I’m writing this from Toronto, where I am directing the Season 3 finale of CROSS.

I’ve directed on CROSS across all three seasons, so returning to the series at this moment carries a particular weight. A finale is not simply another episode in the order. It is where the season gathers itself. It is where storylines begin to answer for what they have set in motion, where characters meet the consequences of their choices, where tension either finds release or becomes something more dangerous.

You are not just directing what happens next. You are directing what the season has been building toward.

That requires a different kind of attention.

A finale has to land what needs to land without flattening the mystery that keeps a world alive. It has to satisfy the audience without over-explaining the journey. It has to honor the emotional labor of the writers, actors, crew, producers, showrunner, studio, and network, while still making room for the scene in front of you to breathe.

That kind of responsibility is serious. It’s also the kind of work I love.

There is something meaningful about being invited back into a world again and again. It means the work has spoken. It means people have seen how you think, how you prepare, how you lead, how you collaborate, how you protect story, and how you carry pressure without letting it swallow the room.

That is not luck.

That is relationship, reputation and craft meeting opportunity, then proving it can be trusted with more.

I have written before about how some stories require us to become the person capable of telling them, and I feel that in my directing life too. Every set has shaped me. Every episode has taught me something. Every challenge has given me another tool. The work has been working on me while I have been working on it.

I have also been thinking about the things we carry while we work, and not just the creative work. The life work.

I think many women will understand this immediately. We carry our entire selves - our bodies, our families, our relationships, our grief, our responsibilities, our private questions, our physical, emotional and hormonal changes, and the needs of the people who depend on us.

We can be directing a scene, solving a production problem, answering an actor’s question, watching the light change, deciding where the camera should go, and still be carrying an entire private life inside our bodies.

I want to write more about this.

To my Substack community, thank you for reading, subscribing, commenting, sharing, encouraging me, and cheering me on as The Director’s Notebook continues to grow. There is so much I want to write, teach, share, and build here.

But when I am not posting every day, know this: I am back in the chair.

Right now, the chair is in Toronto, and the episode is the Season 3 finale of CROSS!

I cannot wait for you to see what we are making.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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A lot of people don’t have a desire problem. They have a spirit problem. What they want may be real. What’s contaminating the wanting is the issue.

Not because desire is wrong. Desire is sacred. Wanting more for your life, your art, your family, your future, your gift, your career, your body of work, your name, your voice — all of that is human, and all of that is allowed. But there is a difference between desire and entitlement, hunger and resentment, believing deeply in your gift and believing the world is obligated to rearrange itself because you have one. And that difference matters.

I see a lot of people moving through the world as if they are constantly being denied something that belongs to them. Not simply longing for opportunity, fighting for access, or feeling the very real frustration of closed doors and unfair systems, but carrying an energy that says somebody owes me. Somebody should have given me this by now. Somebody should have put me on, made the call, opened the door, or handed me the thing I believe should already be mine.

That is dangerous ground for an artist, because entitlement has a way of distorting reality. It does not always begin as jealousy. Sometimes it begins as the quiet belief that you should already have more than you have, that the world has miscalculated your importance. That kind of thinking can become its own prison.

Once an artist starts believing that every closed door is evidence of betrayal, every unanswered call is disrespect, every missed opportunity is proof that somebody is blocking them, they stop asking the harder and more useful questions. Am I ready? Is the work strong enough? Have I prepared myself for the room I keep saying I want to be in? Am I actually doing the work, or am I standing near the work, angry that proximity has not turned into destiny?

That is where entitlement becomes dangerous. It protects the ego from discomfort, but it also protects the artist from growth. It allows a person to build an entire story around why they have not received what they want without ever having to sit honestly with whether they have become the kind of artist who can carry it.

Bitterness has no real energy of receiving attached to it. It cannot hold blessing because it is too busy arguing with God about what has not yet arrived.

I want to be clear. I am not talking about accepting mistreatment or pretending this industry is fair. I am not talking about ignoring racism, sexism, class, access, gatekeeping, exploitation, favoritism, or the many ways talented people are overlooked. Those things are real. People should be paid fairly, treated with dignity, and protected from being abused, erased, stolen from, or shut out of rooms because of who they are. That is not what I mean.

What I mean is this: nobody owes you their name, their relationship, their platform, their reputation, or the risk of recommending you if they are not ready to do that. Nobody owes you a role, a job, a meeting, a phone call, a favor, or a shortcut into a room you may not yet be prepared to stand in.

And if someone does look out for you, that is a blessing. If someone speaks your name in a room you are not in, opens a door, makes a call, sends the email, forwards the script, recommends you, hires you, trusts you, teaches you, mentors you, or offers you a chance, receive it with gratitude. Honor it. Do right by it. But do not build your life around the belief that people have failed you simply because they did not become the bridge you wanted them to be.

That kind of entitlement will rot the gift. It will have you walking into rooms with the energy of someone already offended, suspicious of people who have done nothing to you, looking at your own life as if every delay is an insult and every unanswered prayer is proof that somebody somewhere is withholding what belongs to you. But what is for you is for you.

That sounds simple, but I think it requires deep spiritual discipline to believe it. It requires trusting that your life is not being measured against someone else’s announcement, understanding that visibility is not the same as destiny, doing the work without turning every delay into an accusation, and learning how to celebrate another artist without shrinking inside yourself.

I am honored to be an artist. I really mean that.

I do not take lightly the fact that I get to spend my life making images, shaping scenes, working with actors, telling stories, building worlds, entering the emotional architecture of people’s lives, and trying to leave something behind that feels true. No one has to look out for me, although I am grateful when they do. No one has to do me a favor, although I am grateful when they do. No one has to hand me anything, and I do not create from the belief that something has been withheld from me that belongs to me.

I create because I love the work, because it is what I was born to do, because something in me has always known that story was not just an interest, but a calling. I create for my grandmother, who did not get the chance to fully live the life she may have dreamed for herself. I create because the work is ancestral, because there were people before me whose gifts were interrupted, whose imaginations were disciplined by survival, whose talents were never given the luxury of expansion, and whose lives were spent making a way for someone like me to have room to dream.

So I cannot treat this gift casually, and I cannot approach it with the bitterness of someone who believes the world is late paying me a debt.

I have been given the privilege of doing what I love with my life. That does not mean it has been easy, that I have not been disappointed, or that I have not had to fight, wait, rebuild, sacrifice, grieve, question, pray, and start again. But even in the hard seasons, I try to remember that the work itself is still a blessing. The calling is still a blessing. The ability to begin again is still a blessing. The fact that I can sit with an idea, wrestle with it, shape it, fail at it, return to it, and grow through it is still a blessing.

Sometimes I wonder if part of the entitlement we see in artists comes from forgetting why we began in the first place. When the work becomes only about being chosen, applauded, validated, hired, recognized, platformed, or seen, every other person’s success can begin to feel like an insult.

But art made from that place becomes heavy, not deep. And there is a difference.

Deep work has roots. Heavy work has resentment. Deep work carries memory, discipline, grief, love, longing, and truth; heavy work carries comparison, accusation, and the exhaustion of trying to prove that the world is wrong for not seeing you the way you see yourself.

I do not want that for my work. I do not want to spend my life staring across the road at someone else’s house, angry that the light is on. I want to tend to what has been placed in my hands.

That is not passivity, lack of ambition, or pretending I do not want more. I want a lot. I want to direct more, write more, build more, teach more, create more, make work that lasts, make work that opens doors for other people, make work that my ancestors recognize, and make work that my daughter can point to and know something about who I was.

But I do not want to pursue any of that from desperation, because desperation has a way of making the blessing feel like proof instead of purpose. I do not need my art to prove that I should have been loved, chosen, respected, or seen. I need my art to tell the truth. That is the work.

There is freedom in understanding that don’t nobody owe you shit. Not because you are unworthy, but because your worth was never supposed to be held hostage by whether someone else gave you permission.

When you release the belief that everybody owes you something, you can begin to see more clearly what has actually been given. You can recognize the teachers, the detours, the closed doors that protected you, the delays that deepened you, the people who did show up, and the gift that remained even when nobody clapped for it.

You can also begin to take responsibility for the work itself, not the fantasy of the work, not the announcement, not the aesthetic of being an artist, but the actual work. The pages, the study, the discipline, the humility, the repetition, the years, the craft, the relationships, the preparation, and the spiritual posture required to receive what is actually yours without grabbing at what belongs to someone else.

Because sometimes the issue is not that the door has not opened. Sometimes the issue is that the spirit standing in front of the door is not ready to enter the room.

And that is not an insult. That is an invitation to get clearer, better, quieter, more honest, to stop performing readiness and start building it, to stop confusing proximity to powerful people with preparation, to stop thinking a promise is the same as a path, and to stop being angry that no one carried you across a threshold your own work has not yet made you ready to cross.

There is dignity in waiting without becoming bitter, dignity in knowing that what is yours does not have to be snatched from someone else’s hands.

So yes, want what you want. Want it boldly. Want it with your full chest. But check the spirit around the wanting.

Ask yourself whether your desire still has love in it, whether you can celebrate someone else without shrinking, whether the work still calls you when no one is watching, and whether you are building from devotion or from injury.

Because the world can feel the difference. So can the work. And so can you.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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Yesterday, I had the honor of attending Essence Festival for a panel conversation about The Greatest, the first authorized scripted series about the life of Muhammad Ali.

The first season begins in 1960, when Ali, then Cassius Clay, wins Olympic gold, and follows him through 1964, when he becomes heavyweight champion for the first time. But what moved me most about the way this story is being told is that it is not only about the rise of a fighter. It is also an intimate coming-of-age story about a young Black man becoming himself before the world fully understood him.

The panel featured show creator Ben Watkins, along with cast members Jaalen Best, who portrays Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali; Dana Gourrier, who plays his mother Odessa “Bird” Clay; Kai Parham, who plays his brother Rudy Clay; Amin Joseph, who plays Sonny Liston; and Michael Ealy, who appears as Malcolm X.

They also released the teaser to the world, and it is absolutely beautiful.

The Greatest premieres November 4 on Prime Video, and all episodes will be available to stream. I had the honor of directing Episodes 3 and 4, and I can honestly say this is one of the most meaningful and impactful projects I have ever been part of.

There are some opportunities that are special because of the scale of the work. Some are special because of the people involved. Some are special because of the story itself. And then there are the rare ones that meet you somewhere much deeper. This was one of those.

As a Black woman director, as a daughter of New Orleans, and as someone whose own life and spiritual foundation have been shaped by the Nation of Islam, being trusted to help tell this part of Muhammad Ali’s story meant more than I can fully put into words.

I was standing inside a story that connected to history, faith, memory, and one of our great heroes. I was directing scenes that carried a legacy I do not take lightly. And I remember feeling the weight of that responsibility, but also the blessing of it.

Watching the teaser yesterday and seeing one of my favorite scenes from my episodes woven so prominently throughout it was incredibly moving. The scene of Jaalen Best as Cassius Clay standing in the mirror, affirming who he is and who he is becoming, “I’m the fastest. I’m the strongest. I can’t be beat. I’m gonna be the youngest heavyweight champion ever” is a scene I had the honor of directing.

And to see that moment become part of the first glimpse the world receives of this series is something I will carry with me for a long time.

Jaalen Best steps into this role with such presence, spirit, and care.

I am deeply grateful to Ben Watkins. It’s an honor to build with him and his wonderful team over the past few years.

Muhammad Ali was not simply an athlete. He was a poet, a fighter, a believer, a truth-teller, a disruptor, and a man who understood the power of naming himself before the world was ready to fully see him. To help tell any part of that story is an honor.

The Greatest premieres November 4 on Prime Video. I cannot wait for the world to see it.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to work with a group of talented emerging filmmakers through the New Orleans Film Festival Director’s Lab. These were incredibly thoughtful young directors, many of them in the early stages of finding their voice and learning how to translate what they see in their minds into something actors can actually play. That experience reminded me of something I have seen often with directors at the beginning of their careers: there can be a tendency to talk too much.

Not because they do not care about actors. Usually it is the opposite. They care deeply. They have thought about the scene, the story, the character, the tone, the emotional arc, the symbolism, the theme, the subtext, and the entire life of the project. By the time they get to set, they are carrying so much information that they want to make sure the actor understands all of it. So they start explaining, and then explaining the explanation, and then adding one more idea, and then offering another emotional adjustment. Sometimes they even begin telling actors where to sigh, where to laugh, where to cry, where to pause, or exactly how the emotion should appear.

In the process, they can overwhelm the very people they are supposed to be collaborating with.

This is where the problem begins. The issue is not that directors talk. Directors have to communicate. The issue is over-explaining to the point where the actor becomes less free, less instinctive, and sometimes more confused. A director may believe they are offering clarity, but if the note contains six different ideas, three different emotions, and a paragraph of backstory in the middle of a shooting day, the actor now has to process all of that while trying to remain alive inside the moment.

Actors are not empty vessels waiting for meaning to be poured into them. Great actors are thinking deeply about story, character, history, psychology, and emotional life. Many actors do extraordinary preparation before they ever step onto set. Viola Davis has spoken many times about the depth of her character work, the pages of backstory, the research, the inner life she builds before performing a role. So the point is not that actors are uninterested in meaning, theme, or emotional arcs. The point is that by the time an actor is on set, much of that deeper work should already be alive inside them.

On set, the actor is no longer writing an essay about the character. They are living the scene.

