Director Dee Rees’ Mudbound has put Netflix squarely in this season’s Oscar conversation. Rees also wrote the screenplay—in tandem with producer Virgil Williams, based on the novel by Hillary Jordan.
The story centers on two families—one black, the other white—in the rural American South during World War II. The white McAllen family—headed by Henry (Jason Clarke) and his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan)—moves to the Mississippi Delta from Memphis and isn’t fully ready for the harsh demands of tending to the land. Their lives intersect with a black family headed by Henry and Florence Jackson (Rob Morgan, Mary J. Blige).
While segregation, discrimination and racism stack life against the Jacksons, the sharecroppers persevere with great dignity. Though the McAllens do not face such race-related adversity, the two families have other struggles in common—coping with the ravages of Mother Nature, and each with loved ones who go off to war overseas, ultimately having to return to the battle of adjusting to everyday life on the homefront. The war vets—Jamie McAllen (Garrett Hedlund) and Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) develop a fast and at first uneasy friendship, each bearing the scars of war only to then have to return to the brutality and cruelty of the Jim Crow South.
Helping Rees to fully realize and do justice to this story were assorted collaborators, including several who represent a broad spectrum in terms of their relation to the filmmaker—at one end of the continuum is cinematographer Rachel Morrison, ASC, who had never worked with the director before. By contrast, editor Mako Kamitsuna has a track record with Rees, cutting her Pariah both as a feature and a short. And in a figurative sense somewhere between Morrison and Kamitsuna on the collaborative continuum resides Tamar-kali who performed in musical sequences in Pariah and was a vocal contributor to Rees’ Emmy Award-winning telefilm Bessie. However, Tamar-kali had never scored a feature before—until she was given the opportunity to do so on Mudbound.
“We all came together to make something special,” said Rees of the mix of collaborators on Mudbound.
Len Amato, president of HBO Films, recommended DP Morrison to Rees. This was based in large part on Morrison’s lensing of Confirmation, which like Bessie was a lauded HBO telefilm. “I had known Rachel from around the festival circuit, dating back to the Pariah days and her shooting of Dope,” recalled Rees. “I admired her work and feel fortunate to have connected with her for this [Mudbound]. Because of her schedule, she was working on Black Panther [the Marvel Comics movie] at the time, we weren’t certain we could get her. But she was drawn to the film and contributed so much, including finding photographs of the post-Depression South [images by Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks from the 1930s and ‘40s] which were key to the design of the movie.”
Rees praised Morrison’s approach and evocative rural imagery, capturing how nature can inspire people while also making them feel powerless. On the latter score, Rees explained, “With the photography, I wanted to feel like everything was working against you as a human being. Through her images, Rachel comes to show how nature is indifferent to man’s toil, and to his dreams and ambitions. The land becomes this humbling and leveling force that brings us all down to the basic requirements: Food, shelter, sustenance.”
Of editor Kamitsuna, Rees said “She has great rhythm and taste. Nothing gets past her critical eye. She never rests on ‘it’s good enough.’ I’m reminded of that when we worked on [the feature] Pariah. The film was initially going to end with a different poem. But as we’re cutting, Mako is on me to consider writing another poem. That also meant another day of shooting pickups. Turns out she was right. We came up with what became a signature poem and we told the story better.”
Kamitsuna also championed an unconventional change in sequence for Mudbound, a chronological turn in the edit which gave a relationship between two characters more “tension” and made it a bit more “subversive,” desired qualities that added further to the story, according to Rees.
As for Tamar-kali, Reese assessed, “I knew she could write an entire film score. I wanted her to compose the score for Bessie but we couldn’t bring that about. Tamar has a deep music intellect. She created a score for Mudbound going back to the idea of nature, making the music feel like it was coming from the ground, the trees, the earth. The music helped you feel the sludge, the muddy ground.”
Rees observed that the ensemble of talent she assembled for Mudbound collectively translated into her biggest takeaway from the experience of making the film. “You learn and it reaffirms the importance of a village of artists whom you can trust. You can’t be you as a director without a village of artists who are passionate about what they do. They’re constantly pushing to make the film better. It’s a friction that elevates everyone and everything.
“This is also reflected in the casting,” continued Rees. “Casting is ninety percent of directing. Actors who are self-critical, looking to go deeper into their characters, are critical to telling a story well.”
Award-winning pedigree
Mudbound’s early awards season buzz continues a career momentum for filmmaker Rees which has yielded multiple honors over the years. Her debut feature film Pariah screened at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival where it received the fest’s U.S Dramatic Competition Excellence in Cinematography Award (for DP Bradford Young) and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, later gaining distribution from Focus Features.
Pariah went on to win the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards (2011), the Gotham Award for Best Breakthrough Director (2011) and Outstanding Film—Limited Release at the GLAAD Media Awards, among other accolades.
Then the Rees-helmed Bessie (2015), the HBO telefilm about legendary blues singer Bessie Smith starring Queen Latifah in the title role, garnered a dozen Emmy nominations—two directly for Rees in the Writing and Directing categories. Bessie was also nominated for four Critics’ Choice Awards and earned Rees the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for TV and Miniseries.
