Interview with Dee Rees
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Dee Rees
Writer and director from Nashville, Tennessee, known for Pariah, the HBO film Bessie, and Mudbound, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Source: BAFTA Guru on YouTube
These answers are taken from Dee Rees | BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture Series on BAFTA Guru's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
When did you start making films?
Pariah, I wrote as a feature. I wrote it as a 140-page feature. It was before I knew any better that feature scripts shouldn't be 140 pages. I had her going to college and going to frat parties. It was awful. Then I realized that to tell it well, I could only tell that part of her experience, that high school moment over the course of a couple of months.
Then I needed a thesis to graduate from NYU, and I was obsessed with this. I couldn't think of anything else. So I shot the first act as a short film, which, by the way, was against all the rules. They said, “Don't make a half-hour short film. It will never get programmed.” But I did anyway, and the great thing is they would always program us either first or last, because it was so long. And the short then made the way to raise funds for the feature film. I'd written this bloated feature script, workshopped it at the Sundance Labs, and then we used the short to finance the feature. It became our calling card.
How did your filmmaking career unfold?
Pariah's 2011, and then Bessie's 2015. So in that four-year gap, I was writing many things that didn't get produced. When Focus acquired Pariah, they gave me a blind script deal to write a crime thriller about a lesbian detective based in Memphis. Focus said, “The script is too small for us. But if you can find the money, we'll give it back to you.” We found independent investors who said, “We'll make this if you cast it in a way that makes sense for the foreign sales value equation.” And the two people who did fit the equation said, “Oh, I'm sorry. I don't want to be a lesbian.” So that was two years of a film not happening.
I'd also written a spec pilot about Nashville. Everyone said, “No one wants a story about Nashville.” Then ABC, six months later, comes out with a series called Nashville. But this little spec script had gotten all around town, and HBO said, “We've got this script called Bessie. We're looking for someone to do a rewrite.” And I was like, Bessie Smith, queer woman from Tennessee? Hell, yeah. I rewrote it so specifically that they said, “No one else can direct this. Do you want to direct this?”
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
People in real life rarely say exactly what's on their mind or exactly what they feel, either because they're protecting the self or protecting the other person. So it's really weird in cinema when people give these full-on, heartfelt, emotional monologues that are expositional. I had this great writing professor, and his idea was the triple bumper theory: whatever someone really feels, back off of it three times and then you'll get to the thing that maybe should be on the page. Girl meets girl. The thing that is meant is “I love you,” but you wouldn't say that, because you might be rejected. So you back it off: “I love your sweater.” Then, “Where'd you buy that sweater?” Then, “I heard there's a sale at Topshop on sweaters.” The audience is smart. The audience gets it.
When you're writing dialogue, there are no consequences for you, so there's a temptation for your characters to be this courageous avatar that says the things you want to say. But for the character, there are very real consequences. Rather than let characters be your champion, understand the consequences that they're in and protect them with the dialogue.
And in the edit room, you've got to kill your darlings.
Think about a demanding producer, actor or crew member. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
Ronsel in the general store, with the staredown with Pappy. I was tempted to throw away those last lines, because I felt there's no way that you can say that to Pappy full in his face. We'd just roll credits right there. That'd be it. So I was tempted to throw it away, and the actors fought for it. Jonathan was like, “No, no, I want him to say it.” And Jason was like, “No, no, I want to say it.”
So I changed the blocking: “Okay, if you say that, you have to say it as you're walking away. You have to say it under your breath. Because if you give him that speech full to his face, then that means either there's no problem here, or you're going to be dead.” So I changed the blocking to make the words work.
How do you keep your cast and crew communicating well on set?
I like to keep it more conversational. In the same way I work with actors in small pairings, I work with department heads in small pairings. I don't enjoy the big conference table meetings. You have to do that with the AD a couple of times, but I don't feel that the creative process is best served there. I feel like it's in one-on-ones. I like to let the person complete the thought or complete the idea, or we're going to go through three things that don't work before we get to the thing that does work. Otherwise it gets to a stage where people shut down, or people are performing for each other.
And instead of dumping a big glut, like, “Here's all my references,” I share slowly: here are some songs that sound like the world, here are some images that feel like the world, here's a passage from a poem. So everyone feels like they're getting this personalized little love note from me, and then they get inspired, and they text or email at 3:00 in the morning. It's a steady drip of inspiration, versus this formalized Knights of the Round Table thing.
Describe your filmmaking style.
