The story of the Underground Railroad is a thriller. These are people who are basically in a heist movie, and it's the most precious cargo ever, your life. You're fighting for your freedom.
Music has this ability to bridge time. You can hear a song from the 1920s and still be like, 'Oh, that's it. That's the feeling I have right now.'
I was working at Talesai, which is a Thai restaurant on Sunset. I actually worked there through selling my first script.
It's no secret - I've said this before - people have mistaken me for a P.A. on the set. On my own set.
I mean, you can't help but imagine it a little bit... like, 'What would I do with a Black Canary show?' It'd be exciting, I know that.
When I first read 'Lovecraft Country' I knew it had the potential to be unlike anything else on television.
That's what the best art does, it starts the conversation. What you may see in a scene or a line isn't what I might see, but that conversation we have, that's how we move forward.
We usually center our narratives that come out of Hollywood from a white male center.
I don't want to say you should censor yourselves, but the storyteller should be able to defend why a narrative needed to shift that way or should only be told this way.
I was familiar with Lovecraft, I also was familiar with his history as a person. So I had read his stories but I wasn't bananas like I think that a lot of people get bananas. I was like, they're good and I can definitely see the influences - but I can definitely read them and see the parts where you're being racist right there in your own stories.
There's no limits other than my imagination, which is fantastic.
I do think that Lovecraft is very influential to the horror genre, but I also didn't want to ignore the fact that he's a major racist.
I wanna do mystery, I wanna do sci-fi, I wanna do horror, and I wanna do all of those things.
I'm a huge history buff, so I just love to research, and I'm also slightly lazy.
How do you make sure that you stand your ground and you find your place in the world, even if that place is not the place everyone else tells you it's supposed to be? For me, TV is character-driven and those are the types of characters I want to watch.
I think that's what we like to explore and see on TV these days especially in long form, is complicated people who have to make tough decisions.
I like to hear conversations that are debates.
I think that's when I get excited in the writers' room - when people are yelling back and forth at each other.
One of the things I love so much about horror is the way it uses surprise, and when I write, it's about: What have we not seen before? What's going to surprise us? If we're not going beyond, taking that challenge, I get kind of bored.
It's hard for me to say what viewers will take from a thing because I try not to think about that when I'm making it.
