Piers Morgan welcomes actress, singer, and writerRosario Dawson for a candid and engaging interview, touching upon everything from politics to the environment, and her enthusiasm for riding trains.

With the fifth annual “National Train Day” rapidly approaching, the event’s official spokesperson details why she often lists the rails as her first choice for transportation:

“It is definitely one of the greener ways of traveling, but it’s also just one of the most beautiful ways of traveling,” says Dawson. “I love the conversations that I have when I’m on a train, I love the view of America that I get to have.”

A veteran of such films as “Seven Pounds,” “Rent,” and “Unstoppable,” the native of New York City says she still takes the subway to this day, admiring its authenticity:

“I’m a New Yorker, and that’s the best thing about New Yorkers. You create New York moments. People like ‘Yo what up Rosario,’ I’m like, ‘Yo wussup,’ and then we move about our way.”

Watch the clip as the 32-year-old speaks about two of her greatest passions, engaging young Latino voters, and “National Train Day.”

Article originally posted on CNN. 

On Friday, the actress/political activist was in Washington D.C., for the Voto Latino On Series event. Then on Saturday, the “Sin City” star attended the White House Correspondents Dinner. And on Sunday, Dawson hopped on a train from D.C. to New York and spent the entire trip snapping photos of her journey as part of the “See More On A Train Online Contest,” that encourages people to submit their train journeys via photos as part of Amtrak’s 5th Annual National Train Day.”

When she landed in New York on Sunday night, Rosario invited The Huffington Post over for a chat at New York’s Penn Station. We spoke to the talented actress about her work with the non-profit organization Voto Latino (which she co-founded in 2005 with Maria Teresa Kumar), why you wont be reading about her slamming any presidential candidates in the news, and why she isn’t endorsing any candidate for president.

The Huffington Post: There are more than 9 million young Latinos in the United States, but not all of them are voting. Why do you think that is?
Well, it’s a lot of things. From the things that we’re told from them it’s because people don’t ask them — that’s the first thing they say as to why they haven’t voted for the first time. And the second is because they don’t feel like they necessarily have enough information on the issues. They’re paying attention to student loans, they have opinions on healthcare, they’re angered by the conversation around immigration, they’re feeling the backlash of violence that’s going more and more towards Latinos, because of all of the sort of hate speech that’s been used in so many peoples’ politics.

The more I talk to young people, the more I see how incredibly just full on activists they are. Just because they’re not necessarily voting, it doesn’t mean they’re not doing stuff. They’re organizing. They’re marching and they’re using social media to get their points across. [But] getting engaged as a voter really makes you powerful. If you’re at occupy movements or you’re walking in protests, then you need to march to the polls — you need to occupy the voting booth and that’s really going to make sure that you’re voice and your issues are heard.

That’s very interesting. Often times the media just says: “Young people don’t show up to vote” and they leave it at that. 
That’s it, yeah! One of the things we’re really excited about with Voto Latino is that we connect. We have been really great with our messaging and the reason that our organization has grown over all of these years — especially in this economy and with a lot of organizations shutting down — it has been a really amazing thing to see how people have been connecting with our messaging and understanding that when we’re saying ‘it’s your country, represent!’ that we really mean it. We’re really talking to them like they’re Americans and I think that’s the most crucial part — because that’s what they feel like. That’s who they are — including the DREAMers.

They’re like, ‘I’m American, that’s who I am. Why would you want to deport me? I didn’t choose to do this, I was a kid and I’ve been here my whole life. I’ve never been to this other country.’ A lot of the time they don’t even speak the language from the country they came from. We’ve made things about numbers and we’ve really dehumanized and objectified Latinos a lot in our conversations about them. Latino issues are American issues. You go to China, Brazil or India, and they understand that their population is their power. We have the largest and fastest growing demographic in this country and it represents over a trillion dollars worth of money. Why would we want to ostracize that and put that away? There’s nothing to be worried about. If we start working together, this country is going to be in really great shape.

