Dee Rees: ​‘This was a chance to tell the sto­ry of black sol­diers who came back’

Watch­ing Mud­bound is like watch­ing the past and present blur into one. Set in post-World War Two-era Mis­sis­sip­pi, it scans like an old-fash­ioned fam­i­ly epic with clear lit­er­ary ori­gins (Hillary Jordan’s 2008 nov­el). Yet the tense dynam­ic between a neigh­bour­ing black and white fam­i­ly and the huge emo­tion­al moments afford­ed to each char­ac­ter could – unfor­tu­nate­ly – be ripped from any time. Writer/​director Dee Rees spoke about craft­ing a mul­ti-per­spec­tive film out of his­to­ry and how she pre­pares with actors.

LWLies: How would you describe the feel­ing you get when you chance upon a source of inspi­ra­tion that you know has poten­tial to be a film?

Rees: The feel­ing is what can you bring out of it or what sto­ry it tells. In Mud­bound I saw my grandmother’s sto­ry. She was from a town called Fer­ri­day in Louisiana. Her whole thing was that she decid­ed she was not going to be a share­crop­per, she wasn’t going to pick cot­ton, she wasn’t going to be a domes­tic work­er. She decid­ed she was going to be a stenog­ra­ph­er and she was the first per­son in her fam­i­ly who want­ed to be a stenog­ra­ph­er. So she moved to Cal­i­for­nia. She would tell me sto­ries about her fam­i­ly. Her fam­i­ly owned their land but her par­ents farmed, they picked cotton.

After I read the book it had dia­grams of how the cab­ins were and what things they used and what things cost and so it was a chance for me to dig into that. Both of my grand­fa­thers fought in dif­fer­ent wars. My mater­nal grand­fa­ther fought in World War Two and my pater­nal grand­fa­ther fought in Korea, so it was a chance to tell the sto­ry of black sol­diers like them who came back. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to delve into all that was what what attract­ed me and also the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of voices.

How do you shep­herd all of that into some­thing that you know will work as a piece of cinema?

As a writer, you just know that each fam­i­ly, each char­ac­ter, has to have agency. No one is a sup­port­ing char­ac­ter in some­one else’s life, every­one has their own life. With sev­en char­ac­ters and six voic­es there’s a dan­ger of it not being anyone’s sto­ry and some­how you’ve got to make it everyone’s story.

It feels very ele­gant the way you’ve knit­ted togeth­er so many indi­vid­ual threads.

A lot of cred­it goes to my co-edi­tor Mako Kamit­suna. Because we were on this inde­pen­dent film, we had the leisure of edit­ing in this place in upstate New York. Instead of being in a posh stu­dio, we had this raw, indus­tri­al space: a couch, a com­put­er, a lamp and a dog. We had free­dom and took our time and played with many dif­fer­ent struc­tures. It was a cen­tring thing to do each fam­i­ly sep­a­rate­ly and then join them togeth­er. You fig­ured out how each fam­i­ly can work as its own arc. Each fam­i­ly can stand alone and then if we meld them togeth­er, it just ampli­fies them and makes it stronger.

How did you direct your actors in a short amount of time to hit emo­tion­al cues that are the result of years of accu­mu­lat­ed feel­ing in the lives of their characters?

I don’t do rehearsals where I’m run­ning the lines. I do rela­tion­ship work­shops where we do the pair­ings between each of the key actors and that real­ly gears up the core of things. I had Carey Mul­li­gan and Mary J Blige in a room togeth­er face-to-face just repeat­ing over and over again, ​‘You have the pow­er’, ​‘No, you have the pow­er’ and then vice ver­sa because that was the core of these women, each feel­ing that the oth­er has pow­er over them. From that, in every scene they knew how it was going to go. And then Hen­ry and Ron had a talk about how they met. They built an imag­ined per­son­al his­to­ry togeth­er and the same things with the sons, so to cre­ate the dynam­ic between Pap­py and Jamie I had Jonathan Banks and Jason Clarke and Gar­rett Hed­lund sit in a room togeth­er and have a ther­a­py ses­sion where, in char­ac­ter, they could bounce off one another.

Is this tech­nique some­thing you have used before?

I used it on Pari­ah with Kim Wayans, Charles Par­nell, Ade­pero Oduye and Sahra Mel­lesse. I had them sit­ting on the couch and I had a woman who pre­tend­ed to be a ther­a­pist, who wasn’t a ther­a­pist! But she asked them ques­tions about the fam­i­ly dynam­ic, and that was great. I real­ly like this ther­a­py ses­sion set-up because it lets the actors get close in char­ac­ter and to real­ly get a sense of the arc of these rela­tion­ships and the unspo­ken desire.

Mud­bound is released 17 Novem­ber on Net­flix and in select­ed Cur­zon cin­e­mas in the UK. Read our review.