In an homage, you always want to subvert it and have fresh new takes. You don't want the audience to say, 'Oh they just did 'The Amityville Horror' there,' you always want to add something new.
When you have 10 people in a room, you're always able to come up with new ideas.
One of the reasons I love horror so much is - when it's done well - you can keep peeling away the layers and see something new every time.
I was like, 'Oh, let's do a show about the Underground Railroad.' I never come up with great titles, and I thought, 'Underground' is a fantastic title. I got really excited.
I got a dollhouse when I was six, and my sister would always say, 'You realize you're just talking to yourself. What are you doing?' That kind of opened up this creative need to tell stories.
Sometimes you don't find out why you needed to tell a story until you're telling it.
The story of the Underground Railroad is the story of American heroes, and who doesn't want to hear a story about American heroes?
The Underground Railroad was a spy network for the North and that story has never been told.
For me, I feel like horror space has always been a space of the other, even when it's not people of color or black people. That has always drawn me to it, and I've been a big fan.
What's so interesting is taking kind of all these horror tropes and really finding black history and American history to layer on top of it.
Horror is my favorite genre, but it works best for me when it's a metaphor on top of something we can all relate to.
'Get Out' definitely brought it to the mainstream, but you can look back at the original 'Night of the Living Dead' and that's definitely a commentary on racism.
The horror genre has long been used to uncover the dark underbelly of things.
Everybody wants to watch the underdog win.
The casting process starts off really scary, especially when you're trying to find a Harriet Tubman.
When people walk into our casting room, we do think about what you do outside of being an actor.
Aisha Hinds wasn't in my life one day, and now suddenly I see her every day. I'm like 'You're amazing. What are you doing right now? I have to see you, I'm coming over!'
I just wanna keep making stuff that - in a very selfish way - I find interesting.
In 'Underground,' you have to write for everyone, even the bad guys. People need to laugh and love and have voices and do bad things. Even slave owners need to be people.
It's easy to let ourselves off the hook and say, 'Oh, I would never own slaves.' Because this is in the DNA of this country, like we saw in Ava DuVernay's film '13th.' The cycle keeps repeating itself.
