Dee Rees Quotes

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Dee Rees

Profession : Director

Birth : February 7, 1977

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

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

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

I'm always choosing the hard things, the things that aren't easy.

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

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

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

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

Dee Rees

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

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

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

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