There are some Hollywood actors who have spoken out against presidential candidates. We never hear you doing that. Is that a conscious decision on your part?

Yeah. I remember it was actually really great going to both the Democratic and Republication conventions in the last election. You have all of this stuff that’s said in the media, but when you actually get there and you’re around people, you recognize that there are different ways to think about the American dream, and there are different ways to think about our history and our past. People wanting to fly a confederate flag doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re totally racist — it [may] mean that they recognize their family and where they come from and they don’t want to feel bad about it. They want to be able to say, ‘I’m a good person, I’m willing to move forward, and I don’t want to feel like I have to deny my history to do so.’ Then there are other people going ‘Well, I don’t want to go back to that America, because in that America I didn’t have a voice as a woman or as a person of color.’ And so it’s understandable on their side. We need more diversity of conversation.

A lot of celebs endorse candidates for president. Have you thought about doing that?

No. I’ll vote the way I’m going to vote, but if I’m actually saying I’m serious about your voice being important, then what’s the point of me walking around and knocking on someone’s door and going, ‘OK, I really care about your opinion, but only if it’s exactly like mine?’ That doesn’t really make sense. You know what I mean? And I want to learn and I want to understand where people are coming from, because eventually — that standing president, whoever I’m behind — is not going to be there. Does that mean the next election I’m not going to be interested? I’m not going to vote or not going to care? I’ve already witnessed several presidents in my lifetime and I know I’m going to see several more. And I don’t want to always feel like I have to be behind one person. I’m behind the people.

What is the most important issue for you as a voter?
There are so many right now. I mean, I’m a woman of color in 2012. We’re talking about issues from everything from the war on women’s reproductive health and the economy, which is obviously such a major thing, to access to food, people getting paid fair wages, and the environment is obviously such an alarming situation that we’re not paying the proper attention to. And getting onto wind and solar technology would be so amazing and getting us off this idea of having to have this XL pipeline coming through, or digging for natural gas and destroying our beautiful country — that’s our greatest resource — our people and our land. That’s what we should be investing in.

The people and the land are the biggest things I care about. We should be investing in infrastructure — that’s why I’m doing National Train Day. Why do we not have more high speed train rails? Why are we not paying attention to one of the greenest ways to travel? We could be making incredible railways that could be connecting people and communities, and allowing access to people to be able to do that “staycation” that is so popular right now because the economy is rough. We had 30 million people use the train last year and we can up that. I fly a lot but it’s a really different experience when you’re flying and everything is like a tiny little ant. When you’re actually going through these communities on a train, you really see them. You see the differences in them, you see the areas that are more run down or areas that are more like big cities. And you get to see all of the untouched raw land — like on the train ride over here I saw a deer. You get to see the landscape of the country that you live in. And those are the things that help us be able to connect all of our different kinds of immigration stories.

Article originally posted on Huffington Post.

Rosario Dawson is not like other Hollywood actors. Consider this: she’s 32, and in her 20s decided she’d had enough of being judged on her looks, so took to wearing enormous sweatshirts to auditions.

“I’d perform my ass off, and the casting directors would be like, ‘You are perfect for this role, but can you wear something a little less shapeless?’” Her manager would bargain with her. She could wear a roll-neck jumper, he said – but could it at least be a fitted one? “I’m like, ‘Ugh, fine’, but these stupid conversations needed to be had, because unfortunately, don’t believe what they tell you, there’s very little imagination in Hollywood.” She hoots with laughter.

It annoyed her when casting directors asked to see her in more revealing clothes, she says, because she was naked in the film Alexander, “so go to any crazy, sick website and you’ll be able to look at it in slow motion if you like”. Does that bother her? “No, not at all, my point being: then don’t complain, ‘We don’t know what she really looks like.’ Are you kidding?! Do your research. ‘She looks a little fat right now’,” she says, recalling a message that filtered down from some rotten, deluded film executive. “Really? They’re called breasts … There was definitely a period for a couple of years where I rebelled against it. It probably cost me a lot of really big jobs, but I was just so angry.”

