Djimon Hounsou

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture. ”

America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles. ”

I like stories that have a social impact and social attributes to them. That's the whole reason we make films: to broaden our limited view of things and to see how life is evolving elsewhere. ”

The gym can serve as an excellent place where kids and young men and women can really empty their issues right on the floor. ”

School bored me. Being educated and being intelligent are two different things. I thought I was smart enough. And I wanted to be an entertainer. I stopped going to school as a way of saying I was mature, a way of saying I was going to choose who I was going to become. ”

Until you are somewhat comfortable and confident and embrace who you are as a person, you can't possibly love somebody else because you don't like yourself that much. ”

My passion is more about bringing the stories out from the African continent mixed with the West. ”

Africa is a continent that provides so much for the existence of the rest of the world. We go around the world and cultivate so many things. ”

As a young boy, I had strange dreams of affecting people and somehow being instrumental in changing the makeup of Africa and helping to improve life there. ”

The lack of diversity, specifically in genre films and the superheroes our kids grow up watching and emulating, they can't really identify with. When you see the same thing, over and over again, and it seems not to speak of you and your heritage and your culture, it leaves you out of this world a little bit. ”