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
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
I can't put anything out that's not me.
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.
My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur.
To me, if you can do the Wicked Witch live, you can play anybody.
Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever - like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle.
'Mudbound' highlights the fact that we're still battling a lot of the same issues as we were all of those decades ago.
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.
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.
I thought I'd get an MBA, and then I could be anything. And I'd write on the side. That was the idea.
You don't have to make yourself look like people expect you to look.
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.
Growing up, I was very aware that there weren't many people like me on the screen.
You can't be limited by your own experience.
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 shouldn't be discriminating against each other. The whole 'light skin versus dark skin' is an idea we need to break down.
Filmmaking was the way I could write characters and not have to give them up to anybody.
I still want to do features, but on my own terms.
The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that.
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.
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.'
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.'
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.
There's a dearth of media around young black women and certainly a dearth of LGBT media for people of color.
I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else.
Nothing I do is didactic. I just want to hold up a mirror and say, 'This is who we are.'
You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look.
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.
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.
It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds.
For each character, I try to understand what is driving them.
Our country is pathologically violent.
To have a simultaneous global audience as an artist is more than you could ever hope for.
Going into a room and saying, 'I'm a black lesbian' - it's a strike against you.
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.
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.
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.
For me, like, obviously, I want to see myself onscreen.
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.
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.'
I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.
It's okay to be yourself and to love and accept yourself however you are.
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.