I had been worried Dawson would be too tired to talk properly. Earlier in the day, she had called to put the interview back two hours, pleading jetlag, her voice full of mid-Atlantic grogginess. But she arrives at the Guardian on foot, poses quickly for a photo, sits down and she’s away, words tumbling out.

She’s been a women’s activist for years, and I realise how steeped she is in feminist argument when she talks about how public-sector cuts are affecting women in the UK. (Dawson has a flat in London, but this still takes me aback.) She’s active in all sorts of ways – she’s a long-time volunteer with a girls’ club where she grew up in Manhattan, and appears in the feminist documentary Miss Representation. Later this month she’s performing in A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer, a benefit in London for the organisations V-Day and Women for Women International. The event is based on writings about violence against women, edited by playwright, activist and close friend, Eve Ensler.

The piece Dawson is performing is radical. Written by Periel Aschenbrand, In Memory of Imette starts with the narrator being terrified by the murder of a female student near her apartment. She arms herself with weapons including “a big-ass hunting knife,” Aschenbrand writes, “with which, if need be, I could slice off someone’s testicles”. I ask how Dawson feels about performing the monologue, and she says she completely agrees with its central message, that men and women need to talk more about rape. “You know, don’t just walk down the street and be like everything’s peaches and roses. It’s one in three women who are going to be raped, killed, beaten or abused in her lifetime, and that’s just real. To not live with that as a reality is really dangerous for women, and it lets a lot of guys off the hook from really paying attention to what’s happening to the women around them. Because it’s not all the men who are doing it, but not every single guy that boasts in the locker-room about the hot sex he had last night, had it with someone who was conscious.”

It’s not the first time Dawson has addressed the subject of rape head-on. She produced the 2007 film Descent, written and directed by her friend Talia Lugacy, and starred as Maya, a student who is raped by a classmate. The character goes on to exact revenge, in one of the more extreme scenes in modern, mainstream film-making, but the story is also thoughtful. It shows the slow arc of Maya’s brutalisation, and her feelings after striking back, too.

Being a producer on the film provided some useful distance, she says.

“Otherwise I could have disappeared into that character more, you know, and it would have taken me down. It was really depressing … But I thought it was important to show and really talk about revenge, and to put that question into people’s minds. People have all these ideas about it, but what it would actually look like is not a triumph. It’s actually really degrading and sad.” After the film came out, Ensler invited her to sit on the board of V-Day, a movement to end violence against women. “I remember exactly where I was when she asked,” she says, “and I was so excited.”

Dawson’s career has taken her through gritty dramas (He Got Game), broad teen comedies (Josie and the Pussycats), musicals (Rent), very broad adult comedies (Clerks II) and children’s films (Zookeeper). It includes the comic book fantasy, Sin City – a project that reflects her lifelong love of comics. (In 2006, she co-created her own comic series, Occult Crimes Taskforce.)

She started out playing Ruby in Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids, aged 15. Written by Harmony Korine, Kids is a tough, troubling film, opening with a scene of child sex and moving through drugs, theft, extreme violence, racism, rape and brutal conversations about men having sex with disabled women. In its midst, Dawson seemed one of the few mild beacons of hope. Her character was tough, too, laughing and joking about the difference between sex, making love and fucking (she preferred the last), but there was something essentially redemptive about her.

Although she’s very different to that character, she understood her circumstances, having grown up on New York’s Lower East Side herself.

Her mother was 17 when Dawson was born, and only found out she was pregnant when she was picked for the 1980 Olympic volleyball team and had to take a test. (The US Olympics team boycotted that year for political reasons, so it didn’t affect her participation.)

Dawson’s biological father was not around, but when her mother was eight months’ pregnant she started seeing a man she’d known for years, who went on to adopt her daughter. “I think about that now,” says Dawson, “such a young man, marrying a woman with a baby who’s not his – that just doesn’t happen. He just loved my Mom, and he loved me, and I loved my Dad, you know?”

