Sundance Interview: Dee Rees on The Last Thing He Wanted

This week we are at the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah, sending regular dispatches about the highlights in its independent film lineup. One of the most highly anticipated movies here is called The Last Thing He Wanted, from filmmaker Dee Rees, who previously directed Mudbound and Pariah. The Last Thing He Wanted is an adaptation of the Joan Didion novel, which centers on a journalist who gets caught up in shady international business when her ageing father gets sick. The time period is the high-Reagan 1980s, and the story involves malfeasance in Central America, gun running, family challenges, and the CIA. Anne Hathaway plays the journalist, Willem Dafoe is her father, Rosie Perez is a fellow journalist. Rees takes a kaleidoscopic approach to adapting Didion’s typically complex narration, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with the director at Sundance to discuss her process as well as pick her brain about the movie’s ideas about modernity and identity. The Last Thing He Wanted premieres here on January 27 and will be available through Netflix in February.