Theodore Melfi

“We're all humans. Any human can tell any human's story. I don't want to have this conversation about black film or white film anymore. I wanna have conversations about film.”

“One thing that's nice about doing a movie about people that hardly anyone knows, you never worry if they're a perfect match.”

“For me, as a feminist, as somebody who wants to lift up women - because I do; I come from a single mom who raised three boys on her own - I feel like, you close the door on women, you close the door on humanity.”

“Floyd Thompson, a white man, desegregated NASA. Period.”

“I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.”

“We're very, very flawed, myself included.”

“The journey of making 'Hidden Figures' has shown me the automatic privilege that all white men are afforded in America in 2017 and in any and every year before that.”

“Change is incremental. Change is small.”

“My wife says I have happy delusions. I'm delusional that way. I just say, 'This is how it's got to be, and it's got to be.' I don't take no. I just don't like no. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's just how I am.”

“I think the commercial world is a lateral step from features. Some people see it as a step down, but I've never understood that.”

“After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.”

“People live in the middle. I think everyone does. Good is on one side, bad is on the other side, and we live in the middle.”

“To me, there are saints every day. They stand up and help others and live for others and do things for others.”