She’s never met her biological father. “I tried looking him up online, and 70-something names showed up, some of them only with addresses, and I thought: I’m not going to do that … Maybe if I have a child, I’ll want to know, just for medical history reasons.” She was “violently afraid” of becoming a teenage mother herself, aware of how it had limited her mother’s options, but the experience of being adopted has made her keen to follow that lead – ideally to adopt an older child, who’s otherwise unlikely to find a home.

When she was growing up, Dawson’s father worked in construction, and her mother did a variety of jobs – electrician, plumber, typist – but the family faced financial straits. They lived, initially, “in this slumlord apartment, with rats, tilted floors, a bath tub in the kitchen”. There was a farmers’ market nearby and her mother “used to get food out of the bins. It was fresh food, but technically speaking, she was bin-diving. We still ate and we were eating organic,” she gives a wry smile. “But that’s a pretty tough thing as a Mom to have to do.”

They moved into a squat when she was six and her brother Clay was one. “A place with a huge, gaping hole in the ground and plastic for windows. I saw the stress on my parents. We were the only children in the building for years, because no one else was that crazy. But we had a wonderful childhood because of it. Everybody who moved in had different apartments, and it wasn’t until the sewage lines and the electricity went in that everybody disappeared behind their doors. People really needed each other beforehand.”

Her mother was always an activist; when Dawson was 10, her mother volunteered at a crisis centre where women who had been “beaten and abused, probably for years, showed up with children and the T-shirt on their back”. She would help her mother atHousing Works, an organisation providing housing for families and homeless people living with HIV/AIDS. “One person had been living like a hermit and didn’t have any family, any friends, and died. So here we were cleaning it out, and trying to make it nice and new again, so we could bring in someone else. It was heavy work.”

Her parents and other squat residents built a stoop to keep away drug dealers, and it was hanging out there one day that she was discovered by Clark and Korine. “This guy was like, ‘You just look so perfect.’ And I thought, ‘what are you talking about?’ Harmony was hopping up and down, he was 19, and Larry can come off a little lasciviously, so I was like, ‘Um, Daddy, there are random people here who have asked me to be in a movie.’”

Her father rode her to the audition on the crossbar of his bicycle. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this looks legitimate.’ It was a big office. I had to read, and Larry said, ‘Is that your boyfriend outside?’ And I was like, ‘Ew, that’s my Dad! What is wrong with you?’”

The family went on holiday to Texas with the money she made, and ended up living there. Dawson wasn’t completely sold on acting then. She’d always loved maths, and started to love biology. But she ended up moving back to Manhattan, and attending the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Dawson has a mixed heritage – Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Irish and Native American – and says this has been an unexpected asset. “I remember having a conversation with an actress who was blonde and blue-eyed, and she was like, ‘You’re going to do really well here [Hollywood].’ And I was still really struggling, and said, ‘O-K.’ And she said, ‘no, Rosario, there are a million girls who show up in Hollywood every day who look like me. There’s not a lot of people who look like you.”

Spending time with Dawson is uplifting. Her political discussion flows from Voto Latino, the organisation she co-founded in 2004 to encourage Latino people to vote; her passionate support for One Billion Rising, Ensler’s upcoming march to end violence against women; ecological campaigns; a call for an end to lobbying in Washington. She has been shooting Trance, an art-heist film directed by Danny Boyle, and is rapturously excited to be playing US labour rights activist, Dolores Huerta, in a film directed by Diego Luna.

And she talks with just as much effusive energy about the women’s benefit. “I love this piece,” she says, “because it’s really in your face, and sometimes you’ve got to make people a little uncomfortable.

“There are horror movies that are made, but those are fake horrors – there are plenty of real things to be scared about, and to want to do something about. I’m just grateful,” she says, like a true comic-book enthusiast, “to be able to use my powers for good, not evil”.

Rosario Dawson performs A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer at the Lyric Theatre, London, on 26 March 2012. All proceeds go to V-Day and Women for Women International. Details: nimaxtheatres.com or 0844 482 9674.

