Dee Rees, Director of Pariah, Interviewed

Her identity struggles as a black lesbian, funneled into her first feature

A A A Comments (0) By Ernest Hardy Thursday, Dec 29 2011

Can you talk a bit about the role that Spike Lee played in getting Pariah made?

I met Spike as a student at NYU. He teaches a master class there. Every week I'd sign up for office hours and then find something to talk about. Mostly it was the script for Pariah, and he'd give advice on it. Then in 2008, my producer Nekisa Cooper asked him to formalize his role because he was basically acting as a de facto mentor/adviser, and he did.

PHOTO BY KEVIN SCANLON

Pariah director Dee Rees

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He would look at drafts of the budget, go through with a ruler and give advice on where to cut. He read the script and gave honest, objective feedback. One of my memories of the script was coming back from the Sundance Lab all puffed up that I had the Sundance laurels on the script. He took a Sharpie to it and was like, nope, it's not there yet. It really humbled me, but he was great in that way. When we got to post-production, he would watch edits, he watched the rough cut, he watched the advance rough and gave notes on the edit itself. I interned with him on Inside Man and then again on When the Levees Broke, and he had more black queer people on his sets than I've seen on any other set.

When Focus picked up Pariah, it was reported that the deal included first-look rights at your next film.

Yeah, part of it was a blind script deal, where they basically pay me to write a script for them. I'm writing a thriller called Bolo. It's set in the South, so it's a harkening back to my roots. And I'm working with Viola Davis and HBO on a new TV series. I'm excited to continue creating characters that I fall in love with and stories that are meaningful.

Pariah opens Dec. 30; see the review in this section.