Dee Rees Quotes

It's hard to get personal films off the ground, and it's hard developing them.

When you're making an independent feature, there are so many difficult stages. One, just writing the script is difficult on its own. Then, when you get it to a place where you're happy with it, great - but then you need to find persons who are willing to produce it, who like the script.

I've been in the game long enough to know what elements you have to package together to get a movie into production.

My name can raise money on a small-budget film.

When you're struggling to get a feature film off the ground, there's no big overarching tenure plan or anything like that.

Well, we are not doing that film actually. At least I am not at the moment, but we are making an effort to get it done; I don't know whether we'll get the financing for it. The old story we had it, it fell out of place and this and that.

I don't think I'll ever be a producer who's into taking the meetings and fighting the big fights with studios. I really don't like that part. I'm much more interested in the material.

It proved to be pretty impossible to get funds for a feature film in Finland. It's still small, but the film industry was miniscule at that point in the early '80s.

The great thing about being a producer on a project is that you get to see the ins and outs of every piece of the puzzle. There are so many elements involved in every aspect of a film's development that I don't think the average person is aware of, which is, I guess, why the whole process is referred to as movie magic.

In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.

Generally, an indie film in the U.K. is put together much like in the states. We got a tax credit. You sell the domestic rights, which can be quite low, but it's enough to push you over the line. And you get a tax credit on top of that, and then you cobble it together with private equity or gap financing and things like that.

Getting movies developed doesn't do me any good as a producer. It only does me good to get movies made.

We started getting the script to different people and we were in the business of trying to fund it so we could get it off and running, and all the characters and sets designed and everything.

We shot ten minutes of the movie, and now we're looking for completion funds.

You have to pace yourself. As a producer, you start with a concept and shepherd it through the script to the delivery of the film. It's a very long journey for an hour and 40 minutes of movie.

For 'Filth,' we had about 12 producers on the thing. The opening credits go on for months. Most of them are actually financers rather than producers. And the only way that we could raise the budget without interference from a studio was to have a lot of different financers on board.

Making movies seemed so impossible as far as getting my ideas funded.

To find money to make a film, you have to write maybe 50 pages to explain what you'd like to do, what the film will be, but everybody lies. Because he doesn't know what the film will be. Everybody writes 50 pages and sends it to a TV channel, a producer, to get money, but everybody lies. Or else your film is not interesting.

It's a debilitating process, working with the studios. With the length of time it takes for drafts and development deals, your enthusiasm is gone before you're ready to make the film.

We've always had a roadmap to feature filmmaking, and making a feature film could have been three or four years away for us. But crowdfunding helped us get there in a year, and it allowed us to take a much bigger step.

After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.

It's rare that a character film is easy to fund.

There's no need there to sit with the filmmaker for 11 years to develop the script, or go round the world raising money.

It's part of the film-making business and also part of the creative process - putting all the pieces together to make a movie, so that they all line up. Sometimes it looks like you have a lot of projects lined up, but some of them are in different stages.

Every project that you write about or read about, it goes through years of hard work. We write a screenplay; we design. Then you submit those and the budget, and it's out of your hands.