Source: The Guardian

Check out the add in this month’s issue of Glamour magazine with Rosario Dawson in her Ford Cares T-shirt. Ford and your Ford dealer are recruiting Warriors to help ramp up the fight against breast cancer. Ford Warriors in Pink can be found at the Komen Race for the Cure® events as always, only now they will arrive as a united front, as one in Warrior gear. Learn about the special meaning behind the Warriors in Pink symbols or read the published articles about these strong individuals all across America here. Be sure to check out the contest to win Warriors in Pink gear or a 2012 Ford Focus.

Check out Rosario Dawson in this month’s 15th anniversary issue of Latina Magazine. Full scans can be viewed here.

Check out the full scans from the August Issue of Shape Magazine with cover girl Rosario Dawson! Click here to view.

Check out the issue of Siempre Mujer from this past summer, the scans have now been added to the gallery here.

We’re so excited to share this extended promo of Latina’s upcoming special with Access Hollywood that will be airing across the country this Saturday and Sunday. The hour-long special spotlights the fifteen influential Latina celebrities highlighted on our historic 15th anniversary cover. Natalie Morales, news anchor & co-host of NBC’s Today show and Latina’s parenting columnist, is hosting. Featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes video of the making of Latina magazine’s historic 15th anniversary cover, as well as never-before-seen video and new interviews, each women talks about their rise to stardom and what it means to be Latina today.

Air times are listed below, but be sure to check your local listings:

New York City: Saturday 7-7:30PM/ Sunday 2-3AM

Los Angeles: Saturday 4-5PM /Sunday 12-1AM

Chicago: Saturday 6-7PM / Sunday 12:35-1:35AM

Philadelphia: Saturday 7-8PM / Sunday 1:05-2:05AM

San Francisco: Saturday 7-8PM / Sunday 1-2AM

DC: Sunday 12:35-1:35AM

Miami: Saturday 7-8PM

San Diego: Sunday 9-10PM & 12-1AM

Hartford: Saturday 7-8PM

For more listings, click where to watch

Rosario Dawson Acts Up
July/August 2011 Issue (read original article here)

Rosario Dawson never pined to be an actress. Her family, squatting in an abandoned tenement building in New York City, was just trying to make it. Then, when she was 15, the director of Kids spotted her on her front stoop, and her life has been a cascade of film roles, from Rent to Sin City, ever since. (You can see her in Zookeeper, a new comedy in theaters this week.) But the sexy starlet hasn’t forgotten her hardscrabble roots. Dawson, now 32, remains outspoken on everything from violence against women to the politics of the census. Naturally, the self-described “Twitterholic” was “best-dressed” at the White House correspondents’ dinner (so says that noted fashion arbiter Politico).

I caught up with Dawson as she was getting ready for a show by her friend Prince—and a visit with President Obama. She had so much to say about her various projects that we didn’t even get to her Star Trek yen (yes, she speaks Klingon) or the Paul Rudd crotch-grabbing incident last year when she defended a fondled Eva Mendes (and women everywhere). Suffice it to say, the lady’s got range.

Mother Jones: You’re in Girl Walks Into a Bar, the first straight-to-YouTube feature film. Is this where the industry is headed?

Rosario Dawson: Oh, hell yeah! With the recession, people are having to choose between their cable and their internet connection. And think about it. When they started making made-for-TV movies, people thought it was a fluke. Who would watch that? Because it’s in your TV screen and not in a theater. Remember that?

MJ: How is digital distribution changing the game for you as an actor?

RD: It’s a whole other way of communicating with your fans and giving them content at their leisure. It’s like, there are people making music in their igloos on their PDAs. You’re going to see the exact same thing with film. I’ve been in this industry for 16 years, and I feel very excited about it again. Back in the day, you’d walk down to a street corner and see some people making a story with a hat in front of them. It’s ancient entertainment, ancient storytelling and oral history—now we’re doing it on YouTube. We were all freaked out by the whole HD thing, that it would show every pore on a person’s face. Personally when I first saw it I said, wow, everything looks like porn! This is too real! But you get so desensitized, you just get used to it.