That means the director’s job in that moment is not to bury the actor in information. It is to offer something that helps them play the moment more truthfully, more specifically, and with more freedom. Sometimes that means giving them an action. Sometimes it means shifting their objective. Sometimes it means reframing the scene. Sometimes it means saying almost nothing because the actor is already inside something honest and you do not want to interrupt it.

Directing Behavior, Not Emotion

This is why I think directors have to understand the difference between directing emotion and directing behavior. We are not really asking actors to “be sad,” “be angry,” “be afraid,” or “be happy.” We are helping them find the circumstances, actions, intentions, and behavior that allow those emotions to rise truthfully.

Instead of saying, “Be afraid,” you might say, “Get out of the room before he realizes what you know.” That gives the actor urgency, danger, and a physical objective. Instead of saying, “Be dismissive,” you might say, “End this conversation before he gets too close to the truth.” That gives the actor something to do. Instead of saying, “Be heartbroken,” you might say, “Try to keep your voice steady while you return the ring.” Now the actor is not performing heartbreak in general. They are trying to survive a specific moment.

The behavior is what we see. The emotion is what emerges.

Here are a few simple examples of how emotional direction can become something more playable:

Instead of saying...Try giving the actor something playableBe afraid.Get out of the room before he comes back.Be angry.Make her admit she lied to you.Be sad.Try to answer the question without falling apart.Be happy.You just found out your book made the New York Times bestseller list.Be ecstatic.You’re a Knicks fan, and they just won the NBA Finals.Be dismissive.Push him out of the room before he asks another question.Be nervous.Keep the secret while everyone in the room is looking at you.Be confident.Make them believe you belong at this table.Be jealous.Get her attention before she leaves with someone else.Be relieved.The test results came back negative.Be devastated.You just learned your beloved dog died.Be suspicious.Get him to repeat the story without letting him know you do not believe him.Be ashamed.Apologize without admitting the whole truth.

These examples are not rules, and they are not meant to suggest that every scene needs to be reduced to a simple action. Every scene is different, and every actor processes direction differently. Some actors love conversation. Some want very little. Some want the emotional context before the take, while others want a clean playable adjustment and space to work. Part of directing is learning who is standing in front of you and understanding what kind of note will actually help that actor at that moment.

But the larger principle remains useful: when in doubt, move from emotion toward behavior. Give the actor something to pursue, something to protect, something to hide, something to win, something to avoid, something to survive. The more playable the note, the more likely it is to create real life in the scene.

That is one of the reasons I keep returning to the idea that the more you talk, the worse it gets. Not because silence is always better, and not because actors do not need direction. They absolutely do. But too much explanation can pull the actor away from the scene and into their head. A precise note can do the opposite. It can return them to the body, to the objective, to the person in front of them, and to the truth of the moment.

A Note Is Not Always a Correction

Once a director begins thinking less about emotion and more about behavior, the next question becomes what kind of note actually helps an actor.

This is where the work becomes very specific, because a note is not always a correction. Sometimes a note is a reframe. Sometimes it is an invitation. Sometimes it is a question. Sometimes it is encouragement. Sometimes it is acknowledgment. And sometimes the most useful thing a director can do is resist the urge to manufacture a correction when nothing is actually broken.

I think many young directors feel pressure to say something after every take because silence can feel like they are not doing enough. A take ends, the actor looks over, the crew waits, and suddenly the director can feel the weight of everyone expecting direction. That responsibility is real, but when a director starts manufacturing corrections simply because they feel they are supposed to speak, the note can become less about the actor’s work and more about the director’s discomfort with the moment.

The problem with that kind of note is that it can send the actor searching for a problem that may not actually exist. Instead of building on what was alive in the take, the actor now has to process a new adjustment, solve a new concern, or question an instinct that may have been working beautifully. Sometimes the most useful response is not a correction at all, but acknowledgment. It can be as simple as saying, “That was beautiful,” or “You’re onto something,” or “I’m excited to see what else you find.”

Those are notes too.

They tell the actor that you are watching, that you understand what they are building, and that you trust them to keep going.

On Reasonable Doubt, I gave an actor a note that was really not a note in the traditional sense. I said, “I’m really excited to see what else you find.”

That was not a correction. I was not telling her that something was wrong. I was not redirecting the scene or trying to control the performance. What I was really saying was that something was already alive in what she was doing, and I trusted her enough to keep exploring it.

That kind of note can be incredibly useful because it does not close the actor down. It opens a door. It says there is more here. It says I see what you are doing. It says keep going.

It also lets the actor know that the director is paying attention, not simply to whether the take technically worked, but to the possibility inside the work. Sometimes actors do not need to be told what to fix. Sometimes they need to know that the director sees the doorway they have opened and wants them to walk further through it.

That is still directing.

There is a misconception that if a note is not corrective, it is not doing anything. I disagree. Some of the most effective notes are not about fixing a problem. They are about expanding the actor’s understanding of the scene, protecting what is already working, or giving the actor permission to go further.

A note can also reframe a scene entirely.

When I directed Season 2, Episode 7 of Love Life, there was a scene with Jessica Williams, who played Mia, in which Mia was ending a relationship with a man who genuinely wanted to be with her. On the surface, the scene could easily be approached as a breakup. That would not have been wrong. The relationship was ending. There was pain there. There was conflict there. There was loss there.

But what I felt underneath the scene was something more specific.

My note to Jessica was, “You’re sabotaging yourself.”

That was the adjustment.

I did not tell her to make the scene sadder. I did not tell her to feel more conflicted. I did not talk at length about the psychology of the breakup. I simply reframed what was happening. This was not only a scene about a woman leaving a man. It was a scene about a woman participating in the destruction of something that might have been good for her.

That shift changed the engine of the scene.

Suddenly, the breakup was not only about what was happening between two people. It was also about what Mia was doing to herself. That gave Jessica something more complicated and more active to play, because self-sabotage is not passive. It has behavior inside it. It has resistance, fear, control, avoidance, and contradiction inside it.

She made the adjustment, and that was the take that made it into the cut.

That experience stayed with me because it reminded me that a powerful note does not always need to be long. It needs to locate the scene more truthfully. It needs to help the actor understand what is really happening beneath the obvious event.

The obvious event was a breakup.

The playable truth was self-sabotage.

Those are not the same thing.

That is one of the reasons directors have to listen carefully to the scene before speaking. What is the scene pretending to be? What is it actually about? What does the actor already understand? What are they missing? What do they need from me in this moment? Do they need an action? Do they need a reframe? Do they need more danger, more softness, more resistance, more permission? Or do they need acknowledgment of what is already beginning to work?

Those questions are part of the craft.

The note should serve the actor, the scene, and the story. It should not exist simply because the director feels obligated to have one.

Some directors over-direct because they confuse control with leadership. They believe that if they are constantly shaping, constantly adjusting, constantly speaking, they are doing the work. But leadership on set is not always about more intervention. Sometimes it is about discernment. It is knowing when the actor needs a hand on the wheel and when they need space to drive.

That discernment takes time.

It also requires humility, because actors will sometimes find things you did not know were there. They will bring instincts, rhythms, contradictions, and emotional intelligence into the scene that may surprise you. If you are too busy forcing them toward the version of the scene you already imagined, you may miss the version they are discovering in front of you.

This does not mean abandoning your vision. It means understanding that performance is alive. The actor is not there simply to execute your idea. They are there to embody a human being, and if you have cast well, prepared well, and built enough trust, they may bring you something more interesting than what you expected.

A director has to be strong enough to guide the work and open enough to receive what the actor is offering.

That balance is delicate.

Too little direction can leave an actor unsupported. Too much direction can make them self-conscious. The goal is to find the note that gives them exactly what they need to take the next step.

A good note might give the actor a clear action. It might reframe the scene. It might offer encouragement, permission, or a deeper challenge. And sometimes the most useful note is not a correction, but an acknowledgment of what is already working. That kind of note can protect the actor’s instincts and give them the confidence to keep exploring without making them feel as if they suddenly need to fix something.

That is part of the craft: learning when to guide, when to reframe, when to challenge, when to encourage, and when to simply acknowledge the truth that is already beginning to show up in the work.

Coming Next Week

Next week, we continue The Architecture of a Great Performance with Lecture Two:

Give Them Something to Play - Why performance lives in action, behavior, and objective.

In this next lecture, we’ll go deeper into the difference between an idea and something an actor can actually play. Directors often speak in concepts like grief, shame, love, betrayal, or power, but an actor needs something active, specific, and playable.

Lecture Two will explore how directors can translate meaning into action and help actors find what a character is doing beneath the dialogue.

This first lecture is free for all subscribers. The next three lectures in the series will be available to paid subscribers of The Director’s Notebook.

See you next week for “Give Them Something to Play.”

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Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans whose work is rooted in the cinematic testimony of Black life and the brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, and others - she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for artists reclaiming their birthright through craft, truth, and story.

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One of the questions I’m asked most often by emerging directors is deceptively simple:

How do you get a great performance from an actor?

It is a question that follows directors at every stage of their journey, from film school classrooms and festival panels to professional sets. It is also a question that reveals a common misunderstanding about the nature of performance itself. The assumption behind the question is that there is a secret technique for creating great performances, a perfect note, a magic phrase, or a particular directing style that will unlock brilliance on command.

In my experience, performance is more mysterious and more collaborative than that.

A director cannot perform the role for the actor. But neither is the director a passive observer. The relationship between actor and director is one of the most important creative partnerships in filmmaking. The strongest directors understand how to create an environment in which great work can emerge. They know how to ask the right questions, offer the right note, challenge assumptions, clarify intentions, and help actors navigate the emotional and psychological terrain of a scene.

Sometimes a performance changes because of months of preparation. Sometimes it changes because of a conversation during rehearsal. Sometimes it changes because of a single note between takes. Whatever form it takes, the director’s influence is real.

The question is not whether directors contribute to performance.

The question is how.

That question has occupied me for much of my career. Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with extraordinary actors across independent film and episodic television. Some arrived with decades of experience. Others were just beginning their careers. Some required very little from me beyond clarity and trust. Others benefited from deeper conversations about character, behavior, and circumstance. What I discovered again and again is that there is no single path to a great performance.

There are, however, principles.

The strongest performances are rarely accidents. They emerge from a combination of preparation, trust, specificity, listening, and a shared understanding between actor and director about what a scene is truly asking for. This series is an exploration of those principles. It is not intended as a rigid methodology or a set of rules. Every actor is different. Every director is different. Every project asks something unique of the people making it. Instead, these lectures are an attempt to share some of the lessons I have learned while directing, studying performance, making mistakes, and trying to understand why certain moments stay with us long after a film or episode ends.

Over the next four lectures, we will examine performance from the perspective of both the actor and the director. We will discuss why many directors accidentally make performances worse by talking too much. We will explore the difference between ideas and actions, and why actors can only perform one of them. We will look at the danger of directing from the audience’s perspective instead of the character’s reality. And finally, we will examine the invisible architecture that supports every great performance — trust, preparation, casting, environment, and relationship.

The four lectures in this series are:

Lecture 1 — The More You Talk, The Worse It Gets Why directing is not explaining, and why the most precise note is almost always the shortest one.

Lecture 2 — Actors Can’t Play Ideas The hidden language of performance, and why giving an actor an emotion to play is one of the most common and most costly mistakes a director can make.

Lecture 3 — The Character Never Knows the Theme Why the audience experiences theme while the character experiences life, and what happens when a director confuses the two.

Lecture 4 — The Performance Begins Long Before Action Casting, trust, rehearsal, set culture, and the environment that either allows great work to emerge or prevents it from ever arriving.

The introduction and first lecture are available to all subscribers. Lectures Two, Three, and Four are available exclusively to paid subscribers of The Director’s Notebook. If you find value in this work and would like to support the continued creation of essays, lectures, breakdowns, and conversations about filmmaking, I hope you will consider becoming a paid member of this community.

My goal with The Director’s Notebook is to continue a tradition that shaped me as a filmmaker. I was fortunate to learn from artists and teachers who understood that filmmaking is more than a technical craft. It is a way of seeing, a way of listening, a way of engaging with the world and the stories that move through it. This space is my attempt to carry that spirit forward through conversations about craft, performance, storytelling, and the creative life.

Thank you for being here.

Now let’s begin.

Lecture 1 is available now. Come inside.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans whose work is rooted in the cinematic testimony of Black life and the brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, and others - she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for artists reclaiming their birthright through craft, truth, and story.

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There are films that live in you long after you have seen them, and Get Out is one of those films for me. I have watched it so many times that it often plays in a continuous loop at home, and I never tire of it because it operates on every level that great cinema is supposed to operate on — as a story, as a cultural document, and as an act of pure filmmaking intelligence. So when I came across an interview with Jordan Peele recently about the making of the film, about the years and the doubt and the two hundred - TWO HUNDRED drafts that preceded the version the world finally saw, I found myself leaning forward in a way that felt less like curiosity and more like recognition.

There is a real story behind Get Out, and I am as fascinated by the process of how it came to exist as I am by the film itself.

Peele has often said he stopped writing the screenplay approximately 20 times. Twenty times he put it down, convinced it was impossible, uncertain anyone would ever make it, unable to see a clear path from the vision in his mind to a film that would actually exist in the world. And then he would come back to it because he had to, because the story kept calling him back regardless of his doubt, his discouragement, or the practical realities of the industry surrounding him. He spent eight years developing the script, wrote over two hundred drafts, and worked in whatever pockets of time his comedy career allowed. When the film was finally made, it cost four and a half million dollars and grossed over two hundred and fourteen million worldwide. It became one of the highest-grossing R-rated genre films in history, carried almost entirely by word of mouth and the undeniable force of a story that clearly needed to be told and had been waiting patiently for the world to be ready to receive it.

