I always considered myself as a character actor. I always try to be versatile to show different sides of human experience.

I left Jamaica for a while because as an artist I need to experience different things see the world have different energies. Living in one place is not good for me.

When you go to the movies with your whole family it's a different experience. For some reason it's something that you're all doing together and you take away something special in that.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

I can't control what people think. I'm not trying to manipulate people's thoughts or sentiments. I write all the time. You have to experience life make observations and ask questions. It's machine-like how things are run now in hip-hop and my ambitions are different.

A woman's experience is different from a man's in virtually every respect including how she is treated by the media.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

You can't leave out half the world's experience and expect to address all the problems. Women communicate differently and process information differently which leads them to resolve conflicts differently.

That's not to say that women's priorities are better than men's. Rather when women are empowered when they can speak from the experience of their own lives they often address different previously neglected issues. And families and whole communities benefit.

We are different in essence from other men. If you want to win something run 100 meters. If you want to experience something run a marathon.