Ava DuVernay is one of the most fascinating and trailblazing filmmakers in the business.
She’s an Emmy and BAFTA award winner and an Oscar and Golden Globe nominee, whose middle name should be “First.” For 2012’s Middle of Nowhere, she became the first Black woman to win Sundance Film Festival’s best director prize. With 2014’s Selma, the first studio film ever made about Dr. Martin Luther King, she became the first Black woman to direct a film that was nominated for the best director Golden Globe and the first Black woman to direct a film that was nominated for the best picture Oscar. With 2016’s 13th, the first documentary to ever open the New York Film Festival, she became the first Black woman to receive an Oscar nomination as a director in a feature category. With 2018’s A Wrinkle in Time, she became the first Black woman to direct a film with a budget of at least $100 million. And with her latest work, 2023’s Origin, she became the first Black woman to direct a film that played in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The project details the prejudice across vast swaths of history and geography, and how the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson connected the dots between them for her 2020 best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.
The Washington Post has called her “a singular figure in the arts world, a disrupter.” The New York Times has described her as “a filmmaker whose art has become increasingly inseparable from her activism.” TIME magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Over the course of a conversation at the offices of her distribution company ARRAY, the 51-year-old reflected on her circuitous path to the film industry, in which she worked initially as a publicist, only quitting that job after winning best director at Sundance. She also opened up about the evolution of her social conscience and desire to tell stories that highlight injustices in the world; how her feelings about Hollywood have changed over the decade since Selma and the #OscarsSoWhite controversy that followed it; why she is so passionate about Origin, which she made independently and which stars her frequent collaborators Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Niecy Nash-Betts, as well as Jon Bernthal; plus much more. Below, listen to the conversation or read it in full.
Ava, thank you so much for doing this. It’s great to finally get you on the podcast.
DuVERNAY I’m thrilled to be here. I made it. I finally made it!
Well, I want to begin by asking you, can you tell our listeners where we are? Because I’ve never been here before, and my mind is blown.
DuVERNAY Oh, wow. Well, you’re at ARRAY. This is a creative campus that I bought with my Wrinkle in Time money a few years back. I said, “You know what? You can blow this money, you can take trips, you can do those things, and those are wonderful, but why not create something that might last?” I wanted to have a place to work that felt comfortable. It’s a four-building campus in Los Angeles, in a small, nondescript part of town, historic Filipinotown. And you are sitting in our post-production offices.
That’s great. And it’s so tucked away, in a cool way, that I almost drove by it. I didn’t even see it. And then you come in—
DuVERNAY And there’s a little world in here, right?
It’s massive, yeah. So, where we usually begin is truly at the beginning. Where were you born and raised? What did your folks do for a living?
DuVERNAY Oh, wow. Interesting. I was born in Long Beach, California, and taken home to an apartment in Compton, California. I grew up in Compton, and my mother worked, while I was growing up, as a human resources executive at a big hospital out here called Kaiser. She gave thousands and thousands of people jobs, which is something that I think — that idea of helping, of changing people’s lives, of being excited when something good happens to someone else — in me, really comes from her. And my father was a small businessman. He had a carpet and flooring business, and he would leave out in the morning at 5 in the morning, with his work truck and his bag, and meet his two employees, and they would lay carpet and flooring in small businesses and homes all around L.A.
I think there is another person I have to ask you about, from my reading about you. Who was Denise Sexton?
DuVERNAY Ah, Denise. Denise was my aunt, Aunt Denise Amanda Sexton. And on this campus that you were so gracious to talk about at the top is the Amanda Cinema. That’s our little 50-seat screening room named after her because she gave me the love of movies. I would not have appreciated, I would not have understood the artistry within a film if it wasn’t for Denise, who — as a child, she took me to the movies almost every week. We would take the bus down to the Lakewood or the Cerritos Mall, and we would watch films, and we would talk about them afterward. Well, I would talk about them, and she would listen. And that just opened up a whole new world to me. That’s how movies became a window to the world, seeing films early on about people who are not like me — it was not by choice, there were not a lot of films about people like me. So, it was a steady diet of observing and watching people who are outside of my world, and I think that’s why I am so interested in trying to show more of what was inside my world.
Did I read that you went to an all-girl Catholic school?
DuVERNAY Yeah. All-girls Catholic school. Gray wool skirts and navy blue sweaters — that was every day for the four years of high school. And then also, I went to Catholic school with uniforms and nuns from the first grade to the eighth grade. I’m a good girl, Scott, I’m a good girl.
