Dee Rees Quotes

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Dee Rees

Profession : Director

Birth : February 7, 1977

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

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

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

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