I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was 'The Phantom of the Opera' with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.

I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, 'Dial M for Murder,' and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective.

But no one should have the right to manipulate my films in the first place.

Allah says in the Qur'an not to despise one another. So the criterion in Islam is not color or social status. It's who is most righteous. If I go to a mosque - and I'm a basketball player with money and prestige - if I go to a mosque and see an imam, I feel inferior. He's better than me. It's about knowledge.

You only have so much money to shoot a movie with.

Washington's a cesspool of money.

Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.