‘Old-fashioned movie’
When it comes to classical form and meaningful content, no film this season better embodies the term “Oscar movie” than “Mudbound,” which opens Nov. 17 in theaters and on Netflix. The film, which takes place in the wake of World War II, stars Jason Clarke and Carey Mulligan as Henry and Laura McAllan, who move from Memphis to the Mississippi Delta to work on a farm Henry will inherit from his father, Pappy (Jonathan Banks). Their neighbors are Hap and Florence Jackson (Rob Mor- gan and Mary J. Blige), whose families have worked the same land for generations as sharecroppers. Garrett Hedlund and Jason Mitchell play Jamie McAllan and Ronsel Jackson, returning veterans whose shared trauma brings them into unlikely alliance despite Jim Crow-era racism.
“I wanted it to be an old-fashioned movie, like a movie that doesn’t get made anymore,” the 40-year-old director said during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. A voracious reader, Rees revisited William Faulkner’s novel “As I Lay Dying” specifically for its interlocking narratives and voices. And she brought her personal history to bear on the project. Whereas Hillary Jordan’s novel and Virgil Williams’ original screenplay focused mostly on the McAllan family’s dreams and defeats, Rees conjured memories of her grandfathers, both veterans, and her maternal grandmother, whose parents worked the cotton fields on a farm in Louisiana.
“She would tell me stories about her and her little brother (riding) on her mother’s cotton sack,” Rees recalled, adding that she included a similar shot in the film. “I knew we had to have these little kids riding backwards on a cotton sack.” H e r grandmother had also vowed to get as far away from the farm as she could. “My grandmother’s thing was, ‘I’m not going to pick cotton, I’m not going to chop it, I’m not going to clean anybody’s house, I’m gonna be a stenographer,’” Rees said. “So that’s why the little girl in the film wants to be a stenographer. It was important that the Jackson family have dreams, they have ideas. They didn’t just come with the land.”
Creative journey
In many ways, Rees’ journey reflects that same continuum of aspiration: She grew up in suburban Nashville as “a very closely watched kid,” who liked to write poems and short stories but wound up going to business school and pursuing a career in marketing “because I naively thought marketing was creative.” While working on commercials for panty liners and shoe inserts, she found herself gravitating toward sets where the director clearly held sway.
In 2005, she startled her parents, first by announcing that she was quitting corporate life to attend film school at New York University, then, six months later, coming out as a lesbian. Today, she lives in upstate New York with her partner, author Sarah Broom. “They really thought I was going mad or something,” she says of her parents with a dimpled smile. “But now they’re happy and they love Sarah, and they couldn’t be prouder.”
After leaving NYU, Rees made a 30-minute segment of a feature script she’d written called “Pariah,” the portrait of a teenage girl coming out in Brooklyn. With grants and credit cards, she managed to make the feature version, which premiered as the opening night film at Sundance in 2011. It became one of the most memorable debuts in recent Sundance history.
“Mudbound” producer Cassian Elwes recalls the moment vividly. “I felt like for every important emotional moment in that movie, the camera was in exactly the right place,” he says. “And from an acting point of view, there was not one bad moment. I believed everything that happened in that movie. The emotional impact was so forceful that it was clearly made by someone with a very sure hand. And fact that it was her first movie was incredible.”
Rees was hired to write a few projects after “Pariah” came out, including a pilot for Viola Davis, but nothing came to fruition until she made “Bessie,” an HBO film about blues singer Bessie Smith. When Elwes read Williams’ “Mudbound” script and signed on to produce, he immediately thought of Rees as a possible director. “I thought if I could get her to do this movie, it’s gonna turn out to be amazing, because she’s a genius.”