My process with actors is not to rehearse the lines. It's to pair them off in twos or threes and talk about the core of the relationships, the feeling. For Mudbound, I had Jonathan Banks, Garrett Hedlund and Jason Clarke in my office in this father-son mosh pit. The core of that triangle was admiration and respect. All in the script is going to be antagonism. So in the workshop, I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to find the love and the warmth: say one thing good about your sons, say one thing good about your father.
I had them record their voiceovers on set, which every sound technician will tell you not to do. But the actors are still in costume. They're still sweaty. They're still dirty. They're fresh from the emotion. I'm failing them if I'm not putting them in a situation to give their best performance. So it's worth the three minutes to run to a rental car parked outside and do it.
Tell me about a production that was hard to pull off. What was it and why was it challenging?
Pariah. We reused the bus sequence from the short, because getting a bus in New York City is like hell. There's no way we're going to run another bus. We reused some of the club scenes. It was extremely low budget. We shot Pariah for like four hundred-something thousand dollars, and we never had all that money in the bank at the same time. We recast the parents completely, but I wanted to keep the girls the same, so we used what we could, but we mostly reshot it.
And we had one day of pickups. We had to shoot the rooftop scene between Alike and her father, because it was snowing the first time we tried to shoot. So we had to come back and get it when it wasn't snowing.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
I didn't want to write the poem at the end of Pariah, because I felt it would be corny: yet another film where the protagonist is an artist and delivers her poem in the end. And my editor, Mako Kamitsuna, said, “Just write something, record it. If you hate it, we won't use it.” So I wrote this poem on a napkin at a Starbucks, and we popped down and shot it, and I'm glad we did.
For Bessie, I found my way into her character through her music. There's this Broadway album, One Mo' Time, and I remember as a kid, my grandmother would play it for me and I'd put socks on my hands like gloves and we danced around the living room to these Broadway covers of old vaudeville songs and Bessie's songs. And I drank gin for a time, because that was her drink. Whiskey is my drink, but she drinks gin. So I thought, maybe if I switch to gin, that puts me in a different headspace.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
When I first started out, I was like, “I'm an auteur. I only want to do my original stuff, no adaptations.” And then I compromised: “Okay, I will do adaptations, but only about stuff that I love.” But I want to get back to solely original stuff and world creation. Sci-fi has been the thing I've always wanted to get to, because I feel like you can actually say more and be more direct, because people don't realize what they're looking at, quite.
I never want to be a director for hire. I didn't want to be on loan to different studios, directing someone else's idea. If I fail, I want to fail on my own ideas. Time is short. Each film eats like three years of your life. So I feel like the clock is ticking, and from now on, if I'm going to go out, go out trying to do my own stuff.
Dee Rees's Full Biography
Writer/Director Dee Rees is an alumna of New York University's graduate film program and a Sundance Screenwriting & Directing Lab Fellow.
In 2018, Dee became the first Black woman nominated for an Oscar in the Best Adapted Screenplay category for her highly-acclaimed film Mudbound (2017). The film, starring Jason Mitchell, Carey Mulligan and Mary J. Blige, tells the story of two men returning home from World War II, struggling to deal with racism and post-war life and was nominated for four Oscars, two Golden Globes, and received over 100 nominations between 2017 and 2018.
Her 1980's political thriller The Last Thing He Wanted is an adaptation of the novel by Joan Didion and will star Anne Hathaway as hardened journalist Elena McMahon.
Dee's Emmy-Award winning HBO film Bessie (2015) starred Queen Latifah as the legendary American Blues singer and was nominated for a total of twelve Emmy Awards, including Dee's individual nominations for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing For A Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special. Bessie was also nominated for four Critics' Choice Awards and Dee was the recipient of the 2016 Director's Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television and Miniseries as well as the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Television Movie.
Dee's debut feature film Pariah starring Adepero Oduye and Kim Wayans premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival where it was honored with the festival's U.S. Dramatic Competition "Excellence in Cinematography" Award and was later released by Focus Features. Pariah went on to win numerous awards including the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards (2011), the Gotham Award for Best Breakthrough Director (2011), Outstanding Film, Limited Release at the GLAAD Media Awards (2012) and it received seven NAACP Image Award nominations including Outstanding Motion Picture, Outstanding Directing and Outstanding Writing and won the award for Outstanding Independent Motion Picture. Pariah also earned Dee a spot on New York Times' 10 Directors to Watch list in 2013.
Previously, Dee was selected as a 2008 Tribeca Institute/Renew Media Arts Fellow and appeared on Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film that same year. She is a 2011 United States Artists Fellow and her notable residencies include Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.
Dee Rees was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee and resides in New York.