I heard you were a trailblazer even then. Is it true, first Black homecoming queen?
DuVERNAY Wait, this research is going too deep!
First Black student president?
DuVERNAY This research is going too deep! You know some people. But yes.
Even before there was any interest in making films, you had a strong social conscience, from what I understand. I think this connects back to Denise and Amnesty International?
DuVERNAY She loved music too, and she took me to my first big concert, an Amnesty International concert. I believe it was at the Coliseum. And I remember when you walked in, they gave you a little — I wish I still had it, I kept it for so long — small pamphlet, about the size of a business card, that listed out your human rights. And I remember first thinking, “Wow, I get something?!” You’re just a kid. You’re like, “I get my own pamphlets?! Gosh, I get something for free?” But it had the Amnesty International logo. And then there was this concert and she said, “Listen to this song that these guys are about to play, they’re talking about Dr. King.” I was like, “They’re talking about Dr. King?” And these four white rock stars, who I did not know, got up, sang “Pride in the Name of Love,” and that started my love affair with U2 and opened up my world to the idea that there is a sense of justice that must be reached for, worked for. You can’t just scream about it, think about it, or assume that it’ll be granted, you have to do the work.
And so, maybe out of that, the idea was originally to be a lawyer?
DuVERNAY Oh, yeah, I was already a lawyer in high school, in my mind. I was litigating and prosecuting and debating, all the things. I went into, in my high school years and I thought that would be the case, and then when I got to UCLA I was an African-American Studies and English major, and it started to veer more towards art and the written word, and I became interested in journalism.
UCLA already had a history of producing many great filmmakers and specifically many great Black filmmakers who I know are heroes of yours — people who are now talked about as the Los Angeles School of Black filmmakers or ‘the LA Rebellion,’ like Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett and Julie Dash. Was that something that you were aware of?
DuVERNAY No. Isn’t that crazy? Mr. Gerima — we released Sankofa and had a big celebration for him here on campus. And Ms. Dash has directed Queen Sugar and has been just instrumental in my thinking. And Charles Burnett? These were people who were right there, a cadre of filmmakers known as ‘the LA Rebellion,’ and they were not on my radar at that time, which really goes to show that for a long time that group was just under-amplified. Folks just did not know, in a mainstream way, that they existed or what the work was. That’s changed, which I’m proud-
Well, you’re a big part of that.
DuVERNAY I’m happy about that. But I wasn’t aware at the time.
So film itself was not even on the radar for you?
DuVERNAY No, I didn’t even walk past that film school. It was on the other side of campus. It was too far.
Plus you were pretty busy there. What were some of the things you did at UCLA?
DuVERNAY I wrote for the Black student news-magazine, I frequented a lot of the hip-hop open mic nights in and around LA, I worked as a waitress at a soul food spot that was very popular in LA called Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch, where I made a lot of money, and would blow it every week on getting my hair done and my nails done to impress my boyfriend who was on the basketball team. These were the things that were in my mind. Priorities when you’re in college! But those things started to shift around ’92. It was a very intense time in our city, especially with tensions between the police and the Black community, and I started to grow up really quickly and move out of those frivolous thoughts into feeling activated, and really learning more about our history, but also contemporary issues that affected people of color in the city.
So, if the ’92 situation was one big turning point, I think it was ’95 when another big flashpoint happened, starting with a Bronco chase…
DuVERNAY Well done, I love this interview so far!
Well, thank you. You managed to play a role in that whole situation—
DuVERNAY Well, play a role… [laughs]
That sounds like you were involved, driving the Bronco…
DuVERNAY Right, right, right. No, I, at that time, had veered from wanting to be a lawyer to deciding that I was going to produce broadcast news, that’s what I wanted to do.
Why did you make that pivot?
DuVERNAY I don’t know. I became interested in the idea of traveling the world and bringing the truth to people. I didn’t want to be the person talking on screen, I wanted to be the person finding the story and building the story. I was excited to do that, so I fought for and got this very prestigious internship at the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and Connie Chung. It was a short tenure. And during that time, the trial started. And I remember my packet with the CBS News west coast bureau, my badge, all the things — I was like, “A few short steps to glory, this is going to happen for me!” I was an intern, and I was assigned to a juror, and I was like, “Wow, this is going to be interesting, I’m going to research them.” But I was assigned to sit outside of their house and see who came. And it was suggested that if I wanted to look through the trash, I could. And I thought, “Not what I was thinking this would be.” But to be fair, that was really a time of the celebritization of news, where it became a bit more salacious, and paparazzi were the thing. And so, I quickly turned away from that.
