I was 22, and 40 was old. To be 40 again!
A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer's name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.
I know what you go through when you learn someone close to you has died.
First of all, the leads aren't the kind of acting work that I like. The parts that are meatier are not the ones that have to have a romance.
When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.
Usually, the worst films become cult films.
People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.
What goes on between a father and a son, which is usually such a private matter, is that they are able to be honest with each other, and be honest with me, as a director. It's just remarkable.
You can take your life into your own hands in terms of directing. There are ways for you to finance yourself and to write and make a film.
After the Oscar for 'Shampoo,' I had a sense, even as I was walking up to get it, that this was the height of where I was going to go as an actress. And I felt that now was the time, if I wanted a longer life in the arts, that I had to jump from acting to directing.
Film and television were out. I was 24, and it went on until I was 36. For an actor, those are your years. I got a great urgency and education during the blacklist, and it made me grow up in a way I never could have before, and in very good ways, too.
I started writing to reassure myself that I was still all here.
