Dee Rees Quotes
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When I first came to New York, I was surprised by all these out teenagers who were openly on the street being who they were. That intrigued me because I was 27 and still struggling with being myself.
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My dad was a cop, you know, and I grew up three houses down from people who used Confederate flags as curtains.
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When you choose the hard things, it takes longer than you think to get it done, and if you choose the hard thing and have a very particular way you want to do them and are uncompromising in that, then sometimes it takes even longer.
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Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever - like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle.
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I just want to tell stories that are meaningful and have inspiration to them; people can watch it and take away something, or maybe they'll just think about themselves differently or think about the world differently. I just want to create characters that live on.
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I was interested with exploring the idea of who gets to be in possession of the land - how it's sometimes impossible to go back home, how family can be the thing that drags you down.
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Each moment is defined by a multitude of histories, the past constantly converging upon us, perpetually decaying and reforming itself on the steady pulse of now, now, now, now.
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Contemporarily, we struggle with people worried about representation sometimes. It's a burden, as artists, that we take on that limits the work. It limits the characters people play. It limits the roles they want to do.
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Before Charlottesville, it might have been easy to dismiss the plot of 'Mudbound' as no longer relevant. Now, I feel like audiences will be more receptive to the material - and to interrogating their personal histories after watching it.
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I want more images onscreen because when I was growing up, I think, like, that one kiss in 'The Color Purple' was the one thing that I had. Or 'The Watermelon Woman.'
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New York offers people the anonymity to be themselves without judgment.
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Coming-of-age stories, people roll their eyes.
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For each character, I try to understand what is driving them.
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There's a lot of power in saying no to big things that you don't want to do in order to say yes to the kind of things that really inspire you.
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I was never physically abused, but when I came out to my parents late in life, when I was 27, they definitely had an intervention.
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I grew up in Nashville in a white suburb. We lived next to a Klan member. We didn't see hoods, but my dad knew that guy was a Grand Dragon.
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Filmmaking in general is my second career. I thought that writing wasn't practical, so I went to business school and got an MBA, and I worked three years in grant management.
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Art makes you see people as individual, unique human beings. Art, in that way, allows us to see each other in particulate, as opposed to in aggregate.
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The only advice I can give is to surround yourself with people who are friends and people who believe in you and your material and who are going to help you take it to the next level. It doesn't mean you don't listen to criticism, but you listen to it and edit it, and you figure out what you can take.
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The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that.
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For kids who are struggling, who are of faith, just reconciling yourself to the fact that God loves you, accepts you for who you are, is a big step in the healing, especially when your biological family is unaccepting of you.
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People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.
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I like 'Paris is Burning' by Jennie Livington.
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Growing up, I was very aware that there weren't many people like me on the screen.