Dee Rees

Our statement's on the screen. Awards won't make it better, and a lack of awards won't make it worse.

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.

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

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

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

I just want to tell stories that are meaningful and have inspiration to them; people can watch it and take away something, or maybe they'll just think about themselves differently or think about the world differently. I just want to create characters that live on.

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

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

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.

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.