I might be more satisfied seeing my friends really come up than myself. I'm really happy for my success, but I can't really see it, because I'm myself working. You can see it; everyone around me can see it.
I learned a lot from working with and watching Knxwledge, seeing how he produces non-stop. He doesn't dwell too long on stuff. He's very simple, using only about two or three elements. I like that in production. Sometimes it doesn't take more than three drums, a melody, the vocal, looping a sample or whatever, just as minimal as possible.
People have a preconceived notion about who I am and it's interesting. It's like picking who you want to win for the Oscars and not seeing the movie. Before you make a statement about someone, get all the information and see everything before you make a judgment.
From my very first movie, what was my concentration, my inspiration, was I didn't want to narrate something, I didn't want to tell a story. I wanted to show something, I wanted for them to make their own story from what they were seeing.
When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I'm more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of them. I am fine if they want to take my pictures, but they are not public property.
I was on Facebook. I was on MySpace. And somebody said to me, You should check out this thing called Twitter. I knew five people that were on it, so I started following those people and seeing what they were doing, and then I applied my own sensibility to it. The more that I shared, the more people started following me.
Each country its cost analysis is going to be different. So what we are you seeing in Syria, for example, is different than what's going on in Jordan. The maps are being rewritten.
My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat - or in film's case 'run on' - manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.
I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'
My kid will come home from seeing the latest 'Transformers' movie, and I'll ask him, 'How was it?' 'Amazing!' 'What was it about?' 'I don't know, but it was amazing!'
When I went to university, I finally got exposed to European films, and they had a strong impact on me. I felt those films had a lot of things to say that weren't getting expressed in the films I was used to seeing.
Work is a way of bringing order to chaos, and there's a basic satisfaction in seeing that we are able to make something a little more coherent by the end of the day.
Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren't.