There is another film that lives in this conversation, and it belongs to a man who shaped the way I see cinema at its most fundamental level. Haile Gerima was my film teacher and one of the most formative presences in my development as a filmmaker. His film Sankofa, whose title comes from the Akan word meaning return to the past in order to move forward, took him the better part of a decade to bring into existence. He was repeatedly turned away by Hollywood, and financed the film through small grants and the faith of a community that believed in what he was making before the industry could see it.

He distributed the film himself, renting theaters directly and trusting the word of mouth that moved through Black communities with an urgency and a hunger the studios had not predicted and could not account for. The audience came not because a marketing campaign told them to, but because the story was real and they recognized it.

Both of these films exist because their makers refused to let the journey’s difficulty become a reason to abandon the destination. That refusal, quiet and absolute and without negotiation, is what I keep returning to when I think about what it means to stay in a relationship with a story that is asking something serious of your life.

I have been writing the screenplay for my own horror film, The Return, for the better part of eight years, and I say that not as confession but as testimony.

There is something in acknowledging it that I believe other writers and filmmakers need to hear: the long road is not evidence of failure, and the slow unfolding of a project is not the same as a project that is not working. Sometimes the story takes exactly as long as it needs to. Sometimes what looks like a delay is actually deepening. Learning to tell the difference between those two things, to feel the difference in your body and not just rationalize it in your mind, is part of what the long journey of a serious project asks of you.

Over the years that The Return has been developing, I transitioned from a full-time independent filmmaker to a working television director.

Somewhere inside all of that, I evolved as an artist, deepened spiritually, and changed in ways that were personal and quietly altered the way I see, hear, and move through the world. I expanded technically, matured emotionally, accumulated the kind of life experience that cannot be rushed or manufactured, the kind that changes not only who you are as a person but who you are in a room, behind a camera, in conversation with a story that is asking something real of you.

And I have come to understand that the screenplay was developing alongside all of that, on its own terms and in its own time, the way certain things grow underground before there is any evidence of them above the surface.

The version of The Return I am writing now is not the film it would have been eight years ago, or even six months ago. The difference is not simply craft or technique but the fullness of a person who has lived more, lost more, understood more, and is therefore capable of telling it with a truth and a weight that was not available to me before.

And that becoming cannot be scheduled or hurried or willed into arriving before it is ready.

What these years have also given me is something I could not have anticipated when I first sat down with this story: a deeper understanding of my own family history and of the ways in which The Return is far more personal and ancestrally connected than I could ever have imagined at the beginning. There are threads running through this screenplay that reach back further than my own life, tied to people, places, and histories I am still in the process of fully understanding.

That knowledge has changed the way I hold the project, changed the reverence with which I approach it, and changed what I understand myself to be responsible for in its telling.

It is no longer simply a film I am writing, if it ever was. I have come to believe that it is something I was perhaps always meant to bring forward, that the story found me as much as I found it.

That kind of understanding does something to a writer that craft alone cannot do. It deepens your patience, steadies your commitment, and reminds you that some work belongs to a timeline larger than your ambition or urgency.

A few months ago, I stepped away from The Return, and I am honest about that here because I think honesty serves other artists better than a polished version of a creative journey that presents only forward motion.

The truth is that every long project has its seasons, and some of those seasons require you to put the work down and simply live for a while, trusting that what you gather in the stepping away will find its way back into the pages when you return.

This past weekend, I sat down with one of my writing and producing partners and revisited it. The feeling of returning to that world, of sitting again inside the story with someone who believes in it as deeply as I do, confirmed something I already knew but needed to feel again in my body: this story is mine, it is asking to be made, and it has been waiting with a patience that I am still learning to match.

And perhaps that is why Peele’s own words on the subject have stayed with me the way they have. In his own telling: “I stopped writing this movie about twenty times because I thought it was impossible. I thought it wasn’t gonna work. I thought no one would ever make this movie. But I kept coming back to it because I knew if someone let me make this movie, that people would hear it, and people would see it.”

What moves me most in that statement is not the persistence. However, the persistence is extraordinary, but the knowing, the quiet certainty that lived underneath all of the doubt and the discouragement and the twenty times he walked away, a certainty that the story had something to say and that he was the one meant to say it.

That kind of conviction is not arrogance, it is the authority of an artist who has listened carefully enough to recognize the difference between a story they want to tell and a story they were called to tell, and who understands that the calling does not dissolve simply because the conditions are difficult or the timeline is long or the industry has not yet found a way to see what the artist already knows is there.

Calling is not the same as ambition, and the distinction matters more than most people in this industry are willing to say out loud. Ambition wants recognition, wants arrival, wants the external confirmation that the work has value and that the person making it belongs in the room. There is nothing wrong with ambition, but it is not sufficient for the kind of work we are talking about, because ambition is conditional in a way that calling is not.

It keeps you at the desk when no one is watching, keeps you returning to the pages after months away, keeps you asking the story what it needs from you rather than asking the industry what it needs from you to greenlight what you already know must exist. Calling is the thing that was present before the career began and will remain long after the credits roll, the thread that runs through everything you make, whether the world acknowledges it or not. It is the part of you that is not performing but simply being, not seeking but answering.

And when you are working from that place, something shifts in the way you understand time. The long timeline of a difficult project begins to feel less like a measure of your progress and more like a reflection of the depth the work is asking you to reach, and you begin to understand that the length of the journey is not a punishment but an invitation. The story has always known exactly how much of you it would require.

We cannot measure our success by what Hollywood considers success. That framework was not built with our stories in mind, and it does not have adequate language for what it means to make a film that carries ancestral weight, that speaks to and through a community, that arrives in the world not because a studio decided it was marketable but because a person decided it was necessary. Haile Gerima did not wait for Hollywood’s permission to make Sankofa.

The communities that found that film did not need a critic to tell them it mattered. It mattered because it was true, and because it was made by someone who understood that some stories belong to a people and not to an industry, and that the person entrusted with those stories has a responsibility that goes far beyond the commercial.

We often tell stories with an ancestral dimension, stories connected to something larger than a single life or a single moment in time. That kind of story takes as long as it takes. Not because something is wrong, but because something is right, because the work is asking you to go deeper than the first draft, deeper than the tenth, deeper than the version of yourself who first sat down to write it. The story is not waiting for the industry to be ready. It is waiting for you to be.

The journey of a long project is not a straight line, and the people around you will not always remain constant across the full arc of it. Producers will come and go. Friends will come and go. Collaborators will enter and exit at different chapters of the process. Life will intervene in ways large and small, in ways that stop you completely and ways that quietly redirect you toward something the work needed you to find.

But the story is yours. Your relationship to it is the one thing that does not belong to anyone else, the one thread you are responsible for maintaining regardless of what shifts around you.

That ownership is not incidental. It is everything. It is what keeps the story alive through all the seasons when no one else can see it or hold it but you.

Jordan Peele kept returning. Haile Gerima kept returning. Not because the path was clear, but because the story was calling.

They had learned to trust that the call itself was enough, that the vision did not require external validation to be real, and that the work of becoming the person capable of telling a story is as sacred as the telling itself.

So keep going. Whatever the project is that you have set aside, that you have doubted, that you have told yourself is taking too long or asking more than you have to give right now — keep going. Stay in a relationship with it. Trust that what you are living in the time between drafts is not wasted but gathered. Your life is feeding the work even when you cannot see it happening. The story will be stronger for everything you brought back to it when you finally returned.

You were given this story for a reason. That reason does not expire.

Keep going!

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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(Spoilers ahead. Not just for this film, but for many of the works discussed throughout this series.)

I want to say something before getting into this series.

I’m not writing these pieces from the position of someone who believes they have mastered filmmaking or solved the mechanics of great cinema. In many ways, I’m writing from inside my own ongoing process of wrestling with these questions as a filmmaker myself.

I’ve been developing my feature film The Return for years now, and a tremendous amount of that process has involved studying horror very closely. Watching films over and over. Trying to understand why certain images linger in our nervous systems while others disappear instantly. Trying to understand dread, atmosphere, emotional pressure, rhythm, withholding, performance, and the strange psychological mathematics that make horror work at all.

So this series is not really about reviews. And it’s not a masterclass from someone pretending to have everything figured out.

It’s closer to a filmmaker’s notebook. A running conversation about creative works that continue teaching me something as I wrestle with my own work at the same time.

One thing I’ve been thinking about constantly while writing horror is how often filmmakers feel the need to over-explain their monsters.

There’s a tendency to construct elaborate mythology, psychology, timelines, lore, exposition, and origin stories, as if the audience needs to fully understand where the horror came from in order to fear it.

But one of the scariest things a monster can do is exist without explanation. Or perhaps more precisely: it does not really matter who your monster is. What matters is what your monster can do.

That’s part of what makes The Killing of a Sacred Deer so deeply unsettling.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the film follows a successful surgeon, Steven Murphy, played with cold restraint by Colin Farrell. Steven develops a strange relationship with a teenage boy named Martin, played by Barry Keoghan in one of the most unnerving performances I’ve seen in years.

What’s fascinating is that Martin is not frightening in any conventional horror-movie sense. He isn’t physically imposing. He isn’t visually monstrous. He rarely even raises his voice. And yet from the moment the film settles into itself, you feel danger radiating from him.

Not because we understand him, but because we slowly begin understanding what he can do.

That distinction matters.

At a certain point in the film, Steven’s children mysteriously lose the ability to walk. Martin calmly informs Steven that unless he kills one member of his family, all of them will die. The film never fully explains how Martin possesses this power. There is no elaborate supernatural exposition. No scene where the mythology is decoded for the audience. No emotional unraveling where the film suddenly begins overexplaining itself in order to reassure viewers logically.

And somehow that makes it even more terrifying.

Because once the film establishes that Martin’s power is real, dread takes over completely.

That’s the lesson I keep returning to as I continue wrestling with horror in my own writing. The audience often does not need exhaustive explanation. Sometimes explanation actually weakens fear. Mystery creates space for the viewer’s imagination to participate in the terror, and human imagination will almost always construct something more frightening than exposition can.

The film is also extraordinary in its control of tone.

I know some viewers struggle with the unusual dialogue delivery. Characters speak with a strange emotional flatness that initially feels artificial or detached. But eventually I realized that the performances are functioning almost musically. The emotional suppression becomes part of the atmosphere itself. It creates a world where human behavior feels slightly off-balance long before the horror fully arrives.

That kind of tonal precision is incredibly difficult to sustain.

A lesser filmmaker attempting this style would likely lose the audience completely. But Lanthimos understands exactly how far to push discomfort without breaking the hypnotic tension of the film.

And the performances are brilliant.

Barry Keoghan especially is astonishing here because he refuses obvious performance choices. Martin rarely performs menace in ways audiences have been trained to recognize. He doesn’t posture. He doesn’t rage. He barely changes emotionally at all. That stillness becomes horrifying because it feels so unknowable.

Nicole Kidman is also exceptional in the film. She understands something crucial about social performance — the rituals of composure, marriage, professionalism, upper-class emotional restraint. Her performance feels like someone desperately trying to preserve order inside a reality that no longer obeys logic.

And visually, the film is stunning.

There’s a beautiful long dolly shot early in the film of the doctors walking through the hospital hallway that immediately establishes the emotional architecture of the world. The camera glides with this cold, ghostly precision that feels controlled and ominous at the same time. Throughout the film, Lanthimos often frames characters from above or at a distance, making them appear trapped inside systems larger than themselves.

The hospital itself becomes terrifying.

Not because of gore, but because of ritual, hierarchy, emotional coldness, and inevitability.

What stays with me most about The Killing of a Sacred Deer is not simply the plot. It’s the film’s confidence in withholding. Its refusal to overexplain itself. Its understanding that horror often becomes more powerful when audiences are forced to sit inside uncertainty rather than escape it through information.

As someone still wrestling with horror in my own work, I find myself returning to that lesson constantly.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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The truth is, I watch everything. Films. Television. Music videos. Experimental shorts. Performances. Old cinema. New cinema. Things that are technically brilliant. Things that are emotionally messy but formally fascinating. Work that succeeds wildly and work that collapses under the weight of its own ambition but still teaches me something valuable.

As a filmmaker, I think studying other artists is essential. Not in the sense of imitation, but in the sense of learning how images function emotionally. Learning how tension is built. Learning why certain performances stay with us. Learning what the camera reveals that dialogue cannot. Learning how rhythm, sound, silence, movement, editing, atmosphere, and emotional pressure all shape the experience of a story.

My hometown of New Orleans is a place where storytelling feels alive. Stories exist in the architecture, in the music drifting through neighborhoods, in family histories, in second lines, in the rhythm of conversations, in grief, in humor, in food, in silence. It’s a city that teaches you very early that storytelling is not simply information. It’s feeling. Memory. Atmosphere. Spirit.

So this series isn’t bout reviews. I’m not particularly interested in assigning stars or deciding whether something is “good” or “bad.” I’m interested in looking beneath the surface of the work and asking deeper questions.

Why does this scene linger in our minds? Why does a particular performance feel truthful? How is dread being constructed? What emotional language is the camera speaking? Why do some images haunt us long after the story itself is over?

