Dustin Lance Black

I'm drawn to making films that in some way move the social conversation.

If you do something with acceptance and kindness, you can create a true friendship.

You're either Mormon or Southern Baptist in my family. They're incredibly conservative and I love my family.

Most of my family is still active in the Mormon Church. They live in Utah and Provo and Orem and Salt Lake City.

Having a son has made it all the more important for me to stay in close contact with my family in Texas and Arkansas, whom I know full well voted for Trump. Though I didn't, and have deep problems with this administration and many of them don't. But I'm not going to let that cut the tie from my son to his own history and family.

Have I always agreed with my Southern, military, Mormon family? Absolutely not. Have we always figured out how to get along? Yes! At the point at which politics supersedes the family and community, we've got a real problem.

Children are raised by single parents all the time. Those children - I'd like to claim myself as one, I was raised by a single mother who raised me incredibly well.

That's what I learned most about directing on my own - you've got to build a family, a filmmaking family.

I think people in the U.K. best know me as the guy who will take their picture when they run into Tom Daley. But I'm also his husband and the dad to our child.

For people who have fertility issues - and certainly gay men have fertility issues - there's several options for having a child and surrogacy was one of them.

If you go to Paris, try to speak French. If you go to the South, try to speak Southern. Southern isn't stupid. Southern is narrative; Southern is family.

I grew up quite poor, and the Mormon church was always there for us as a family.