MJ: You were actually doing online productions before it was the current rage, producing and starring in online-only shows. Can you have more fun in this milieu since there are lower production costs, like can you experiment more?

RD: There wasn’t a whole lot of precedence before us. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a success, and they were going to spend this money and we weren’t going to be able to recoup it. We just put ourselves out there and it was fun, we were shooting in LA, with unions, and it just was great to just feel like, okay, we’re trying something else so let’s see what happens. You’re not spending an entire three days shooting half a page where everyone is sitting in their trailers for most of the time. I’ve just been very excited that over the years I’ve constantly had those types of different experiences. I like staying a little bit like acting school, not experimental, necessarily, but just fun. I have the best job in the world: I pretend for a living. You can’t get too precious about that.

MJ: You started Voto Latino in 2004 in the throes of the Bush Administration, where channeling outrage was pretty straightforward. Is the sell more complicated now?

RD: Yeah, but I think nuance is very important to have in the conversation, nuance that’s been lacking for a long time. A lot of voting organizations only exist every four years, putting all this money into “your voice is important!” Wouldn’t that be nice, if that’s all it took? Voting is the first political action for most people. But if you don’t follow up then voting is not actual participation but just a one-off. That person has no accountability or political cost to what they said they were going to do and what they ended up doing. This is the only free country in the world that’s doing lobbying. Voters should be the lobbyists. If we can spend all of this time with all these different celebrities who fill up the internet and magazines then we should be able to keep an eye on politicians because they might cost you your job and your home and your life savings. Don’t you want to know who they are? When people start to complain, “Voting doesn’t matter,” I’m like, the people of Wisconsin weren’t boycotting and hitting the streets and blowing up those rooms because voting didn’t change those situations for them. That was their livelihood. There’s revolution going on all over the world because they actually can’t have a voice.

MJ: You produced a series of telenovela spoofs for YouTube called La Pasion de la Decision that are essentially voting soap operas. Activism used to be so earnest. Has it lightened up a bit?

RD: The reason we do activism is because, maybe you haven’t been raped or abused, but there are millions of people who can’t say the same, and when you hear their stories you may be a little bit compelled. And it doesn’t have to be dark. In the Congo, there are women who’ve been raped and re-raped, and they’re so powerful, and they can carry trees on their heads, and they’re dancing!

MJ: What is it about Twitter that makes it a good mix for you as an actor and activist?

RD: I really like Twitter. It’s a conversation and it reminds me of having stranger conversations on the train. I’m a New Yorker. I’m used to bumping into strangers, acknowledging them, them acknowledging me, even if it’s just with an eyebrow lift. And maybe you just have those impromptu conversations, or where all of the sudden you’re standing on the corner waiting to cross the street and you notice three people looking up and you look up with them. And you all smile at each other because you’re seeing a little piece of a rainbow between two buildings, and that little [rainbow] and you all just shared a New York moment, and that’s awesome, and then you keep on in your way. (What’s odd about it is that I see it as these moments and then other people, I’ll reply to someone, and they’re like, “Follow me back, let’s be friends!” and I’m like, “See, on the train you have a great conversation between stops and you don’t necessarily exchange phone numbers. It’s not that deep, actually. Why can’t the moment just be what it is?”) I grew up and I’ve worked with people who have been very present, a) either always jumping to whatever is most modern technologically advanced sort of thing, or b) people in this industry, like Kevin Smith, who, his communication with his fans is hugely connected to his success. And he was talking about that years ago. And David Bowie was doing that years ago. And Prince was doing that years ago. There have been people who’ve understood it for a long time, who’ve gone, okay, this is a medium I get. It’s not a phase; it’s not a fad; it’s actually something quite vital and important, and it’s pretty fascinating to watch that.