Sometimes I’ll write about horror films. Sometimes television episodes. Sometimes performances. Sometimes music videos, short films, or visual artists whose work I think filmmakers should spend time studying closely. Some of these works will be masterpieces. Others will simply contain moments of brilliance worth examining.

And honestly, some of the most valuable lessons in filmmaking come from works that are flawed, contradictory, or reaching beyond their grasp.

More than anything, this series is meant to be an ongoing conversation about the craft itself and the endless ways artists teach one another how to see.

I’d also love for you all to share your own recommendations with me along the way. Some of the greatest films, books, and artists I’ve ever encountered came through conversation, community, and people saying, “You need to watch this.”

So consider this a new corner of The Director’s Notebook - living inside of THE CASE FILES - an evolving archive of creative works worth studying seriously.

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER - kicks off the series.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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To all the new subscribers who found their way here after my recent essay, welcome. Truly.

Over the last few days, I’ve watched this space grow in a way that feels deeply meaningful to me, and I wanted to take a moment to properly introduce myself and talk a little bit about what The Director’s Notebook actually is.

My name is Stacey Muhammad. I’m a writer, director, producer, editor, and daughter of New Orleans.

I was born and raised in the 17th Ward by Black people who loved being Black, and I say that very intentionally because it shaped my lens completely. My understanding of image, rhythm, language, memory, spirituality, humor, grief, style, music, movement, survival, and storytelling all begins there.

New Orleans is in everything I make.

Long before I ever directed television, I spent more than fifteen years as an independent filmmaker finding my voice and building a body of work that eventually opened the door for me to transition into episodic television. I made short films, music videos, documentaries, experimental work, digital series, and whatever else I could create with the resources I had available to me. I learned how to shoot. I learned how to edit. I learned how to build stories from instinct, limitation, collaboration, and necessity.

I still edit today, and honestly, I think editing may be one of the greatest directing schools in existence because it teaches rhythm, emotional timing, compression, restraint, and where truth actually lives inside a performance.

Before filmmaking fully took over my life, I studied dance at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center after high school, and that experience continues to shape me profoundly as a director. Dance taught me how bodies move through space emotionally. It taught me rhythm, tension, composition, musicality, and the emotional architecture of movement itself. I think it’s one of the reasons I care so deeply about blocking and performance.

I also had the tremendous privilege of taking some of my earliest film classes with Haile Gerima, whose work and philosophy left a permanent imprint on me as an artist. He challenged us to think about cinema not simply as entertainment, but as cultural memory, political language, and responsibility.

I’m also a mother, and I think motherhood has shaped me profoundly as a director. My daughter is an artist herself — a singer, producer, and photographer deeply rooted in New Orleans culture and creativity — and I think being a nurturer informs the way I move through sets and collaborations. Directing, for me, has never simply been about control. It’s about stewardship, emotional intelligence, protection, listening, rhythm, and creating conditions where people feel safe enough to do vulnerable work.

Eventually, after years of independent filmmaking, I transitioned into episodic television. Since then, I’ve directed nearly thirty episodes of television across series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Harlem, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, The Best Man: The Final Chapters, Bel-Air, Reasonable Doubt, and others.

I recently wrapped directing on Reasonable Doubt, which was a beautiful experience creatively and personally. One of the things that stayed with me most was the presence of so many Black women throughout the creative structure of the show: writers, producers, department heads, executives, assistant directors, and creators. That kind of environment still feels meaningful to me every time I encounter it.

At the same time, I’m also developing my feature film The Return, a Southern gothic horror film rooted deeply in New Orleans history, ancestry, land, memory, spirituality, and the afterlife of American violence. It’s a project incredibly close to my heart and one I’ve been shaping for years.

All of these experiences are part of what eventually led me to create THE DIRECTOR’S NOTEBOOK.

This space is not simply a newsletter to me. It’s a film school, a workshop, a creative archive, and a place for rigorous conversation about cinema, directing, performance, race, visual language, storytelling, and the emotional architecture beneath the frame.

Sometimes I’ll write essays about television and film, like the recent piece on Black antiheroes and narrative punishment. Other times I’ll talk about directing actors, building scenes, the emotional temperature of a set, New Orleans, Southern memory, filmmaking craft, or the complicated inner life of being an artist.

Underneath all of it is the same core belief: images matter, stories matter, and the emotional logic underneath stories matters.

The way we frame human beings on screen matters too.

I’m interested in the interior of the craft. The moral questions underneath the image. The unseen labor of directing. The architecture of performance. The politics of storytelling. The tension between art and industry. The rhythms underneath cinema that people feel even when they cannot immediately articulate them.

More than anything, I’m interested in building something lasting here. Not simply a platform, but a real creative community and resource for filmmakers, writers, actors, artists, and thoughtful viewers who care deeply about storytelling.

So whether you arrived here because of one essay, one conversation, one television episode, or simple curiosity, I’m grateful you’re here.

Welcome to The Director’s Notebook.

In craft and truth,

Stacey

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans whose work is rooted in the cinematic testimony of Black life and the enduring brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film The Return to her directing work on series including CROSS, The Greatest, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories in which Black people remain at the center of their own emotional and narrative worlds, never merely the backdrop to someone else’s. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school, creative laboratory, and evolving archive devoted to craft, authorship, image making, and the emotional architecture beneath the frame.

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I recently finished rewatching Ozark and found myself unsettled all over again by how thoroughly the Byrdes were allowed to survive their own devastation.

Over the course of the series, Marty and Wendy Byrde launder money, orchestrate violence, destroy lives, destabilize communities, and repeatedly place their own children in danger. Nearly everyone who enters their orbit suffers in some way. People are killed. Families collapse. Entire lives are pulled into the gravitational force of the Byrdes’ ambition.

And yet by the end, they still have each other.

Their children return to them. Their social standing survives. Their intelligence remains intact. Their family structure, fractured as it may be, still holds. Even Omar Navarro, the cartel figure looming over the series, is ultimately removed, while the Byrdes emerge with their future still imaginable.

The series never fully strips them of humanity.

It continually frames them through intimacy and emotional access. We see them at dinner tables, in private arguments, navigating marriage, parenting, exhaustion, fear, and ambition. Even in their worst moments, the audience is repeatedly invited back into identification with them.

They remain emotionally legible.

I found myself thinking about this again recently while rewatching Your Honor with someone very close to me, someone whose insight into television I deeply respect. He pointed out something I could no longer unsee once he said it aloud: no matter how corrupt, violent, manipulative, or criminal the white characters became, the series continued to frame them inside ecosystems of intimacy and domestic humanity. We saw them with wives, children, friendships, histories, vulnerabilities, contradictions.

The Black characters, meanwhile, were more often positioned inside structures of devastation.

Entire Black families are destroyed over the course of the series. Kofi Jones dies protecting the secret of a wealthy white family. Eugene loses nearly everyone connected to him.

Black suffering accumulates narratively while white suffering remains individualized and emotionally textured.

Even when Black characters are granted complexity, they are frequently denied the same emotional protection the series extends to its white characters.

That difference stayed with me.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was not really thinking about morality. I was thinking about consequence. More specifically, I was thinking about the politics of consequence in American television.

Because consequence in television is never neutral.

Writers decide who remains emotionally legible after wrongdoing. They decide who is granted tragedy, who is granted dignity, who is granted complexity, and who is ultimately reduced to a cautionary tale.

White antiheroes are often allowed contradiction without complete narrative annihilation. Black antiheroes rarely are.

That does not mean white characters never suffer.

Walter White dies. Tony Soprano dies. Jax Teller dies.

But even in collapse, these characters are often granted mythic stature. Their narratives preserve charisma, intelligence, emotional complexity, and symbolic power. Their stories remain tragic.

Black antiheroes, however, are often denied even the possibility of tragic transcendence. The punishment frequently becomes total. Not simply defeat, but erasure.

Franklin Saint and the Difference Between Consequence and Collapse

Snowfall may be one of the clearest examples of this pattern in recent television.

Franklin Saint does not simply lose. He is systematically dismantled by the narrative itself.

And I want to be careful here, because I am not arguing that Franklin deserved a triumphant ending. He built an empire through violence, addiction, greed, and destruction. The series never loses sight of the catastrophic impact of crack cocaine or Franklin’s role in accelerating devastation within his own community.

That is not the issue.

The issue is the nature of the punishment.

By the end of Snowfall, Franklin loses nearly everything that once made him legible to himself and to the audience. His money disappears. His relationships collapse. His sense of self erodes. His future evaporates. His emotional coherence deteriorates. His mother is imprisoned. His family structure disintegrates. His wife leaves. Even his final interactions with Leon are framed through absence, exhaustion, and irreversible decline.

The ending does not simply punish Franklin morally. It empties him symbolically.

He becomes a ghost wandering the same streets he once controlled, stripped not only of wealth and power, but of narrative stature itself.

And that distinction matters because white antiheroes are so often allowed to retain some mythic quality even in defeat.

Walter White dies, but Breaking Bad preserves his brilliance, his strategic mind, his legend. There is almost an operatic grandeur attached to his collapse. The audience is still allowed to remember him as extraordinary.

Franklin’s ending, however, insists on degradation. Not tragedy. Not myth. Humiliation.

The narrative strips him of continuity, inheritance, and emotional afterlife. Even his ambition begins to feel retroactively reframed as contamination rather than complexity.

And what stayed with me afterward was not simply that Franklin lost. It was the totality of the loss.

The narrative seemed to insist that there could be no version of Black criminal ambition that remained standing in any meaningful way. No surviving family structure. No preserved dignity. No possibility of reinvention. No symbolic continuity. Only ruin.

That pattern appears again and again in American television. Black antiheroes are often permitted charisma, intelligence, strategic brilliance, and even temporary power, but they are rarely allowed sustainable interiority beyond the arc of punishment itself.

Their collapse must become complete enough to restore moral order.

And that is where this conversation becomes uncomfortable, because it forces us to ask a deeper question:

Why does Black transgression so often require narrative annihilation, while white transgression is more frequently framed as tragic contradiction?

Queen & Slim and the Limits of Black Escape

The same pattern emerges differently in Queen & Slim.

To be clear, I understand the intention behind the film. Melina Matsoukas has spoken openly about wanting the story to function as a modern Black tragedy rooted in the historical reality that Black people in America are often denied the luxury of ordinary longevity, safety, and escape. The ending is not accidental. It is meant to confront the audience with the inevitability of state violence against Black bodies.

I understand that.

And yet I still found myself haunted by the larger cinematic pattern the film participates in.

Again and again, Black escape becomes narratively unsustainable.

The film begins by opening up the possibility of fugitivity as transformation. Queen and Slim become almost mythic as they move across America. Their journey briefly allows them to exist outside the structures that initially defined them. Along the way they experience intimacy, vulnerability, eroticism, tenderness, humor, and connection. For brief moments, they appear to step outside surveillance itself.

But the narrative ultimately closes that possibility down.

Not only through death, but through betrayal. Even freedom becomes temporary. Conditional. Unstable.

What haunted me was how quickly the possibility of Black escape narrowed back into sacrifice. Queen and Slim become symbols before they are ever allowed futures.

That matters because white outlaw narratives often preserve the fantasy of reinvention even when the characters die. There is still mythology attached to their escape. Still romance attached to their rebellion. Still a sense of symbolic freedom embedded within the narrative itself.

Black rebellion in American cinema, however, is frequently forced back into containment.

The system reasserts itself. The body is recovered. The lesson is restored.

And again, I want to be precise here because I am not arguing that every Black story requires a happy ending. Tragedy is not the problem. Some of the greatest films ever made are tragedies.

The question is repetition.

What does it mean when Black freedom repeatedly becomes narratively unimaginable beyond suffering, sacrifice, or death?

What does it mean when Black characters are allowed transformation, but not continuation?

And what does it reveal about the limits of American cinematic imagination that Black escape so often feels temporary, even inside fiction?

Top Boy and the Collapse of Black Continuity

Top Boy complicates this conversation in particularly revealing ways.

What makes Top Boy especially interesting is that the series spends years building Dushane and Sully into deeply textured human beings. The show grants them intelligence, emotional contradiction, vulnerability, ambition, fear, tenderness, and strategic brilliance. They are never reduced to caricature. They feel fully realized.

Which is precisely why the ending lands with such force.

By the final season, nearly everything around them has collapsed. Dushane loses his money, his infrastructure, his future, his relationship, his sense of stability. Sully ultimately kills him, severing the last emotional thread connecting them to each other and to the history they built together. The empire disintegrates from within.

What stayed with me was not simply that these men faced consequence, but the totality of the collapse. The narrative leaves little room for continuity beyond destruction.

And perhaps most striking is the asymmetry surrounding who ultimately escapes the wreckage.

The white women connected to the financial architecture of the drug operation retain mobility. They survive structurally. They disappear back into continuation and invisibility. Meanwhile the Black men destroy each other emotionally, psychologically, financially, and physically.

That contrast lingered with me long after the series ended.

What makes all of this even more revealing is that Top Boy understands the humanity of its characters deeply. The series is anything but shallow in its portrayal of Black life. Quite the opposite. It gives these men emotional texture, contradiction, tenderness, fear, intelligence, and history.

Which is precisely why the ending lingers the way it does.

Even within a narrative this emotionally sophisticated, Black power still becomes narratively unsustainable.

And that phrase matters to me: narratively unsustainable.

Because this conversation is not really about realism. Every one of these series asks audiences to accept improbabilities, coincidences, heightened realities, and dramatic exaggerations all the time. Television constantly bends realism in service of suspense, emotion, mythmaking, and dramatic effect.

