Lee Daniels

“Most actors want the audience to like them, and that leads to bad acting.”

“I've had all types of beautiful girls tell me that they ugly when they look in the mirror, as if it's someone else's reflection they see.”

“I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.”

“I have a very clear vision, and I come from film, where director is God, so if there's a clash, it's painful.”

“I look at my movies; I call my movies 'the kid.' It's like I'm giving birth. I'm in the cocoon, you know?”

“I don't know - I haven't seen any of my movies after I finish them. I leave the editing room; I don't go back.”

“As a film director and as film actors, you get used to a certain rhythm that's slow. But with TV, it's hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. It's a different pace.”

“My dad was a cop. My mom worked at various jobs - she worked as a homemaker, a bank teller, a bartender.”

“I started casting. I cast music videos, but I kept getting fired from jobs because I was iconoclastic in my ways of casting.”

“I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that...”

“I went to school at Radnor High School. And I went to a liberal arts college in St. Louis, Missouri, called Lindenwood College.”

“My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Emp...”

“I was always in trouble. I was mischievous. And movies were always a part of my world.”

“I love actors, and I'm very protective of them. I trust them. It's a mutual trust.”

“When you're paying everybody nothing, I mean, they have homes to pay for. And my movies are like putting on theater. Nicole Kidman is at craft services, and John Cusack is moving furniture;...”

“I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just sup...”

“Putting on a movie is like going to war - for me, at least. It's all about time; time is money, and we don't have it. So it's all about getting to know each other intimately quickly. You are...”

“I want to see movies I can walk away from and say, 'Wait, what happened there? Hold up, what did I just see? What?' and then it connects to something that you personally, unequivocally know...”

“My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct the...”