There's a great deal of women in film school. I was not the only woman in my class at UCLA. When I went through the Sundance program, it was half women and half men.

'Beyond the Lights' was my fourth film. I gained a lot of knowledge, and I'm excited to share that with young filmmakers because I know how lost I was coming out of film school with that question of 'What's next?'

I didn't play a great deal of sport in primary school. It was not until I went away to boarding school in Sussex that I really got into sport.

Other women looked on me as a rival. And it pained me a great deal.

I was reared in an atmosphere where a great deal of attention was paid to women's hairdressing.

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'