So when Black futures repeatedly collapse while white futures remain imaginable, we have to ask what kind of narrative logic is operating underneath the surface.

Tragedy, Moral Correction, and Narrative Permission

This is why I think it is important to distinguish tragedy from moral correction, because they are not the same thing.

Tragedy allows a character to remain human even in destruction. The fall becomes emotionally expansive. The audience is invited to wrestle simultaneously with contradiction, grief, vulnerability, power, fate, and desire. Even in collapse, the character retains emotional dimension.

Moral correction is narrower. It insists that the narrative restore order through punishment.

And that distinction becomes especially visible when comparing the endings of many white antiheroes to the endings often assigned to Black antiheroes in contemporary television.

Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy is a criminal, and yet his death is framed almost mythically. The series grants him emotional grandeur. His final act remains self-authored. He dies as legend, as tragic outlaw, as someone the audience is still invited to mourn.

The same is true for many white antiheroes across television history. Even in collapse, the narrative often preserves their symbolic stature.

Black antiheroes, however, are frequently denied that same emotional architecture. Their endings often move beyond tragedy into disintegration itself.

Not simply death or consequence. Collapse.

The distinction matters because stories teach audiences how to interpret humanity.

When white criminality is repeatedly framed through contradiction, emotional intimacy, family continuity, and tragic complexity, audiences learn to separate whiteness from criminal reduction. White characters remain redeemable, emotionally legible, even when they are monstrous.

Black criminality, however, is more frequently framed as terminal. The punishment must become complete enough to restore moral order. Wealth disappears. Family collapses. Dignity evaporates. The character is stripped not only of power, but of emotional continuity itself.

And this is where the conversation becomes larger than television, because what we are really discussing is narrative permission.

Who is allowed contradiction without forfeiting humanity? Who is allowed reinvention after moral failure? Who is allowed legacy after wrongdoing? Who is allowed to remain emotionally legible to the audience after violence?

And who must ultimately be reduced to ruin in order for the story to feel complete?

Perhaps most importantly: who is allowed to survive symbolically, even when they do not survive literally?

Get Out and the Refusal of Narrative Punishment

Part of what made Get Out feel so radical was not simply its horror premise. It was the fact that Jordan Peele understood the narrative trap surrounding Black suffering and consciously chose to interrupt it.

Peele has spoken publicly about originally considering a darker ending for the film, one in which Chris is arrested after killing the Armitage family and ultimately imprisoned. In many ways, that ending would have aligned perfectly with the cinematic logic audiences have been conditioned to expect. Black survival would once again become impossible. Escape would collapse back into punishment. The system would reassert itself.

Peele made a different choice. Chris survives.

Not only physically, but emotionally and symbolically. His friend arrives instead of the police. The audience experiences relief instead of inevitable devastation. And what is remarkable is how shocking that relief felt at the time.

That reaction alone reveals something important.

We have been conditioned by American cinema to anticipate Black punishment as narrative equilibrium. The expectation itself has become part of the language.

What Peele understood is that representation is not only about visibility. It is also about imaginative permission. What futures can be imagined? What outcomes feel possible? What forms of Black survival are audiences allowed to emotionally process without immediately demanding consequence?

And this is where I think the conversation becomes especially important for Black filmmakers.

Because I am not interested in arguing that Black stories should avoid darkness, tragedy, contradiction, or moral complexity. Some of the greatest works of art emerge precisely from those spaces.

But I do think Black filmmakers inherit a responsibility to interrogate the narrative limits we have been handed, not simply reproduce them.

American cinema has historically been one of the primary mechanisms through which Black life has been distorted, disciplined, criminalized, caricatured, and contained. That history does not disappear simply because more Black creators now have access to authorship.

The question becomes what we do with that authorship.

Do we merely recreate the inevitabilities we inherited? Or do we begin expanding the imaginative possibilities surrounding Black existence itself?

Because there is a difference between tragedy and narrative surrender. There is a difference between moral complexity and the repeated insistence that Black ambition, Black fugitivity, Black criminality, or even Black freedom must always end in absolute collapse.

And perhaps part of the work now is not simply placing Black faces into existing narrative structures, but reimagining the structures themselves.

Sinners and the Preservation of Humanity

I found myself thinking about this again recently while watching Sinners.

What Ryan Coogler understands, and what so few filmmakers fully grasp, is that there is a difference between death and narrative diminishment.

Michael B. Jordan’s character Smoke dies, but the film never strips him of humanity, emotional continuity, or symbolic stature. By the end, he is framed through memory, grief, love, fellowship, and myth. Even in violence, the narrative preserves his emotional interiority.

One of the most moving choices in the film comes just before the final confrontation, when flashes of the people he has loved and lost move through the sequence like memory refusing disappearance. We see moments of beauty, community, laughter, intimacy, fellowship. The film reminds us that these are not simply bodies accumulating in a narrative. These are people to whom we have become emotionally connected.

And when he turns toward violence in the final movement of the film, it does not feel like degradation or collapse. It feels mournful. Righteous. Mythic.

He confronts and punishes the people responsible for that loss, but the sequence never abandons his humanity in the process. The violence remains tethered to grief, memory, and love.

That distinction matters.

Because even in death, the film allows him dignity. It allows him emotional afterlife. It allows him to remain fully human all the way to the end.

I am less interested in accusing individual writers than I am in interrogating the storytelling traditions we have inherited.

In many cases, the very works I am wrestling with here are works I genuinely admire, which is exactly why I think they deserve rigorous conversation.

Because stories shape emotional expectation.

They train audiences whom to fear. Whom to forgive. Whom to mourn. Whom to humanize. Whom to imagine surviving.

And if cinema has historically participated in limiting the imaginative possibilities surrounding Black life, then perhaps part of the responsibility now is not simply representation alone, but expansion.

Expansion of emotional permission. Expansion of complexity. Expansion of futurity. Expansion of what kinds of Black lives are narratively imaginable in the first place.

Because perhaps the deeper question underneath all of this is not simply who gets punished.

It is who American storytelling still struggles to imagine free.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans whose work is rooted in the cinematic testimony of Black life and the enduring brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film The Return to her directing work on series including CROSS, The Greatest, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories in which Black people remain at the center of their own emotional and narrative worlds, never merely the backdrop to someone else’s. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school, creative laboratory, and evolving archive devoted to craft, authorship, image making, and the emotional architecture beneath the frame.

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I started getting terrible, debilitating headaches on set. One afternoon, the lovely Kate Beckinsale handed me a small bottle of peppermint oil from a Canadian wellness company called SAJE, promising it would help the headaches.

It did.

But after a while, I noticed something else happening in those moments. When I rubbed a few drops into my palms and inhaled, something in me genuinely recalibrated. My breathing slowed. My focus sharpened. The ambient noise of production receded just enough for me to locate myself again.

What began as a remedy slowly became ritual, a small private act of regulation in the middle of an intensely demanding environment.

Eventually, that little bottle of peppermint oil became part of my directing toolbox.

The conversation around directing tends to center on the visible mechanics of the craft: coverage and blocking, shot lists and lenses, scheduling and notes, and the thousand logistical decisions that shape a shooting day. All of that is real. All of it matters. But it is only part of what directing actually is.

Directing is also energetic.

A set has a felt atmosphere to it, and whether consciously or unconsciously, the director is generating that atmosphere all day long.

That atmosphere enters the work in ways that are difficult to measure but completely visible on screen.

Actors feel a director before they fully process their notes. Crews read emotional temperature with astonishing precision.

Calm is not passivity on a set, it is actually the most sophisticated form of leadership because it requires you to remain grounded in yourself while simultaneously holding emotional and creative space for everyone around you.

Over time, I began offering the peppermint oil to actors as well, and eventually a kind of quiet ritual formed around it that I still find deeply moving. I would walk over between setups rubbing the oil into my palms, and sometimes before I even said a word, the actor would already be smiling, already reaching out, already knowing what was coming.

A few drops. A breath. A small moment of stillness inside the velocity of production.

This week alone, I’ve used it with Meagan Good and with Tank on the set of Reasonable Doubt. I dabbed a few drops into Tank’s palms. He inhaled, looked up at me, grinned, and said, “Yep. I’ma need this.”

Over the years, I’ve used it with countless actors, and now there are moments when they come looking for me before particularly emotional scenes or difficult days because they know the ritual already.

But this has never really been about peppermint oil. Not entirely. It is about regulation, grounding, trust and presence.

It is about having a director who understands that actors are doing something genuinely vulnerable, and that the emotional conditions surrounding the work matter just as much as the technical conditions.

A director’s nervous system directly impacts the nervous systems of actors, whether we acknowledge it or not. Actors feel the pace of your breathing, the speed of your speech, the tension in your body, the way you approach them between takes, whether your presence feels calm or chaotic, collaborative or judgmental, grounded or scattered. All of that enters the performance.

I have a calm demeanor by nature. I do not direct through volume or urgency or the kind of performed authority that mistakes noise for power. I think part of what actors respond to in working with me is not only technical clarity, but a genuine sense of emotional safety. The feeling that they are held securely enough to remain open. Securely enough to risk something real without bracing for impact.

That matters enormously because performance is inherently vulnerable, and television moves at a pace that can be genuinely brutal. Actors are being asked to locate grief, fear, rage, intimacy, humor, trauma, heartbreak, sometimes in rapid succession, always under lights, always with a crew watching, always with the clock moving.

The director’s responsibility in all of that is not simply to capture what emerges. It is to protect the conditions that allow something truthful to emerge in the first place.

The older I become as a director, the more clearly I understand that the real work is cultivating within yourself the kind of presence that allows other people to do their best work.

The shot list, the schedule, the coverage, all of it is ultimately in service of something more fundamental: creating a space where the truth of a human being can appear on camera without fear.

And that space begins, always, with you.

Thank you, Kate, for introducing me to what became one of the most grounding tools I’ve carried with me as a director.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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I’m writing this from set, day five of directing on Reasonable Doubt, surrounded by an extraordinary cast, crew, producers, department heads, writers, and artists who care deeply about the work and one another.

One of the things that has stayed with me most about this experience is the way Black women are centered throughout the creative structure of the show. A Black woman lead. A Black woman creator / showrunner. Black women writers. Black women producers. Two Black women first ADs helping lead the floor every day with precision, calm, and clarity.

It is powerful to witness and even more amazing to work inside of.

You can feel the difference when that kind of authorship exists across a production. There is a certain rhythm to the set, a certain trust in the conversations. People listen to each other differently. The work feels grounded in lived experience rather than performance of experience. There’s care in the details, care in the collaboration, care in the way people are allowed to show up fully inside the work.

It reminds me of another experience that meant a great deal to me creatively: Harlem. And if I’m honest, productions like this still feel far too rare.

Being back at work has also made me think more about what I want The Director’s Notebook to be moving forward.

I never wanted this space to feel like content for content’s sake. I wanted it to feel like a real conversation about the work. Directing. Performance. Image making. Race. Story structure. Collaboration. The emotional and cultural life underneath what we put on screen.

And as the Notebook continues to grow, I want that growth to become useful in tangible ways to other filmmakers too.

So moving forward, a portion of proceeds from The Director’s Notebook will go toward filmmaker grants, finishing funds, creative resources, and support for emerging artists and independent productions.

More details on that soon.

I’m also looking forward to sharing more from inside the process itself. More reflections from set. More conversations about directing actors and shaping performances. More thoughts about visual language, collaboration, leadership, and what it actually takes to build television at a high level week after week.

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, read, shared, commented, and spent time with this work. I’m grateful for the community that’s forming here, and I’m excited for what this next phase can become.

In craft and truth,

Stacey

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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There is a common misconception that directing begins when the director calls action. In truth, by the time the camera rolls, much of the real work has already begun. Prep is where the episode begins to take shape, where instinct meets logistics, and where ideas are translated into practical choices that dozens of people can execute together.

Prep is not downtime before the “real work.” Prep is the work.

It is where you study the script closely enough to understand not only what happens, but why it happens, what is being conveyed beneath the surface, and how those ideas will be experienced by the audience.

It is where you begin asking the deeper questions: What is the emotional spine of the episode? Where does the pressure live? What needs to feel intimate, dangerous, funny, fractured, urgent, or restrained? What wants to be seen, and what should be held back long enough to create tension, curiosity, or emotional depth?

From there, prep becomes a series of conversations, each one shaping what the audience will eventually experience. Early clarity is invaluable because it carries forward into every meeting that follows, sharpens your questions, refines your instincts, and helps every department move in the same direction from the beginning.

The audience may not know how a decision was made, or which department executed it, but they experience the result as one unified piece of storytelling. The fit of a jacket, the placement of a lamp, the texture of a location, the rhythm of background movement, the way a room holds tension or ease, all of it contributes to meaning.

That is why communication during prep is so important. You are not simply approving things, you are helping departments understand the emotional intention behind the choices.

A wardrobe meeting is not just about clothes. It is about character, psychology, status, vulnerability, contradiction, and movement.

A production design conversation is not just about objects in a room or colors on a wall. It is about atmosphere, history, energy, and how the environment supports story.

A props meeting is often about precision. What a character touches, avoids, carries, hides, or values can reveal more than pages of dialogue.

A location scout is not only about whether a place looks good on camera. It is also about logistics, efficiency, and whether the day can actually be made there. How close is this location to the next one? Are we losing an hour in transit that could have gone onto the screen? Is this a company move, where the entire production relocates and valuable time is spent reestablishing the day, or is it a push move, where we can move quickly and keep momentum? Does the location work creatively while also helping us practically?

