Dee Rees plays video games three or four hours a day, trying to crack their codes. One recent afternoon, the director, whose new film is the mud-spattered saga “Mudbound,” opened a laptop in her downtown pied-à-terre. Rejecting her building’s white-walls-only standard, she’d painted one wall dark blue. She wore a gray sweatshirt and cat’s-eye glasses, had her hair pulled tight, and gave off an “Are you ready for this?” vibe.
Rees, who is forty, booted up West of Loathing, a black-and-white stick-figure game set in the Old West. “I like games because the wins aren’t clean, necessarily—there’s more than one way to do it,” she said. “And I like this one because it’s sarcastic.” She helped select an avatar for her visitor—“Mabel McCoy the Cow Puncher”—then explained, “It’s a weird mix of Wild West and sci-fi, where you’re trying to gain muscle, mysticality, and moxie.” Had she beaten the game? “Yes, I figured out how to stop the demon cowherd from destroying the town.”
When Mabel freed a crow, Rees approved: “He’ll come back and help you later.” When Mabel lost most of her supply of meat in a poker game, Rees frowned: “Fuck, dude!” And when the game tried to warn Mabel off exploring a spittoon by elaborating on its yuckiness (“It smells like someone ran over a skunk, waited a week, and then set it on fire”), she snickered. “You have to explore everything, talk to everyone, and make the unexpected choice,” she said. “So, now, do you want to eat that dusty turnip?”
“Mudbound,” set in a racist Mississippi in the nineteen-forties, is Rees’s third feature. It’s about a black sharecropper family, the Jacksons, and a white family, the McAllans, who own the farm that is slowly defeating them all. As Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan) yearns for her brother-in-law, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), he and Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell), both veterans of the recent world war, strike up an unlikely friendship that has violent consequences. “We didn’t have the time or the money we needed,” Rees recalled. “We had ten million when it should have been twenty, because I wanted the cast I wanted, not one that appealed to foreign-sales agents. In game terms, we had less gear than we needed, so it came down to relationships—and lots of fucking moxie!”
She opened her tablet to play Device 6, which, she disclosed, was about “nuclear weapons and bears.” She quickly got stuck inside a kind of missile silo, facing a screaming Goldilocks. Vexed, she reminded herself, “Go slow, check everything, don’t just push buttons!”
With “Mudbound,” she said, “I wanted an old-school seven-reeler, a John Ford film where the characters feel smaller than the place. The producers were all nervous: ‘It’s too long!’ ” The movie runs two hours and fourteen minutes. “Well, Laura’s whole meditation on country violence, with the dead possum and killing the mule, sets the tone in an ineffable way. Shooting the lynching scene in the dilapidated barn near our set”—in rural Louisiana—“would have been cheaper and faster, but I needed to find a two-tiered barn and put some bodies on the second level to give me a theatre of violence.” She sighed. “Making a film is like a game,” she said. “You can beat it, but you don’t know how you would have done it if you’d gone a different way.”
During the Sundance Film Festival, Netflix bought “Mudbound” for twelve and a half million dollars. “I was relieved,” Rees said, “but I was also surprised that there wasn’t a bidding war. We solved all the puzzles—and the door didn’t open. The studios were thinking, Oh, this is just a black film and we can’t sell it.” She continued, “I don’t want to sound whiny, but if you’re only going to like mediocre stuff, then just say so.”
Shrugging, she turned to her tablet. “ ‘Mudbound’ did pay off my student loans, so now I’m free as an artist,” she said. “I can say no.” She toggled to another game, Year Walk, a snowy traipse through a nineteenth-century Swedish forest. “I like this one—it’s dark and obtuse,” she said. Deep in the woods, she came upon a spinning doll. “She does this eerie little dance where her arms point out clues,” Rees said. Humming quietly, she peered at some notes she’d taken about the directions the doll pointed in—“L, B, L, R,” and so on—that would help her find the way out. ♦
