Dee Rees Quotes

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Going into a room and saying, 'I'm a black lesbian' - it's a strike against you.

I still want to do features, but on my own terms.

I can't put anything out that's not me.

To have a simultaneous global audience as an artist is more than you could ever hope for.

Filmmaking was the way I could write characters and not have to give them up to anybody.

I had originally written 'Pariah' as a feature, and we shot the first act as a short film, and then we used the short as a marketing tool to fundraise for the feature.

Our country is pathologically violent.

We shouldn't be discriminating against each other. The whole 'light skin versus dark skin' is an idea we need to break down.

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.'

For each character, I try to understand what is driving them.

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.

We have to create a range, and we have to let there be possibilities. And basically, by showing there are different types of people, you write down the monolith. You stop having to represent for all black people when you allow there to be different types represented.

It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds.

You can't be limited by your own experience.

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.

I think 'Mudbound' reveals the interconnectiveness of our stories. You can't separate out threads of history and race as economic construct. 'Mudbound' makes it very plain. Race is about commerce; it's not an actual thing. It's a fiction that was created to basically divide resources unequally.

Growing up, I was very aware that there weren't many people like me on the screen.

I'm not a writer that writes every day. I just kind of have ideas. I jot them down when I have them, and when I have enough, I just start. And for me, I start more around noon, and I'm all about feeling. Once there's a theme, I can't not write.

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.

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.

My first job was at Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati, my second job was at a pharmaceutical company in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. My third job was at Palmolive. And I realized, three jobs in three years, maybe it wasn't the job. It had to be me.

Actors need to know why they're saying what they're saying, more than just learning their lines.

I started out at Procter & Gamble marketing panty liners, so basically selling women insecurity. I thought there must be more to life than this. Then I was on set for a Dr. Scholl's commercial, and I asked one of the execs, 'How do you get a job behind the camera?' and he said, 'Film school.' So I quit and applied to NYU.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

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.

History informs where we are and how we got here.

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.

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.

There's a line that runs between everyone and their ancestors, and you cannot sever that. Maybe disassociate from those ideas but not how you are connected to them. But, you can realise how you've benefited and change how you raise your kids.

For 'Pariah,' people were surprised Kim Wayans was there, but comedians have a dark streak; they're comedians for a reason.

Having to stake out your identity and have people question whether or not you're being yourself was a tension that I could relate to.

You don't get to hand footnotes to the audience or explain what you were trying to do and what it's supposed to be. Everything has to be on the screen, and it has to be clear.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

As long as you tell the best story possible, you can trust that people will be able to connect to it.

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it.

I thought that marketing was a way to be creative in business but quickly learned all creative stuff happens at the ad agency.

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.

When I first started going out to lesbian clubs, I felt a very binary recreation of hetero culture. There are butches and femmes, and I felt like I was neither of those things. I'm in a turtleneck and jeans and just learning to be comfortable in that space. I realized I don't have to be a certain way.

Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.

Coming-of-age stories, people roll their eyes.

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.

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.

Our statement's on the screen. Awards won't make it better, and a lack of awards won't make it worse.

New York offers people the anonymity to be themselves without judgment.

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.

With friendship, it's hard sometimes - you don't outgrow your friends, but you do question how people are friends to you in different ways and how it's okay to cultivate other relationships outside of that.

For me, books were my source of affirmation. Alice Walker, Audrey Lord - it was these authors who wrote about their experiences. It was this weird thing where I was censored in terms of what I could watch but not in terms of what I could read.

I like 'Paris is Burning' by Jennie Livington.

I think Charlottesville was shocking for some, but it wasn't for me or for my family, I mean, because I grew up in 1980s Nashville.

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.

You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look.

You don't have to make yourself look like people expect you to look.

It's okay to be yourself and to love and accept yourself however you are.

Nothing I do is didactic. I just want to hold up a mirror and say, 'This is who we are.'

I thought I'd get an MBA, and then I could be anything. And I'd write on the side. That was the idea.

I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.

I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else.

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.

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.'

There's a dearth of media around young black women and certainly a dearth of LGBT media for people of color.

I'd go to lesbian parties. I felt like I wasn't hard enough to be butch, but I wasn't wearing heels and a skirt - I wasn't femme - so I felt like I was sort of invisible.

When I first came out, holidays were hard. I reached a point where I didn't go home anymore. I constructed my own, kind of like, family group around Christmas.

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.

'Mudbound' highlights the fact that we're still battling a lot of the same issues as we were all of those decades ago.

For me, like, obviously, I want to see myself onscreen.

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.'

Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever - like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle.

I'm interested in telling stories about characters that are interesting and who are challenging in some way, one that will make you think about them afterwards.

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.'

To me, if you can do the Wicked Witch live, you can play anybody.

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.

For me, Sundance always felt big. It's not the only way to make your way, but for me, it was definitely that critical link between struggling artist, kind of working on my own, to actually working professionally and being connected and being seen.

My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur.

I had this thing where I only wanted to work on original material, no adaptations, and obviously, that changed. I really wanted to have the resources and have the space and the time to tell stories that I've really cared about. I've kind of changed my approach, but I've gotten to do that, to tell stories that I really care about.

The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that.

In some communities it is - like, for me, coming out with my parents, they were not accepting; they were not understanding. So it depends. For kids in New York and L.A., maybe it's different, but for kids in Iowa, for kids in Tennessee, it's still something that's not really talked about.

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