Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" You don't have to make yourself look like people expect you to look. "
Dee Rees
Yourself
Expect
Look
Related Quotes:
" The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that. "
Dee Rees
Enemy
System
Up
" You don't have to make your life look like anybody else says it should look. "
Dee Rees
Your
You
Look
" I kept getting offered all this young adult stuff. I don't want to keep telling teen coming-of-age stories! "
Dee Rees
Adult
Keep
Teen
" My dad was a cop, you know, and I grew up three houses down from people who used Confederate flags as curtains. "
Dee Rees
Used
You
Know
" 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
Resources
You
History
" 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
Country
Nashville
Desire
" Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes. "
Dee Rees
Creatively
Most
Come
" 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. "
Dee Rees
Family
God
Step
" 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
Me
Interesting
Character
" When I'm on set, I know what I want. "
Dee Rees
Set
Want
Know
" I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else. "
Dee Rees
Direct
Always
Going
" 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. "
Dee Rees
Think
Way
You
" History informs where we are and how we got here. "
Dee Rees
Where
History
Got
" 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. "
Dee Rees
Artist
Own
My Own
" 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. "
Dee Rees
Care
Kind
Tell
" I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it. "
Dee Rees
Always
Career
Write
" Culture - art, music, literature - is the long game, because it's the way to change people's ideas in a more personal way. "
Dee Rees
Change
Art
Culture
" 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
Play
People
Struggle
" 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. "
Dee Rees
Film
Marketing
Used
" I still want to do features, but on my own terms. "
Dee Rees
Want
Still
Own
" I can't put anything out that's not me. "
Dee Rees
Me
Out
Anything
" 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
Women
School
Life
" Knowing what you want is not a shortcoming. Let people deal with their own anxieties. "
Dee Rees
People
Deal
Knowing
" I think art always comments on the time and place it was created. "
Dee Rees
Time
Always
Art
" 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. "
Dee Rees
War
Home
Father
" For each character, I try to understand what is driving them. "
Dee Rees
Try
Character
Driving
" 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
Find
I Can
Three
" Growing up, I was very aware that there weren't many people like me on the screen. "
Dee Rees
People
Me
Like
" My ultimate dream was just to be an auteur. "
Dee Rees
Dream
Just
Ultimate
" To have a simultaneous global audience as an artist is more than you could ever hope for. "
Dee Rees
You
Artist
Audience