Take Out Girl Director Shares Why He Never Feels Pressure To Represent The Black Community

If I had a superpower, it would be my ability to notice the similarities between very seemingly different people. And today, as a filmmaker, I found that that has been a little bit of a knock against me. I feel I’ve been asked to take the Black experience and show why it’s so different than everybody else’s and for some reason, in my heart, my job is to take the Black experience and show how it’s universal so that people can relate to us a lot more and stop seeing us as a threat and stop seeing us as the villains of the world and, you know, the way mainstream media tends to portray us.

I feel the beauty of movies is that you can take a person from any underrepresented group and if you can make the audience walk in their shoes for 90 minutes, and then question the way they walk through the real world, as a result of that experience, you have a much better real world to live in. You have a conversation you can have with them that is as close as it comes to actually living the same experience. Those are the sort of films I like to make. Those are the sort of commonalities I like to put out, which is why Take Out Girl is about the most relatable thing in the world: A child’s love for their mother.