Dee Rees and the cast of the highly anticipated Netflix film ‘Mudbound’ comment on the links between the movie and contemporary culture and how audiences can put the film in context with the world around them:
““It exposes race as an economic construct and exposes the fact that we’re all interconnected not just to each other but to our history,” said Mudbound director Dee Rees, speaking on the contemporary message of the period film at Deadline’s The Contenders. “There is no ‘then’ or ‘will be,’ there’s only now. Everything is now. We can’t dismiss our history and say we are a product of our times. We are the times and we decide what kind of nation we are going to be.”
Rees was joined onstage by some of the film’s stars including Mary J. Blige, Carey Mulligan, and Garrett Hedlund. Moderated by Deadline’s Joe Utichi, the cast was asked about what drew them to the project. Hedlund, who was raised on a farm, found familiarity with the piece. “The story deals a lot with the family trials of trying to have a successful farm and the pain and the hardships that come with that. I had a lot to play on.” Per Blige, is was the story “being so relative to where we are today” as well as the portrayal of a free black man after WWII, which made “it was very important to get involved.””
(Source: Deadline.com)
Originally published: 11/4/2017
