Top 70 Dee Rees Quotes

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.

For me, like, obviously, I want to see myself onscreen.

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.

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.

To have a simultaneous global audience as an artist is more than you could ever hope for.

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.

For ‘Pariah,’ people were surprised Kim Wayans was there, but comedians have a dark streak; they’re comedians for a reason.

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.

I’ve always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it.

Growing up, I was very aware that there weren’t many people like me on the screen.

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.’

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

Coming-of-age stories, people roll their eyes.

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.’

Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For each character, I try to understand what is driving them.

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.

We shouldn’t be discriminating against each other. The whole ‘light skin versus dark skin’ is an idea we need to break down.

I feel a lot of folks, like teenagers, can feel like outcasts.

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.

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.

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.

Both grandfathers fought in different wars. My mother’s father fought in World War II, and then my father’s father fought in Korea. And they’re both these country boys, one from rural Tennessee and one from rural Louisiana – and they never went back home.

I kept getting offered all this young adult stuff. I don’t want to keep telling teen coming-of-age stories!

A producer has to want you. And if the producer trusts you and asks for your vision, it frees you up so much, not having to explain or fight for every decision. You’re allowed to create.

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

I was going to study business administration at Florida A&M, at the height of Reaganomics.

‘Mudbound’ highlights the fact that we’re still battling a lot of the same issues as we were all of those decades ago.

I think art breaks down otherness.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

It’s a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know – we have to be able to imagine different worlds.

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.

Going into a room and saying, ‘I’m a black lesbian’ – it’s a strike against you.

Culture – art, music, literature – is the long game, because it’s the way to change people’s ideas in a more personal way.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur.

I thought that marketing was a way to be creative in business but quickly learned all creative stuff happens at the ad agency.

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.

I like ‘Paris is Burning’ by Jennie Livington.

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.

The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that.

I’m interested in characters and relationships.

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.’

Creatively, I just like interesting characters. So straight, gay, or whatever – like, whatever, wherever the characters are coming from or their lifestyle.

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.

I still want to do features, but on my own terms.

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.

Our country is pathologically violent.

The best thing in the world is to put two characters who hate each other side by side. Or put two people who love each other far away, so they have to reach for each other with their looks.

You can’t be limited by your own experience.

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.’

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.

There’s a dearth of media around young black women and certainly a dearth of LGBT media for people of color.

To me, if you can do the Wicked Witch live, you can play anybody.

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.

For kids who are struggling, who are of faith, just reconciling yourself to the fact that God loves you, accepts you for who you are, is a big step in the healing, especially when your biological family is unaccepting of you.

Art makes you see people as individual, unique human beings. Art, in that way, allows us to see each other in particulate, as opposed to in aggregate.