Dee Rees Quotes

Audiences need to engage with characters.

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

You have to present characters an audience can relate to.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.

I think I would struggle with any job if it was purely about effects. Even as a viewer, those aren't the kind of things that interest me. I think ultimately you have to be connected to characters and their relationships. Otherwise, it's not drama to me.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

When you find you don't like a character, you just type four letters and he's dead.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

I try to create characters that I am fascinated by on some level or intrigued by or can't stand.

My stories are character driven.

Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

I want to create a TV show that people will watch and say, 'Hey, I have a favorite character,' or 'Hey, that person reminds me of myself,' or 'Hey, I've made some of those same mistakes, or those are some of the things I've dealt with.'

Characters are an extension of your imagination.

For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.

In 'Poster Boys,' every character is well defined.

All my characters have been relatable.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.