For me it’s great because I am very political about stuff, and I do have a lot of issues that I care about. Twitter frees me up from being on the red carpet and feeling like I have all of these things to say, but it’s not the appropriate time to be talking about rape in the Congo. I’m in high heels, I’m wearing a fabulous dress, people want me to just smile and talk about my movie because I only have three minutes, and that’s my job. I do have people who are like, “Yo, I think someone hacked into your Twitter account to talk about census forms.” I’m like, “No, that’s me.” There are people who don’t like celebrities who tweet about politics—to whom I say, don’t follow me. Thank you for liking Sin City. I can completely understand if you watch that movie and then I talk about single-use plastic bags and you’re a little confused, maybe put off: “You should be talking about machine guns! In a sexy way!” I’m sorry, that’s not me.

MJ: Any hashtag you wish would take the Twitterverse by storm?

RD: I am the queen of hashtags! I love hashtags. I think in hashtags. I wish I could write everything in hashtag. Me and my friends, we do this little two-finger-on-two-finger thing when we talk to each other, because we’re Twitterholics. Maybe #acceptance. I feel like we pay a lot of attention to the word “tolerance,” and I don’t really like it. I get it, but I don’t need you to tolerate this. It is. When you accept something, it’s much deeper.

MJ: Why do you suppose that actors work so hard to remain apolitical?

RD: From Marilyn Monroe and beyond, that’s a huge part of Hollywood, creating a persona that’s mysterious and fairly simple, though it’s interesting how that’s changing: Now, you have fans who are like, “Um, yeah, I just emailed with Barack Obama and tweeted with Lady Gaga, so I’m kinda right there with you; give it to me.” I get that people are a little allergic to celebrities using their voices, but I grew up a squatter on the Lower East Side, so it’s kind of a given that I’d have very strong opinions on everything from cyclical violence to teenage pregnancy to environmental justice.

MJ: You don’t see mainstream films being made about poor people very often. Winter’s Bone, about life in the Missouri Ozarks, was made because it was backed by someone who was independently wealthy. It seems like the types of movies that are made could change if budgets are smaller, you can communicate wholly different messages to a worldwide audience.

RD: People watch more documentaries too now. These movies that would normally be shown in these little art houses, and unless you walked by the theater, or happened to read that tiny zine that contained the info for it, or went to a film festival, you might miss it. But now your average Joe can go: “I watched all the action movies on my playlist, now let me see what’s playing in documentaries, see if there’s anything I like there. I’ll watch this one on sports, and I’ll watch this other one, and then, all right, let me see this one on the private-prison system and the privatization of water and…holy shit!” It’s kind of amazing and in some ways it’s shocking to me how much information is out there and still how little we look at it to inform. Once upon a time if we saw whale murders were happening, people were hitting the streets and we had to stop them. And now The Cove wins awards, and no one’s doing anything about the dolphins. And then you see Inside Job, and you’re like, “Why aren’t people hitting the streets over this, what does it take?” You can watch a documentary at three o’clock in the afternoon and get really, really angry, and then just when you’re about to get up to call your congressman, a commercial comes on and you’re like, “Oh my God, I love that laughing baby, it’s so cute!” Wait a minute, no, this was a big thing you just saw, why don’t you get active about it? I don’t put all my eggs in any basket and go, now with social media we can just be social activists; no, we have to really choose to do take action. And it’s a long day, and you want to just play your video game. And believe me, I love playing Red Dead Redemption or Arkham Asylum, too. I get it; it’s not about always being so vigilant all the time. It’s about finding that balance.

MJ: When you were just 19, Prince invited you to do the intro commentary on his “1999” remix. He also called you the “voice of a generation.” You seem to have taken that to heart.

RD: He just saw me. Maybe more so than I saw myself at that time. I take it very seriously. And it’s not all like beautiful-smelling roses all the time. There’s room for improvement. And I’m young enough. My grandmother will vote, but she looks at some of the political stuff I do and says, “That’s a young person’s game.” But then there’s Dolores Huerta—she’s what, 80? And she’s saying, “I’m not tired, I’m still marching—what’s your excuse?”