Appearing this week on Larry King Now, director Jay Roach compared the civil rights movement of the sixties to LGBT rights.

Roach directed the upcoming film All the Way, in which President Lyndon B. Johnson (played by Bryan Cranston) works on passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. HBO will premiere the film on Sunday.

When a viewer asked whether Roach considers the film timely given the uproar going on over a law in North Carolina which limits LGBT rights, Roach answered “absolutely.”

“I just saw yesterday that the attorney general is suing the state using the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – this very act that's passed during our film, because it included clauses on discrimination based on sex,” Roach told host Larry King.

“It's a perpetual battle for civil rights, whatever class gets sort of scapegoated as being the 'problem' class that people decide to turn against. It's unfortunate that you can't just pass an act and it just goes away. It takes years of battle at every level,” he added.