I lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and now my kids are growing up in Los Angeles, so that's culturally very different.

As a kid growing up St. Louis, Missouri, I lived in a predominantly black neighborhood. Any time people talked about slavery, it was always something like, 'If I was a slave, I wouldn't have been putting up with that. I would have been out in a heartbeat.' And it's like, sure, it's a very easy thing to say.

I think what Hollywood is learning at large is that there is profitability in stories that are culturally specific and that you can only address the universal through the specific.

I've spent so much of my career working intermittently, being busy and then with large swaths of time off, that it became the norm.