What attracted you to making a film about blaxploitation?
There was this fantastic book, “What It Is … What It Was!” [by Gerald Martinez, Diana Martinez and Andres Chavez], which had interviews with all the different stars from that era, so that was probably what got me interested at first. Then I was teaching a course on blaxploitation at Harvard, on the invitation of Henry Louis Gates, and I realized there was no context for assessing films from this era. So this documentary in some ways was an attempt to put the fun back into film history and give recognition to what was one of the major periods in Hollywood cinema. What would you say defines a blaxploitation film? They’re considered B movies, but they’re really an amalgamation of different genres, including kung fu films, Westerns, horror, pulp, comedy — although on the whole their main focus is black action films of the ’70s. Of course, there’s a whole other cinema of the period, films made by people like Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, which I think could be the subject of another do