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What’s fascinating is, everybody has the one person that got him or her into filmmaking…

Man, I had so many influences. I went to Kent State University and I was blessed to be in a phenomenal theater department run by Dr. Francis Dorsey. One of my first forays into the activity … I always did music but getting into theater, learning how the stage works, learning drama, the importance of our culture as a voice in our medium, that was big. So when I got to New York, I was also fortunate enough to be roommates with Terence Nance.

Wait, Random Acts of Flyness  and Space Jam 2 Terence Nance?

Yeah, so Terence and I were roommates for five years. That was a huge influence on me. He taught me a lot about tenacity and voice and being confident even if the world thinks you’re wrong. That was always something big to me, even though I was making music at the time. We made our first short film together and that was a huge light bulb that went off in my head in terms of reach. If you think about music, you and I probably have less in common than we do films in common.  One, there’s just not a lot within that medium, or genres split within film. You may like music but you may not like punk, you may not like country. You miss out on a lot of great work because you don’t like the genre.

Film isn’t as segregated when it comes to taste. We’ve all seen Terminator 2. We’ve all seen Rambo. All these films that are canon … as opposed to saying, “Have we all heard of Fleetwood Mac? Have we all heard of Rakim?” Depends on who you are, right? I think that music has seemed lifeless for certain times where as cinema hasn’t. So if you’re gonna say something, I feel that cinema is the appropriate medium because it enables the audience to intersect in a much more constructive way.

When you set out to make this project, did you expect Ava DuVernay’s involvement, the widespread acclaim? Was there something telling you that even if it wasn’t successful, that you at least made this project?

I call this project a personal feat. It wasn’t comparative, I couldn’t even see that far that Ava DuVernay would come on board, that we could be on Netflix. I wasn’t even seeing that! I was more concerned with telling an authentic story, the same way my grandmother told it to me. It was personal because that’s my grandmother. If it were anyone else, they wouldn’t care. But I shepherd this work from script form to production form to post-production to if anybody got to see it at all. I think that just because we were sure we achieved this feat? The universe is wild; it rewards you for personal kind of focus. I think just because we were focused on the personal, people like Ava were attracted to it.

I was so sure that we had contributed to the canon of filmmaking that I purchased a projector and was going to travel on some Oscar Micheaux sh*t! Go from city to city and project the film on any white surface I could find.  I was VERY sure people would want to see these images. In my mind, I had never seen these images before. So, by us achieving them, I knew I was going to achieve them. You never know if the work is going to connect but part of me isn’t surprised because it was personal and we achieved our personal feat. So this has all been one wild ride, if you ask me.

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