Q: One critic wrote that Killer of Sheep was in some ways your response to the lies of blaxploitation. Was that in any way true?

Burnett: In some ways, yeah, in many ways. A lot of us were angry at those films because they became the only representation of our experience in the movies. So we were very conscious of knowing that's who the enemy was, so to speak. And then there were the seemingly positive images like Sidney Poitier movies which were great but they spoke more to the white community than the black community. We needed the spectrum, the full range of the black experience. Then there were also attempts at being positive and political with social-realist pictures where the issues are very clear: for example, there's exploitation in a shop, the manager is exploiting the workers, so you have to have the people come together and form a strike. And then boom, you get your worker's rights, and everyone is happy. But it wasn't the case where I was living. And there were too many films I saw like that. And that troubled me equally as much as the black exploitation films.