Nia DaCosta

“You really have to hold as many stories as possible in your hands before you figure out how to tell your singular story in the best way.”

“The work that I create for myself has to be enough to sustain me, creatively. It's tricky because this industry is so much about having an audience and having people support you and give you approval, but you have to learn how to exist without it in whatever shape that takes.”

“Little Woods' came out of a desire to want to worry about people who are not like me and not where I'm from.”

“The hero's pain is something that spurs them to martyr themselves, and an anti-hero's pain is a thing that kind of starts their journey as opposed to ending it.”

“Film is all about telling stories, and telling stories is the thing that has pushed forward humanity from the beginning of storytelling.”

“I'm trying to put less significance on my worth through work. That helps me shoulder that pressure because I'm also thinking, 'Am I a good friend? Am I a good sister? Am I living in the right city?'”

“I think, like, '70s filmmaking in general was really huge for me because I was like, these men are insane. They're making these crazy movies, and anything is possible.”

“Horror is really in your psyche, it gets deeper into your brain.”

“I grew up watching the 'Spider-Man' cartoon and 'the Fantastic Four.'”

“I think the thing about systemic oppression is that inclusion is purposeful, but so is exclusion.”

“A lot of my film education when I was younger was basically whatever VHS tapes were in my house, and also the fact that I had premium cable and could watch 'American Beauty' at nine years old, which was super inappropriate.”

“I think stories in a community are really useful because they pass on lessons to learn, to remember people.”

“My mom once forgot to invite me to a family thing because she forgot I was in town. Stuff like that makes me go, 'I need to connect more.'”

“For me, Westerns are about how people are on a frontier, between society and the wild, and what being in that middle ground makes you do to survive.”

“Something that people talk about a lot in the Black community is how Black women hold it up, basically, and Black women don't get to really process and work through their trauma because they're too busy dealing with everyone else.”

“This is one of the biggest reasons I'm a writer: I love creating worlds but also discovering worlds and getting into the lives to people who aren't myself; that's really rewarding to me.”

“For me, 'Candyman' has always been about telling stories and how they are important to keep telling because they will hopefully stop us from repeating the past. But it also shows how everlasting this pain and trauma are.”

“Eventually when 'Candyman' became a possibility, I pitched on it and got the job, so it was really wonderfully straightforward and so, so exciting.”

“In terms of the most successful heroes, no matter how much power you have, you never really have control over yourself. That's something you see in characters like Magneto, for example. His emotional life is always going to overpower his actual power.”

“People are always going to go see movies in theaters.”