While the first AD and locations department are deeply involved in managing these logistics, directors stays close to those conversations to help shape decisions that will serve the day. Sometimes that means letting go of a location you love and finding another way to achieve the scene so the schedule remains workable and the day doesn’t become unnecessarily heavy. Once you are shooting, you will appreciate every smart choice made in prep that allows the work to move with greater ease, focus, and confidence.

Time is one of the great hidden currencies of directing. The better it is protected, the more of it shows up on screen.

The best directors understand that the visual is only one part of the job. Tone, composition, and taste matter, but so does getting the work shot within a fixed number of hours, because how the day is run affects everything.

A well-managed day creates a culture where people are willing to work hard because they feel the work is being led with discipline and respect. They can give their full energy because they trust they are not being dragged through unnecessary chaos.

When days run too long without purpose, it wears people down. Fatigue dulls creativity, morale slips, focus weakens, and the drive that makes great crews special can start to erode. People still do the job, but something essential begins to dim.

And then there is the technical side of prep, where the episode begins to take visual form. Shot listing with the DP, discussing blocking possibilities, and deciding how scenes should be covered are all part of translating what lives on the page into cinematic language. These choices shape rhythm, perspective, tension, scale, and where the audience’s attention will live moment to moment. Long before the first setup, the visual grammar of the episode is already being built.

Departments begin to understand how you think. You begin to understand where their strengths live. The team feels whether you are clear, prepared, collaborative, indecisive, generous, or disconnected. Long before the first setup, people know what kind of director has arrived.

This is why I take prep seriously. It is foundational. A strong prep process does not eliminate surprises, but it gives you the structure to handle them. It allows you to be flexible because you have already done the deeper work.

By the time you call action, the episode should already be alive inside you in some form.

Let every detail be considered, every question asked, every loose end addressed.

Prep is how you arrive on set ready, and how you carry that readiness from day one to wrap.

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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I’ve been quiet here for a couple of weeks. Much of that time has been spent deep in writing and development, building, refining, and preparing a new wave of essays, lessons, and lab work that I’m looking forward to sharing inside The Director’s Notebook, while also stepping into prep on a new show.

I’ve just begun work directing an episode of Reasonable Doubt, now entering its fourth season, which is no small achievement. Any series that reaches a fourth season has already done something difficult. For a Black-led show to sustain itself, evolve, and keep an audience over time is especially worth acknowledging.

Congratulations to creator and showrunner, Raamla Mohamed - Hunter, and everyone who has helped build this world into something that has endured.

One of the first things I pay attention to when stepping onto a new show is the culture. You can feel it almost immediately in the way people greet each other, in whether the room carries tension or ease, in whether the crew feels tired, inspired, fractured, or connected. Sets tell the truth quickly.

I walked in and immediately felt a strong spirit around the work. I was welcomed warmly, shown my office, introduced to the rhythms of the space, and met by people who clearly care about what they do.

My first AD, Angel Cook Williams, is the first Black woman assistant director I’ve worked with, which means something to me. My DP, Richard Vialet, has a sharp eye and a grounded presence, and I can already tell we’re going to have a strong creative collaboration.

And I’d be remiss not to mention that the producing director on this show is Anton Cropper, one of the coldest in the game, whose body of work and steady hand speak for themselves.

Prep has been what prep often is: full days, constant movement, and a thousand decisions quietly stacking on top of one another.

Day one began with a stage walkthrough and a look at all the standing sets, followed by a location photo review, concept meeting, and conversations with department heads.

Day two was largely spent scouting locations, then returning for a props meeting.

Today was more scouting, more meetings, and time spent on the sets thinking through the visual architecture of the episode, how it should move, how scenes should block, and where the emotional pressure lives.

I also spent time talking shots with my DP and working closely with my first AD to talk through timing, scene coverage, and the order of the day once we begin shooting.

This is the part many people never see. Directing is not only what happens when someone says action. It is observation, preparation, problem-solving, leadership, tone, instinct, and a thousand invisible choices made before the camera ever rolls.

I wanted to check in and let you know I’m here, still building The Director’s Notebook into a meaningful space.

And now that I’m inside a new season of work, I’ll have much more to share with you soon: lessons from prep, behind-the-scenes content, creative breakthroughs, mistakes avoided, and what it actually takes to guide an episode from page to screen.

Back soon.

— Stacey

About the Author

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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Every so often, I hear an artist speak about being overlooked with such intensity that it reveals something deeper than disappointment. It reveals a kind of dependence, not on the work itself, but on being affirmed for the work, on being named, on being celebrated in real time, on being publicly recognized as worthy.

I understand that longing because I understand what it means to labor in public and private, to give years to something exacting and uncertain, to shape a life around a gift that does not always return anything immediate or tangible.

I understand wanting to be seen, wanting the work to travel, wanting the people whose opinions seem to matter to reflect something back to you that confirms your devotion has not gone unnoticed.

And while I understand that longing, I also recognize it is one of the great spiritual dangers of a creative life.

If recognition is the thing sustaining you, what happens when it doesn’t come? What happens when the room goes quiet? What happens when the peers you hoped would champion you remain silent, when the institutions you hoped would validate you turn their attention elsewhere, when the culture does not reflect back to you what you believe you have earned?

That question matters because, more and more, I find myself wondering whether some artists are truly devoted to the work, or whether they are devoted to being seen doing the work. Those are not the same devotion. One can carry you through a lifetime. The other collapses the moment attention shifts.

Support, community, and encouragement matters, because none of us are beyond the human need to be witnessed. We want to know that our labor is landing somewhere, that the years we have given to craft and discipline and study and becoming are not simply vanishing into air. There is nothing shameful about wanting resonance, and for your work to reach beyond you.

But if your deepest orientation is toward applause, then your practice will never be stable. You will be governed by weather, by trends, by access, by who called, by who posted, by who included you, by who failed to, and you will begin to confuse visibility with value, attention with alignment, and mainstream recognition with truth. That confusion can distort an entire life.

I was an independent filmmaker for fifteen years before I entered television, and fifteen years is a long time to remain committed to something that does not always reward you in obvious ways. Yes, I had support, yes, and an audience. Yes, there were people who saw me, but if I had measured the worth of my life and my work by who was publicly celebrating me, by whether the right gatekeepers were naming me, by whether the larger culture had decided to place me somewhere visible, I would have abandoned myself long before anything shifted professionally.

There is a saying that if it is not in the mainstream, it is not in your bloodstream, and I understand what that phrase is trying to name, which is the seductive power of visibility, the way artists can begin to feel that if the wider machine has not acknowledged them, then somehow they do not fully exist, as though obscurity were proof of insufficiency, as though delay were a verdict, as though the work had no pulse until the culture certified it.

But the mainstream has never been the sole keeper of what is true, and it has certainly never been the sole keeper of what is excellent. Often it is simply the keeper of what is visible in a given moment, and visibility is not the same thing as depth, not the same thing as rigor, not the same thing as calling, not the same thing as devotion.

Being from New Orleans teaches you that in your bones. This is a city where art is not some decorative attachment to life. It is life. It is breath. It is inheritance. It is ritual. It is labor. It is survival. It is joy.

It is the old man who has been playing his horn for decades with a depth the world may never properly reward. It is the musicians who have given their whole lives to sound, who have played in clubs and on corners and in parades and funeral processions and sanctified spaces, who have shaped the atmosphere of a city and never once been given the kind of mainstream spotlight people elsewhere treat as the final measure of significance. It is the culture bearer who keeps showing up, not because the cameras came, not because a magazine called, not because an industry machine anointed them, but because the art itself is the calling.

In New Orleans you see, if you are paying attention, that there are people who live and die in service of the gift, and whether recognition finds them or not does not alter the sacredness of what they have given. The work is still the work. The devotion is still the devotion. The beauty is still the beauty.

That matters to me because it reminds me that some of the purest artistic lives are being lived far from whatever the mainstream is looking at that week. They are being lived in neighborhoods, in churches, in rehearsal rooms, in social aid and pleasure clubs, in traditions passed hand to hand, body to body, breath to breath. They are being lived by people whose names may never be widely known and whose commitment is no less profound for it. If you come from a place like this, if you have watched people offer themselves to the art with that kind of steadiness, then you understand something early that the culture often learns too late, which is that applause is not the same thing as purpose, and being witnessed at scale is not the same thing as being in right relationship with your calling.

As Black artists, we should know this in an even deeper way because we come from lineages of brilliance that were not properly recorded, not properly rewarded, not properly protected. We come from people whose gifts were undeniable and whose names were still made vulnerable to erasure.

Black singers, dancers, actors, musicians, writers, storytellers, image makers, performers of every kind, people who shaped the very language of American culture while being denied the dignity of full humanity, people who entered through back doors and still transformed the room, people who stood under lights while being dishonored, people whose genius was consumed while their personhood was treated as disposable.

So when I think about success, I cannot think about it only in the language of awards, lists, followers, invitations, and press. I think about those who made work inside conditions designed to diminish them. I think about those who remained devoted while being excluded, who kept refining while being denied, who kept making beauty while the world refused to name them equal to what they had made. That history should humble us. It should also deepen us,.

It can suggest that the artist believes the journey should have unfolded according to their preferred design, that the unfolding itself is somehow in error because it has not yet arrived at the image they had in mind. But an artistic life does not obey our vanity. It asks for discipline, for surrender, for patience, for a relationship to process that is deeper than ego and more enduring than disappointment. It asks us to remain present while the thing is still being built, even when we cannot yet see its final shape. It asks us to trust what is taking form in us before the world confirms it, and that kind of trust is not passive, it is rigorous, it is mature, it is spiritual work.

Not everyone is rooting for you, and you have to be okay with that. Not everyone will be happy for you or understand what your life is becoming. Some people will grow quiet when your work begins to gather attention. Some will want proximity to your light but feel no real reverence for the labor that produced it.

Some will celebrate you publicly and resent you privately. Some will only know how to relate to you when they feel superior to you, necessary to you, or reflected favorably by your success. You have to make peace with that, and more than that, you have to stop taking it personally.

What others cannot extend has absolutely nothing to do with your deserving and everything to do with the condition of their own spirit. It is difficult for a person at war with themselves to be fully at peace with another person’s becoming. It is difficult for someone estranged from their own joy to rejoice without complication in the joy of someone else.

You cannot organize your life around trying to extract wholeheartedness from people who do not possess it.

You also cannot afford to become spiritually disordered in response. Envy and resentment has consequences. So does the quiet belief that what has opened for someone else should have opened for you first. Those energies do not sharpen the artist, they corrode the vessel. They interrupt gratitude, and distort perception. They make it difficult to receive your own life because you are too busy keeping score of somebody else’s.

And desperation has its own distortion. There is a quality of desperation that repels, not because desire is wrong, but because panic alters presence. It narrows the artist. It makes every interaction feel weighted with need, every opportunity feel like rescue, every delay feel catastrophic.

This is why I believe so deeply in artists building lives that can hold them. Do what you need to do to sustain yourself. Protect your livelihood, your dignity and your nervous system. There is nothing honorable about living in such a state of depletion that the work becomes contaminated by fear. The work asks for openness and steadiness. It asks for devotion that is not frantic. It asks for gratitude, not the shallow performative kind, but the real kind, the kind that allows you to recognize what is already here, the kind that understands that the process itself is not a detour from the blessing, it is the blessing.

My why has never been reducible to ambition.

But my why is also larger than self expression. It is bound up in lineage, in inheritance, in Black womanhood, in all of the women whose inner lives were never permitted the same horizon of possibility, women whose gifts had to live in the margins of duty, women who were asked to mother, to serve, to endure, to hold families and worlds together, while the deeper call inside them went unnamed or unanswered.

I am a mother, and one of the blessings of my life is that I have been able to mother without relinquishing the deepest truth of myself. I did not have to abandon the work in order to love my child. I did not have to disappear in order to nurture.

But many women, in ways large and small, have been made to believe that their calling and their caretaking could not coexist, that their own becoming was indulgent, that their gifts belonged behind something else.

I think often about my grandmother, Lela May Malbrough - a talented tap dancer who danced with the Nicholas Brothers, and I think about what might have unfolded in her life had she been permitted a wider freedom, a fuller selfhood, a life less constrained by the imposed architecture of womanhood. I think about who she might have become if she had been allowed to live more audibly inside her gifts, more fully inside her longing, more freely inside her own sense of possibility. And so yes, I do this for her.

I do it for the women whose names history did not bother to keep. I do it for the Black women artists whose brilliance remained local, private, interrupted, unarchived. I do it because, as Black people, as African people, as descendants of a tradition in which memory, story, music, gesture, and witness are sacred, we come from the lineage of the griot, from people for whom storytelling was never merely ornamental. It was how we carried ourselves forward. It was how we remembered what the world tried to erase. It was how spirit remained intact.

I do it for the artists who stood on stages under humiliation and still gave the audience everything. I do it for the musicians who played because the music itself was holy, whether fame ever arrived or not. I do it for the people who knew that the calling was reason enough. I do it for the ones who entered through the back door and still transformed the room. I do it because to make art, to tell stories, to shape image and feeling and meaning for a living, is an honor.

Recognition, applause, and awards are beautiful. I do not reject any of those things. I am grateful for every flower that has come my way. But not long ago, someone said something about me that moved me more deeply than any award ever has.

