyiwa Quotes

Rick Famuyiwa

Profession : Director

Birth : June 18, 1973

When I first started working on 'The Wood,' these people couldn't grasp the concept that, one, there is a black middle class, and, two, Inglewood is a part of it.

Rick Famuyiwa

It could be why it's getting harder and harder to get people into the cinemas and multiplexes, because we're just seeing a world that doesn't reflect reality.

Rick Famuyiwa

There's a hunger our there for different types of stories, and I think there's an audience that's waiting and primed to accept a vision of America that looks like what they see when they walk out of the door each day.

Rick Famuyiwa

We're a country of many different cultures, and that's always what has made this country stand out. It almost feels like making diverse movies is the most American thing you can do.

Rick Famuyiwa

I loved films like 'When Harry Met Sally' and 'Annie Hall,' but these were very specific, white Manhattan experiences. You don't see a single person of color anywhere, but somehow these films are universal. As a filmmaker and creator, I was frustrated with that idea.

Rick Famuyiwa

Love stories happen in communities outside of just the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Rick Famuyiwa

So many kids that we label as 'thugs' and 'criminals' are often those same kids that end up in circumstances that are out of their own control.

Rick Famuyiwa

Societies are being interconnected and we have to adjust to that fact.

Rick Famuyiwa

Ultimately we're all moving towards a time when the races will be more and more mixed and we will all be brown to some extent.

Rick Famuyiwa

I really love weddings. You are surrounded by people who are strangers and then after you say 'I do' those strangers become family.

Rick Famuyiwa

You might go into 'Dope' feeling you already know what this movie is because, all right, there's kids, they're from Inglewood, oh, it's drugs.

Rick Famuyiwa

I was fortunate to write pretty much a year out of film school and start making movies in the Hollywood studio system. But with each progressive film it became more frustrating not being able to speak and say things I wanted to say.

Rick Famuyiwa

Because of technology, there's no longer the social shaming that goes on if you're a black kid walking into a record store to buy Nirvana.

Rick Famuyiwa

But at the end of the day, the lottery of birth shouldn't determine your value to the world.

Rick Famuyiwa

When I wrote 'High Stakes,' I followed the classical format. I wrote an outline first, then a first draft, then got feedback and rewrote and rewrote it. I'd never done that before.

Rick Famuyiwa

Maybe I'm more suited to making small independent films.

Rick Famuyiwa

I was always this weird outcast kid.

Rick Famuyiwa

There are constant challenges about what's 'mainstream.' These kids in 'Dope' are as mainstream as the kids in 'Superbad' or 'The Breakfast Club.'

Rick Famuyiwa

I think the trick is to understand that universal isn't defined by a singular way of being. We don't have to somehow accept universal as being middle class, or white, or whatever it may be.

Rick Famuyiwa

There's this responsibility you feel to present a certain thing that kind of respectability politics. I think that became the only accepted way of defining black culture. I started to become too aware of 'How does this look?' instead of 'Who are these characters?'

Rick Famuyiwa