A Quote by Dee Rees

Once your film is done, you can't explain to people what something was supposed to be. You can't give them footnotes. It all has to be there. — © Dee Rees
Once your film is done, you can't explain to people what something was supposed to be. You can't give them footnotes. It all has to be there.
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.
If I may bend your ear for a moment, I like Terry Pratchett. I like footnotes. I like footnotes even when they are not as entertaining as a Pratchett footnote, even when they are in the middle of a book on evolutionary biology and briefly explain the Red Queen hypothesis or the fate of the Stephen's Island Wren or how many bunnies can dance on the back of Australia. Footnotes fill me with a very mild glee. The endnote simply does not compare.
You give your film away to the audience once it's done. I never look at my films after the premier. The film needs to start its own history.
I explain to athletes, you're supposed to be a well-oiled machine. You're supposed to be in better shape than the people watching you. You're supposed to be an unbelievable specimen of a human being. You have to treat your body different while you're performing.
Entertainment was transportation. You were supposed to take somebody out of their seat and bring them back in. You’re not supposed to impose your values or your supposed knowledge to manipulate or control people. That was not your job. You were not supposed to use the bully pulpit of Hollywood to pound people with ideas. You’re there to entertain.
Nobody ever starts out to make a mediocre, commercial film. You always think it's going to be something. And then, once you're done with your shooting, you have no control. You're just done, as an actor.
Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.
As an actor, demonstrating your feelings in front of people is not what you're supposed to be doing. You're supposed to hold your emotions and control them, and not show them all over the place.
Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.
It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do. It's not unexpected for me to be in a comedy film anymore; I'm no longer the underdog in that world. Not that I'm great or good at it or anything, it's just that I've done a bunch of them, so you're not shocked.
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
A why has to be for others. It's something you give to the world. It's the reason your friends love you because this is the thing that you give them and it fulfills them. This is the reason your clients love you or your fans love you because you give them something. It's something to offer, that's what the why is.
There's a great deal of mystery in film editing, and that's because you're not supposed to see a lot of it. You're supposed to feel that a film has pace and rhythm and drama, but you're not necessarily supposed to be worried about how that was accomplished.
We created materials to explain Slack to individuals - what it was for, how it worked, what you're supposed to do - but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team.
If 'Satyagrah' was supposed to be my last film I would look back and say it was a happy portfolio. But there is a feeling that I wish I could have done something better.
If you give an answer to your viewer, your film will simply finish in the movie theatre. But when you pose questions, your film actually begins after people watch it. In fact, your film will continue inside the viewer.
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