Dee Rees Quotes

“I remember one summer I played, like, with the granddaughter of this known Klan member. Like, all summer we caught cicadas. And we had grown close, and so it was, like, time for her birthday party and I said ‘Oh, like, what time do I come for your party?’ And she’s like ‘Oh, no, you can’t come to my house ’cause my parents don’t like black people.’”

― Dee Rees

“I’m always choosing the hard things, the things that aren’t easy.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“You don’t have to make yourself look like people expect you to look.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“It’s okay to be yourself and to love and accept yourself however you are.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“I was always going to direct. I wasn’t going to hand my characters over to anyone else.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.’”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.’”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.’”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“Going into a room and saying, ‘I’m a black lesbian’ – it’s a strike against you.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“I can’t put anything out that’s not me.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“Our country is pathologically violent.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.’”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“It’s a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know – we have to be able to imagine different worlds.”

― Dee Rees

“You can’t be limited by your own experience.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“History informs where we are and how we got here.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

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

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“I like ‘Paris is Burning’ by Jennie Livington.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“My dad was a cop, you know, and I grew up three houses down from people who used Confederate flags as curtains.”

― Dee Rees

“I definitely felt the desire to, like – I definitely knew there was an elsewhere. I definitely knew that, like, if I were going to be free, I needed to be away from, kind of, like, Nashville and kind of get out of the South and get out of the country.”

― Dee Rees

“In an industry that’s uncertain and when you’re in a lot of situations that are anxiety-causing, to have someone there who has your back unconditionally and cares for you and the material and would give anything to make sure everything is OK, makes you feel so much better. It gives you a sense of security as an artist.”

― Dee Rees

“I feel a lot of folks, like teenagers, can feel like outcasts.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“I kept getting offered all this young adult stuff. I don’t want to keep telling teen coming-of-age stories!”

― Dee Rees

“I’m interested in characters and relationships.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“Shooting on film is great because it imparts discipline: What do you need to see so you’re not finding it in the camera. When I’m shooting, I have the scene in mind, where I’m going to have certain lines. I learned to overlap and to shoot more than I think I need. That was the learning curve.”

― Dee Rees

“I was going to study business administration at Florida A&M, at the height of Reaganomics.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“When I’m on set, I know what I want.”

― Dee Rees

“Knowing what you want is not a shortcoming. Let people deal with their own anxieties.”

― Dee Rees

“I think art breaks down otherness.”

― Dee Rees

“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.”

― Dee Rees

“Both grandfathers fought in different wars. My mother’s father fought in World War II, and then my father’s father fought in Korea. And they’re both these country boys, one from rural Tennessee and one from rural Louisiana – and they never went back home.”

― Dee Rees

“Culture – art, music, literature – is the long game, because it’s the way to change people’s ideas in a more personal way.”

― Dee Rees

“’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.”

― Dee Rees