Interview (Written): Dee Rees

Co-writer and director of the Netflix movie ‘Mudbound’.

A Film School Rejects interview with Dee Rees whose movie credits include Pariah and whose latest film is Mudbound, screenplay by Dee Rees and Virgil Williams, novel by Hillary Jordan.

So, how did you find Mudbound?

That book found me eight years ago. I had switched agencies and when I had switched agencies, I told my new agent that I wanted to adapt novels, so they sent me a stack of books, probably about two and half feet tall. Mudbound was the first one.

The reps warned me that period pieces don’t sell, but that was before movies like 12 Years a Slave had changed the landscape for stories in that neighborhood. So, it sorta did what feature scripts do in this town. It languished for a while. George Tillman Jr. was attached to direct it for a time. And then, about four years ago, Dee [Rees] fell in love with it.

How did she change the script?

She mostly made changes to the Jackson family. She really wanted to blow them out and give them a certain purchase of agency. That was the thrust of her focus. And she also had an astounding amount of personal history to add, I know her grandfather has this life journal, with writing and drawings and such. And she was really able to take a lot of that personal history and give the movie some real texture and breathe it into life.

Structurally, it was all already there. The ending, of course, was different in the movie than the book and that was a contribution that I made that and that I’m most proud of.

Tell me about your decision to change that. It really changes the tone of the movie.

What’s just more important in a movie than a novel is to leave people in a state of feeling; for me, a film is really made in the language of emotion. And in that book, Hillary [Jordan], she was upset when I told her I was going to change her ending, just alludes to the possibility of what Ronsel could potentially be and where he could potentially go. And I didn’t think that was a satisfying enough ending.

And part of that is that I’m a minority, and, quite frankly, there are too many fatherless black children in the world. For Russel to truly occupy the space of a hero, he needed to go get his son. It is the very reason he got his tongue cut out and if he didn’t fulfill that relationship, it would have felt very non-cinematic and, quite frankly, not satisfying at all. And, after all that pure truth in the movie, after all that searing idea of America, you really need to end on a hopeful note. Mudbound, I hope, shows us who we were and, in doing that, it shows us who we are and on that hopeful note will inform who we choose to be.

Here is the trailer for the movie Mudbound:

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