They said that I am one of television's most trusted visual storytellers.

That word, trusted, stayed with me because to be trusted is to be known not only for talent, but for integrity.

And perhaps that is the deeper question every artist must eventually ask, not only what do you want, but what are you in service to. Are you seeking to be admired, or are you seeking to be in right relationship with the work you have been called to do. Are you building a life around attention, or around truth. Are you chasing recognition, or are you answering an assignment.

Your why must be larger than your desire to be seen. It must be older than your ambition. It must be strong enough to survive silence, envy, delay, misunderstanding, even success itself.

Do the work because it is yours to do. Do it because something in you would be diminished without it. Do it because you are in conversation with those who came before you, with those who were denied room, denied freedom, denied witness, and still found a way to make beauty.

Do it because the gift is sacred. Do it because there is honor in answering what called you here. Do it because, long before the world decided what to celebrate, there were people making holy things in small rooms, on street corners, in churches, in clubs, in kitchens, in rehearsal halls, in neighborhoods like the ones that raised us, and they understood something that many artists still have to learn, which is that the work does not become real when the world applauds it. The work is real because you have given your life to telling the truth through it.

And that, in the end, has to be enough.

About the Author

Stacey Muhammad is a writer, director, and daughter of New Orleans. Her lens is committed to the cinematic testimony of Black life and the unyielding brilliance of the Southern imagination. From her upcoming feature film, The Return, to her directing work on series including Amazon Prime’s CROSS, Queen Sugar, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, and Harlem, she tells stories where Black people are the architects of the narrative, not the scenery. She is the creator of The Director’s Notebook, a digital film school and creative sanctuary for those reclaiming their birthright through craft and truth.

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There’s a version of every scene that lives on the page, and then there’s the version that lives underneath it.

My job as a director is to find the distance between those two things and help the actor close it. Not by telling them what to feel, but by naming the truth that the scene is actually holding, the one the script gestures toward but doesn’t always say out loud.

While directing an episode of Love Life Season 2, there was a scene in which the character Mia, portrayed by the incomparable Jessica Williams, is on the surface, ending a relationship. A breakup scene, plain enough on the page.

She was playing it beautifully with the skill and presence she always brings, fully committed, fully in it. But I felt something pulling at me. A quiet sense that we hadn’t yet reached the bottom of the scene. That there was something deeper living inside it that we hadn’t touched yet.

I walked over to her between takes and said: “You know, on the page this looks like you’re breaking up with your boyfriend, but this scene is really about something else — it’s about the way women, Black women in particular, have a tendency to keep ourselves from the happiness we deserve.”

She looked at me and I watched it land. Something true had been named, something she recognized and could relate to. The next take was the take that made the cut.

That’s what directing actors is, at its core - not managing performance, not adjusting line readings, but finding the emotional truth underneath the scene and creating the conditions for the actor to live fully inside it.

The director I am today is not the director I would have been at an earlier point in my life. Not because I didn’t know the craft, but because I hadn’t yet accumulated the life that made certain observations possible.

I hadn’t yet sat in enough rooms - hadn’t watched enough women I love talk themselves out of joy, or felt enough of it moving through my own experience.

Wisdom informs directing in ways that are difficult to articulate and impossible to rush. The longer you live, the more you carry into the room with you - every relationship, every wound, every moment of clarity or confusion. All of it becomes usable. All of it becomes material for seeing into a scene more deeply than what’s on the page.

When I talk about the emotional life of a scene, I mean the thing beneath the action. The grief inside the joke. The longing inside the argument. The self-betrayal inside the breakup.

The director’s job is to locate that, to hold it clearly enough to name it quietly in someone’s ear and watch them recognize themselves in it. And then you step back. Because once you’ve given the actor the real thing to play, it belongs to them.

What Jessica gave in that next take was hers. I just helped her find the door.

That’s the collaboration. That’s the work — not just the technical execution, but the moment when something true passes between two people on a set and the camera is there to receive it. That is always what we are reaching for.

LAB EXERCISE

Find the Scene Beneath the Scene

Take a scene you are preparing — as an actor or a director — and write two versions of what the scene is about.

The first version is what the scene says it is about: the argument, the apology, the goodbye.

The second version goes deeper. Ask what the scene is really about — the fear of being abandoned, the refusal to be seen, the grief that has no name yet.

Sit with the second version, ask yourself where you have felt that in your own life, and what it would mean to bring that recognition into the room.

FOR DIRECTORS: practice naming the emotional subtext to your actors in one sentence. Not a note about technique, but a truth about the human experience inside the scene. See what shifts.

RECOMMENDED STUDY

FOR ACTORS

Toni Morrison — The Source of Self-Regard

A collection of essays, speeches, and meditations on what it means to tell stories rooted in Black life and imagination. For any actor seeking to understand voice, interiority, and the emotional weight of living inside a character’s truth, this is essential reading.

bell hooks — All About Love

Not a book about acting, but one of the most useful books for actors — because it is about the ways we deny ourselves feeling, the patterns we inherit, and the courage it takes to be honest. Everything in it is material.

FOR DIRECTORS

Julie Dash — Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film

Julie Dash’s companion to her landmark film is a rare document — part production journal, part cultural philosophy, part meditation on what it means to center Black women’s interior lives on screen. A masterclass in authorship and intention.

bell hooks — Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies

bell hooks on cinema — on representation, on the gaze, on what it means to make images that tell the truth. Every director working in this cultural moment should have this somewhere close.

Further Study — The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection’s essays and supplements — available at criterion.com — offer some of the most thoughtful writing on cinema, including deep dives into the work of Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and other filmmakers working at the intersection of craft and cultural truth.

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New Orleans asks to be loved quickly. The music makes its case before you have time to think, the old houses lean into the light like they have known how to survive a hundred lives, and on certain evenings the air itself feels staged, as if the city knows exactly how to seduce you. A brass band turns the corner, somebody is laughing loud outside a bar on Frenchmen, tourists drift toward the romance they were promised, and the neighborhood performs what it has been taught the world wants from it, beauty, freedom, pleasure, rhythm, a kind of holy improvisation. But if you live here long enough, if you walk slowly enough, if you learn to look down, another truth begins to rise.

That is one of the deepest truths of New Orleans. The city can enchant you before it tells you what it cost. It can offer atmosphere before it offers history, beauty before it offers truth. And maybe that is part of what it means to be here honestly, to live here honestly, to visit here honestly, to walk these blocks with your eyes open. Beneath so much of what is marketed as charm, romance, architecture, and culture is another story, one the ground has never stopped holding.

In my neighborhood, near the edge of all this music and movement, there is a plaque set into the sidewalk. You could miss it if you were distracted, and most people probably do. It does not announce itself with the scale of the violence it names. It just sits there in bronze, low to the ground, holding the memory of a slave trading compound operated by Franklin and Armfield, one of the largest slave trading firms in American history. At that site, in this neighborhood, in the 1830s, enslaved Africans were held, inspected, sold, and folded into the machinery of a market that turned Black life into profit with such efficiency that the men who ran it became unimaginably wealthy. What stands here now is an empty lot, a chain-link fence, passing cars, ordinary light. What stood here then was another architecture entirely, one built not only from wood and iron but from appetite, calculation, and the belief that Black people could be handled like inventory.

That is the real terror of it, not only that it happened, but that it happened here, inside the living body of the city, inside the geography people now move through casually, drink through casually, inherit casually. Near Royal and Esplanade, near the Quarter, near the routes of celebration, there once stood one of the places where this nation practiced one of its most enduring skills, making commerce out of cruelty, and calling it business.

Franklin and Armfield were not merely traders in the informal sense, not men operating in the shadows of the economy. They were the economy. They helped industrialize the domestic slave trade, moving enslaved people from the Upper South into the Deep South with the precision of businessmen who understood exactly what the market demanded. Their wealth was not incidental to the violence. It was produced by it. Every sale, every family severed, every woman trafficked, every captive body held in a pen until purchase, all of it fed a system that made men like Isaac Franklin and John Armfield powerful, respectable, and rich beyond moral comprehension. New Orleans was one of the central theaters of that exchange, a city where human beings were caged, displayed, priced, and sold into the expanding appetite of plantation capitalism.

Even now, the language strains against the truth. Slave pen. Compound. Office. Sales. The nouns can sound almost administrative until you stop and ask what they are hiding. A pen is where people were confined. A compound is where they were processed. An office is where someone recorded the profit. Sales means someone’s child was taken, someone’s husband vanished, someone’s mother was pushed farther south, someone’s body became an entry in a ledger, someone’s terror became another man’s gain. The restraint of historical language can sometimes feel like its own kind of silence. What happened in these places was not abstract and it was not clean. The trade was full of disease, sexual violence, forced transport, degradation, and death. Bodies broke under it. Families disappeared into it. Creeks and gullies received what the market could no longer use.

What does it mean to know this and still walk home past restaurants, corner stores, porch lights, and tourists with daiquiris in hand. What does it mean that one of the most storied neighborhoods in America is also one of the landscapes of the slave trade, that so much of what gets sold as atmosphere was built in a city where Black life was bought and sold with ruthless regularity. New Orleans has always known how to dress itself in beauty. That is part of its genius, and part of its danger.

I live close enough to this marker to understand that history here is not sealed off behind museum glass. It sits underfoot. It interrupts the lie that the past is past. The French Quarter, the Marigny, Frenchmen Street, these are not separate from the story of slavery. They are inside it. The music, the architecture, the cuisine, the language, the very texture of New Orleans life bear the imprint of Black people, yes, but also the imprint of the system that brutalized Black people while extracting our labor, our culture, our bodies, and then calling the city’s brilliance its own inheritance.

And that is part of what makes New Orleans so difficult and so singular. There is something almost too perfect, too New Orleans about the contradiction, that a place so saturated with Black creation could also be so saturated with anti-Black violence, that a city with one of the largest free Black communities in the country could also be one of the nation’s great engines of slave commerce. New Orleans has always held beauty and brutality in the same hand. That is part of what makes it singular, and part of what makes it impossible to romanticize honestly once you know. The French Quarter, the Marigny, the streets around Esplanade and Chartres and Royal, these are not just charming historic districts. They are part of the geography where Black people were caged, trafficked, separated, displayed, and sold.

Maybe that is part of what it means to live here honestly, to refuse the version of New Orleans that asks only to be adored and to insist on the version that must also be witnessed. To understand that beneath the music there is memory, beneath the romance there is terror, beneath the sidewalk there are the remains of a marketplace that treated Black life as raw material for wealth. The plaque does not redeem that history. It cannot. It does not even fully contain it. But it does mark the ground, and sometimes that is where truth begins, not in the stories a city tells about itself, but in the places where the earth keeps refusing to forget.

There are places in New Orleans where the dead are remembered with brass bands and flowers and ritual. And then there are places where the dead remain under sidewalks, under streets, under renovated beauty, under the ongoing appetite of a city that still profits from its own mythology. The other day my daughter and I were walking and saying what the moment demanded, which was simply this, we are walking on sacred ground. I do not mean sacred in some polished or marketable sense. I mean sacred because of what was endured here, what was buried here, what was desecrated here, what remains spiritually unaccounted for here. Sacred because there are lives beneath our feet that were never properly mourned.

That is what I feel living here now. I love this neighborhood. I love this house. I love the beauty of this side of Esplanade, the way the evening settles here, the feeling of being near the music and still inside a residential quiet. But I also find myself asking what happened right here, on this block, in the ground beneath the house, beneath the sidewalks, beneath the life we are making now. My daughter and I have walked these streets before reading the plaques, talking about the slave pens, talking about the fact that so much of this neighborhood was once organized around the captivity and sale of Black people, and saying almost in passing, what would it be like to live over here. Now we do.

My daughter and I have done this for years, walked through parts of New Orleans and imagined ourselves there. We did it near Dumaine and Chartres before we ever lived there, talking about the cathedral view, the beauty of that pocket of the Quarter, what it might feel like to wake up inside that history. And then, years later, we were there. We did it again over here, reading the plaques, talking about this neighborhood with that mix of awe and ache New Orleans so often demands, and saying again, what would it be like to live over here. Now here we are, on the Frenchmen side of Esplanade for the first time, in a beautiful home, in a part of the city we genuinely love, and the question has changed. It is no longer only what would it be like to live here. It is what does it mean to live here, knowing what here is.

Maybe this is part of what it means to return home as an artist. Not just to come back to what you missed, but to come back to what has been waiting for you to see it clearly. I left New Orleans and lived in Washington, DC, New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. I came back in 2020, during the pandemic, thinking in part about home, about grounding, about where I wanted to build a life and keep making work. And New Orleans, for all its beauty and complexity, remains one of the most creatively inspiring places I know. But home can trick you. What is most familiar can become background. What formed you can become so embedded in your body that you forget to name it. Then one day you look down at a plaque in the sidewalk, or stand on a corner you have passed before, or read the history of a block where people now sip cocktails and listen to music, and you realize that inspiration here is inseparable from reckoning.

New Orleans is home in the deepest sense. Brooklyn is the only other place that has ever felt close, a second home, but New Orleans is the place I return to, the place I chose again, the place I leave for work and come back to, the place that continues to make demands on my spirit and my art. There is something different about creating in the city that formed your first eye. Especially when that city is this layered, this wounded, this alive.

