Wow.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Wow, that film was really- whoever directed that did a good job.
Thank you.
Made my mom cry. So happy she's here tonight with my brother.
Listen- Dark Knight, Eight Harry Potter films, The Matrix trilogy, Oceans Eleven trilogy,
Shawshank Redemption, When Harry Met Sally, Beauty and the Beast, Jungle Book, the new
Star Wars films, that's all Alan Horn.
My current boss.
Chairman of Walt Disney Studios.
Overseas.
Everything around the world.
Production. Distribution. Marketing.
For Disney, Pixar, Marvel, LucasFilms.
Four decades of guiding and guarding artists and I just want to thank you for being here
for me tonight.
And um, he's a big deal around town.
And thank you for making history when you championed a Black woman as the head of a
hundred and twenty million dollar film for the first time in history.
Thank you sir.
Appreciate it.
Not bad.
Um, thank you to BAFTA LA for including me tonight, for gifting me an award named for
John Schlesinger, a documentarian turned narrative director like me.
A documentarian with something to say.
A director with something to say.
With a disregard with the same old way.
A risk-taker.
When I studied him more deeply, one part of his journey as a filmmaker that really stands
out to me is his longstanding relationship with one particular actress- Julie Christie.
They made several films together, and were lifelong friends from her film debut in 1963
to his death in the year 2000.
They shared a bond.
I know how that feels.
I share the same bond with the British actor David Oyelowo who I've made four films with,
including Selma.
[Applause]
I regard the bond between a director and an actor as sacred.
I truly do.
Cause if we do it right, we're in a union.
A creative marriage, creating life together.
Life through cinema.
A sacred bond between an actor and a director.
So to imagine what's been in the news this week, the harmful manipulation and harassment
and emotional violence towards actors in my view is sinful.
Sinful because I've held the innermost feelings of an actor in my hand.
I know what it means for an artist to give themselves over to you.
To tell stories of our humanity.
Actors give their face, their bodies, their memories to this endeavor of making films.
They give more than anyone else, I truly believe that.
So how dare someone enter into that sacred space with an aim to do harm.
It's an abuse of a very singular kind.
It should be entirely unacceptable in our industry.
[Applause]
Unacceptable among many other things in our industry that should be unacceptable.
The purposeful diminishment of any member of our industry of any position or rank should
be unacceptable to us all.
I've sad it before, and I'll say it again: we don't have time to work on these dark behaviors,
these isms, one by one.
We don't have time to be solely triggered by trauma and outrage.
We should be outraged by all of it.
All of the time.
Until we're all safe, no one is safe.
[Applause]
We should all try to be somebody who makes everyone feel like somebody.
I learned that from my mom.
So to close, a woman named Rachel Held-Evans wrote a piece a couple of years ago revisiting
Madeleine L'Engle's Genesis Trilogy.
Madeleine L'Engel was the author of more than forty-five books of all ages, for all ages,
and among them, the beloved Wrinkle in Time.
And she wrote about her own fears, decades ago, about raising children during the Cold War.
She wrote this in one particular worrisome season.
"Planting onions that spring was an act of faith in the future."
Planting onions was a way of me combatting what was very fearful about my planet.
Planting onions.
I love that term.
Who plants onions?
It just stuck with me.
What a thought.
It felt like a call to action about the importance of committing to slow growing, long-term investments
in our family, in our community, in our industry, in our world.
Things that we could commit to now we may not even feel the effects of,
but we know it will change things for the people along the way.
We're bound to get discouraged, angry even, but we won't become hopeless if we never abandon
our onion patches, those little pieces of earth where we cultivate our greatest hopes
and dreams for the world.
So I'm going to plant my onions like the sun in shining, it's certainly shining in this
room for me tonight.
I thank you all for inviting me here.
What a thing.
Have a good evening.
Thank you.
[Applause]