Dee Rees Quotes

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Dee Rees

Profession : Director

Birth : February 7, 1977

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

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

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

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

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