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