As a writer, as a director, as someone always trying to understand what an image carries and what a place remembers, I do not think that is accidental. I think artists are often called back into landscapes that still have something to say through them. Not because we are special, but because the work requires listening. Sometimes the assignment is not to invent, but to witness more deeply. To document what remains. To notice what has been paved over. To ask what the city is still trying to tell us through its beauty, through its silences, through the contradictions it places in our path again and again.

Maybe that is part of my work here, not only to love New Orleans, and not only to critique it, but to keep listening to it. To live inside its beauty without surrendering to its amnesia. To let the city remain complicated, holy, wounded, and unfinished. To understand that the same streets that inspire image, rhythm, character, dialogue, and feeling are also streets thick with memory, some of it celebrated, some of it buried, some of it still asking to be named. I think about what it means to write from here, to direct from here, to raise children and make meaning from here, to walk these blocks and know that the ground is not mute. Perhaps that is what the ancestors are asking of us, not performance, not sentiment, but attention. A deeper attention. The kind that changes how you live, how you make art, how you tell the truth.

Because this is what it means to walk here: not just to admire the city, but to witness it, not just to inherit its beauty, but to reckon with what lies beneath it, not just to call this place inspiring, but to understand what it is asking of you in return.

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Before anything is written, there is a quieter, slower, less visible kind of work. This preliminary work doesn’t announce itself but shapes everything that comes after, setting the stage for what is to be written.

Writing doesn’t begin on the page. It starts in what you notice, what stays with you, what unsettles you, and won’t let go. It’s in the accumulation of experience, the feel of a place, the conversations you can’t shake, and the recurring images. Writing starts with attention, memory, and the emotional residue of living.

By the time you sit down to write, something essential has already been forming beneath the surface, often unnoticed, but ready to emerge.

The Writing Lab isn’t about format or structure. There are places for that; this isn’t one of them. This is about learning to see, to sit with a moment until you understand what it holds, to translate that into something others can feel. It’s about writing from memory, place, emotional truth, and the lived textures of a world not always on the page.

To write meaningfully, you must know what it means to have a point of view. You must trust your instincts before smoothing them into something ‘correct.’ That takes time. You can’t rush it, shortcut it, or borrow someone else’s voice.

I came into this work as an independent filmmaker. That means I never had the luxury of waiting for perfect conditions, and in truth, there are no perfect conditions.

I wrote and created from what I had. I used what was around me and what mattered so much I couldn’t look away.

Projects like For Colored Boys came from urgency and the need to explore Black male identity. I wanted to explore vulnerability, contradiction, and interior life honestly and openly. This kind of writing doesn’t come from trying to be clever. It comes from staying with something real, even when it’s uncomfortable.

The same is true for The Creed.

That film is about grief and the specific weight of loss. It held the tension that settles in a relationship after something unthinkable happens. There was no clear way forward, no easy solution. Just two people carrying something too heavy, trying to keep standing. I had to stay in that emotional space long enough to understand what the characters carried, how they held it, and how it might quietly push them to act.

The work is not just coming up with an idea, but staying with it long enough to understand it.

Writing from that place requires a different discipline. Not discipline of a schedule or word count, but the discipline of honesty. You have to be honest with yourself about what you’re drawn to and what you’re avoiding. Notice what you circle without landing on. Pay attention to the details that seem small but do the heaviest storytelling. The glance, the pause, the unsaid thing that fills the room. Trust specificity. Know that the more precise you are, the more your work lives inside someone else.

Because people don’t connect to complexity for its own sake. They connect to experience.

As a director, I come to writing from a different angle. Transitioning to episodic television changes my role: I’m not writing the script, but I’m deeply engaged with what’s on the page. I know immediately when a script is alive.

Reading the first season of Cross, I find clarity, rhythm, and a sense of character and world that activates something in me before I’ve pictured a single frame. It gives me a blueprint, not in a rigid, prescriptive way, but as good writing does, it opens up space and tells me how the story breathes.

Everything starts with this work before the work.

The tone, the pacing, the emotional architecture - it all begins with what’s written. This foundation is key: when the writing is strong, it creates a kind of alignment across the entire process, a through-line that holds everything together. It allows the actors to go deeper. It allows the camera to move with intention rather than decoration. It allows the work to feel cohesive because it was grounded in something true from the very beginning.

So even when I’m not the writer, I’m responding to writing that understands itself.

What lives inside The Director’s Notebook Writing Lab reflects all of this. Sometimes it will be essays like this one - reflections on process, memory, and on what it actually means to develop a voice that belongs to you. Other times, it will be exercises designed to help you reconnect with your instincts and break out of your own head. Sometimes, it will be scene work, or a closer look at how character, environment, and emotional stakes move on the page. And occasionally, it will simply be writing that is trying to hold something - without forcing it into a neat conclusion, without resolving what isn’t ready to be resolved.

Because writing is not just about getting something done. It’s about becoming someone who can do it with clarity and intention.

It takes a lot of courage to tell the truth.

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Watching Aldis Hodge and Isaiah Mustafa move through scenes with that kind of grounded brotherhood, and seeing that same level of commitment from Samantha Walkes, Alona Tal, and Johnny Ray Gill, is a reminder that the strength of the work is always tied to the people carrying it. Everyone shows up prepared, present, and deeply invested in telling the story well.

That kind of environment does not happen by accident. It is shaped by leadership. Creator / Showrunner, Ben Watkins has built something that honors both the craft and the people inside of it, and you feel that in every department, in every interaction, in the way the work is approached day in and day out.

What has made this experience especially meaningful is that the strength of the material has been matched by the spirit of the people making it. Some of the best scripts I’ve had the opportunity to direct have been on this show, and doing that work alongside a cast and crew so talented, so energetically aligned, and so deeply committed to the process has been a genuine gift.

There is a kind of ease that comes when people are in right relationship with the work and with one another. You can feel when a set is in rhythm, when the energy is right, when people are coming to the work with clarity and intention. Cross has been that kind of experience for me.

I’m grateful to be part of a show, a set, and a storytelling culture like this.

Season 3. Let’s go.

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My journey into directing was shaped by hip-hop, music videos, live performance, documentary, and short films; experiences that each taught me about rhythm, storytelling, and resourcefulness. For filmmakers, short films are often where the real work of finding your voice and honing your craft begins.

I’ll come back to the full origin story, how hip-hop gave me my start, and the many people who helped shape me in those early years. That deserves its own space.

For now, I’ll focus on short films.

I started out as a documentary filmmaker, making short nonfiction films about Black life, Black memory, and the kinds of stories that felt urgent to me. My very first film was a documentary titled A Glimpse of Heaven: The Legacy of the Million Man March, which screened at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. It was early work, raw and amateur in many ways, but it still matters to me because it marked the first time I took the impulse to document our stories seriously enough to shape it into a film.

The first film I released onto the festival circuit, though, was a ten-minute documentary titled I Am Sean Bell, Black Boys Speak, made in the wake of Sean Bell’s killing in New York. Like many early films, it came out of urgency more than strategy. I needed to say something, and film was the tool I had to say it. That documentary went on to screen internationally, introducing me to the festival circuit and the broader possibilities of short films.

As I was embarking on the Sean Bell documentary, I was working in the shipping department at HBO and spending some time in the media library as well. I had shared my aspirations of becoming a filmmaker with a number of people there, and, understandably, those ambitions did not carry much weight in a space where such declarations were common. But a gentleman by the name of Peter Consiglio, who was the director of the graphics department, listened to me. He recognized that I had talent and abilities beyond the role I had been hired to perform, and because he knew I had some background in graphic design and a genuine desire to deepen that skill, he would occasionally allow me to go upstairs and sit with the designers in HBO’s graphics department, observing their creative process.

Although that opportunity was not directly related to film, it took me out of the shipping department and into a genuinely creative space. I was mesmerized by the level of talent and discipline those designers possessed, and the experience reinforced something I had always known about myself: I needed to stay connected to my creativity and to environments where imagination, skill, and artistic rigor were being taken seriously.

As I began mapping out a festival life for I Am Sean Bell and thinking about the body of work I wanted to build beyond it, I realized that many of the festivals I hoped to enter were sponsored by HBO, which meant the film would not be eligible for consideration as long as I remained employed there.

So I made a decision that some people around me considered reckless, and I left HBO.

The criticism was never really about the job itself. I was working in shipping, after all. It had more to do with the idea of walking away from a stable job at a prestigious company without any obvious safety net waiting on the other side. But I was not interested in proximity to the industry. I wanted to be inside the work.

And the irony is that the decision turned out to be exactly the right one.

The following year, I Am Sean Bell won top prize at the Media That Matters Film Festival, sponsored by HBO. If I had stayed, I would not have been eligible. One year, I was working in the shipping department at HBO, and the next I was back in the building as an independent filmmaker with a film that had just won top prize at a festival sponsored by the same company.

That experience made it clear early on: truly committing to your path requires making bold choices, even when they involve risk. Prioritizing your calling over comfort is what leads to growth and opportunity.

After Sean Bell, I directed another short documentary, Out of Our Right Minds: Black Women and Depression, which explored mental health in our community. Like the first film, it screened widely and sparked conversations at festivals and panels across the country. Those screenings reminded me that short films are not just exercises in craft. They are also a way to enter the larger cultural conversation through cinema.

From there, I began exploring other forms of short-form storytelling. I created a digital series called For Colored Boys, an eight-episode project that ran between 15 and 30 minutes each, and I want to acknowledge Michael “Boogie” Pinckney and Marc Lamont Hill, because without them, that project would not have been possible. I’ll return to that collaboration in more detail in another essay.

Later, I directed a narrative short called The Creed, a film I never released publicly. Each project sharpened something different in me as a filmmaker: my eye, my instincts with actors, my sense of pacing and rhythm, and my ability to finish a story with clarity.

And finishing is a discipline.

Short films teach the discipline of story economy. You learn to focus only on what’s essential, building scenes that serve the core emotion rather than unnecessary detail. This is a key takeaway for any filmmaker.

Short films also build the critical skill of working with the resources available. Learning to craft stories around what’s accessible fosters creativity and adaptability, key traits for growth as budgets and projects scale.

Another skill that became incredibly important to me early on was editing. I studied at the Digital Film Academy in New York, where I learned the filmmaking process from writing and directing to post-production, and one of the most valuable things I took from that experience was learning how to edit my own work. Editing gave me independence because I never had to wait for someone else to shape the film before I could see whether something was actually working. I could experiment, make adjustments, and discover the story’s rhythm for myself.

But editing gives you more than independence.

Some of the strongest directors are also editors, especially in episodic television, because once you understand editing, you begin cutting the episode in your head as you shoot. You know what coverage is necessary and what is not, which means you do not overshoot. You begin to understand rhythm, pacing, and the way a scene will ultimately breathe in the final cut. Actors can usually feel the difference when working with a director who truly understands coverage and editorial rhythm, because the direction becomes clearer and the choices more intentional.

Editing teaches you to shoot strategically. It sharpens your instincts around story and performance, and it gives you a deeper understanding of how all the pieces of a film ultimately come together.

Today, the barriers to making short films are lower than ever. Filmmakers can shoot entire projects on phones, edit on laptops, and distribute their work directly to audiences. We are also living through the rise of micro-dramas and vertical storytelling, forms that continue to expand the possibilities of short-form narrative.

Years ago, my producing partner Michael “Boogie” Pinkney and I experimented with something similar when we created a series called Black AF, with vertically shot episodes that ran no more than five minutes. At the time, it felt experimental. Now that format has become an entire category of storytelling in its own right.

All of these point to a simple truth: there are no excuses not to create now.

Short films remain the most effective way to develop your voice as a filmmaker. They serve as both calling cards and laboratories - helping you experiment, sharpen instincts, and understand your identity as a storyteller.

For many, short films mark the true beginning of the filmmaking journey.

And in that spirit, I want to share one of my earlier works.

THE CREED.

The Creed follows a couple in the wake of their son’s killing by a police officer, as grief reshapes their relationship and presses them into a space where love, anger, and loss begin to collide, ultimately pushing the father toward a decision that cannot be undone.

I wrote and directed the film, and we shot it in September 2016. Nearly ten years later, I’m releasing it publicly for the first time. I made it three years before directing my first episode of television on Queen Sugar, so it falls within a period before my episodic directing career, when I was still shaping my visual language, instincts, and voice through short-form work.

There are some films you make that stay with you. Watching this now, I can see the artistic risk in the work, the instinct already alive in it, and the places where I was reaching toward something I did not yet fully have the language for. I can also see the moments where it landed, where the work connected in a way that still feels true.

The film was executive produced by Marc Lamont Hill and me, senior produced by Michael “Boogie” Pinckney for Black Noise Media, and produced by Wendell Jordan for Legacy Media LLC, along with Shareese Thompson and Jairo for JARO Media LLC.

It stars Yolonda Ross, Akintola Jiboyewa, Ruslan Verkhovsky, Wendell Jordan, Malcolm Brickhouse, Alfonso Johnson, and Marcellus Lewter.

Cinematography by J. Anders Urmacher. Music by Paul Mounsey.

Shot in Brooklyn, New York.

I’m sharing it now not as a finished statement, but as part of the journey, the work, the growth, the evolution. This is what it looks like to be in process.

If you’re a filmmaker, I hope you see what’s possible.

If you’re an actor, I hope you feel the intention behind the work.

Below, I’m stepping into a LAB lesson on how to make your own short film, from shaping the idea to building it, shooting it, and finishing it with intention. This is the work behind the work, the discipline, the choices, and the process that turns an idea into something real.

That lesson is available to paid subscribers.

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