Dee Rees Quotes
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I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.
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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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Growing up, I was very aware that there weren't many people like me on the screen.
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With 'Pariah,' at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, 'No, I'm from Nashville.'
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'Mudbound,' you know, is about home. 'Mudbound' is about what it means to be a citizen, and 'Mudbound,' in fact, is set in this post-reconstruction era that we haven't really explored. You know, not since 'Sounder' have we even really explored that experience.
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A producer has to want you. And if the producer trusts you and asks for your vision, it frees you up so much, not having to explain or fight for every decision. You're allowed to create.
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For me, 'Pariah' is very much about that inner churn. It's about this person's emotional inner life, and that's really what I wanted to bring to 'Bessie.'
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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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To have a simultaneous global audience as an artist is more than you could ever hope for.
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For me, like, obviously, I want to see myself onscreen.
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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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I wrote poetry and short stories. I would send them to magazines; they wouldn't get in. But short stories are how I found philosophy and how I'd understand the world.
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I grew up listening to Mary J. Blige's music. When I initially met her, it was like, 'Oh, wow. I'm meeting this woman whose music was the soundtrack of my college years.'
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I still want to do features, but on my own terms.
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If I can go three grandmothers back and find a slave, that means someone else can go three grandmothers back and find a slave owner. When you interrogate your histories, it forces you to rethink who you are and where you are.
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Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.
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I want people to get from 'Pariah' that it's okay to be you and not to check a box as a parent or child.
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The best thing in the world is to put two characters who hate each other side by side. Or put two people who love each other far away, so they have to reach for each other with their looks.
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I'm always choosing the hard things, the things that aren't easy.
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You can't be limited by your own experience.
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You're your own person, and it's about you. I'm my own person, and it's about me. Everyone has their own life.
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Actors need to know why they're saying what they're saying, more than just learning their lines.
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I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.
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There's a dearth of media around young black women and certainly a dearth of LGBT media for people of color.