101 Quotes by Dee Rees

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

I thought I'd get an MBA, and then I could be anything. And I'd write on the side. That was the idea.