I don’t know if many people know this, but your first involvement in the world of film, Hollywood, anything like that, was as a publicist. Where did that idea even come from? As the O.J. stuff was going on, you had all these characters who were looking to get their five minutes of fame, like Kato Kaelin, and they had publicists. Is that where the idea came from?
DuVERNAY No. You know what? When you really trace back how most people in this world end up doing what they do for a living, it’s, “What job can you get when it’s time to get a job?” Purely. I didn’t want to be a journalist anymore, I didn’t feel like that was something I wanted to pursue, so I went to the career center and I was looking for a job, and there was a post for a publicity assistant. A few publicity assistants. And someone had told me, “If you’re interested in news, there’s another side of news; you can pitch the news instead of produce the news.” So I was looking in PR. And I had applied to municipalities — like, you’d be a publicist for the gas company, or corporate communications for them. I had had a big interview process with the NBA for their publicity department. But I ended up getting a PR job at a small studio and falling in love with it.
So you graduated from UCLA in ’95, and then that first place was Bender Helper Impact?
DuVERNAY Yeah. My goodness.
Then Fox — did you consult with Fox, or you worked at Fox?
DuVERNAY I worked at Fox for a quick second.
Then MPRM was—
DuVERNAY Was next. Yeah.
And then in 1999, at 27, you started your own thing, The DuVernay Agency. What made you decide to do that?
DuVERNAY No clue what she was doing. I don’t understand. When I think of the confidence — I was naive. I tried it twice. I did it the first time and it didn’t work, before I even went to MPRM, I tried it. After I left Bender Helper Impact, I thought, “Oh, I got it, I know how to do this.” What are you talking about?! And so I went out on my own, I got a couple of clients, and they weren’t enough to keep the lights on. So I went in, did a consultancy at Fox, then I went into MPRM, and when I left MPRM I took a few clients. I learned a lot there from those folks, Mark Pogachefsky and Rachel McAllister and Laura Kim, really wonderful people, and really learned the practice of PR, and crafting that, and the relationships. And so when I left there and opened the Duvernay agency when I was 27, clients came with me, and it just took off.
And was there a specific kind of publicity you did? Was it primarily personal or—
DuVERNAY Project. Personal? God bless them. I looked at them and I was just like, “God bless you. What are you doing? How do you do it?”
I know. You got to have a lot of patience.
DuVERNAY I don’t even know. I did project publicity. At the time, home videos was a big deal; studios were spending tons of money on these home video campaigns to relaunch a film into the home video marketplace. Home videos, DVDs and theatrical campaigns. I also did unit publicity, so I was on set while the film was being made. I did release publicity, I did premiere publicity, I did all the things. I’m like your grandmother. We don’t really talk because your parents in the middle — your personal publicist — so I don’t really have to deal with you. Except at the junket. I see you at the premiere, you have a question, we have a good time, and then I send you home. But what that did is it gave me proximity to actors. And so I felt comfortable talking to actors, which is one of the big things that emerging filmmakers fear. They fear the camera, and they fear, “What do I say to these people?”
It sounds like there was almost an epiphany one night when you were on set as a unit publicist—
DuVERNAY A unit publicist for the film Collateral, directed by Michael Mann. I had been on many sets before, but there was something about that set — it was a lot of night shoots, all night shoots, basically, and they were shooting with digital cameras, which I had not seen used in every frame of a film, and that created an energy, a faster process. Also, it was breaking a lot, so they were arguing. I don’t tell that part of the story very much. Michael, he’s not a quiet arguer, you know what I mean? You could hear what was being said. And I just loved his energy. “Come on, let’s do it!” I loved it. He would want to shoot, and want to go so badly, and want to make things happen, that I would feel like, “Let me help you. Should I jump in? Can I hold this? What can I do to make this happen?” It was Tom Cruise, Javier Bardem, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett and Mark Ruffalo, just an incredible cast, and they were shooting in areas that I knew in LA, Black and brown communities. So anyway, something on that made me think, “Oh, maybe I can make stuff.”
That’s in 2003. Where did you go from there? “I think I can do it, but I didn’t study film at school, I don’t necessarily know equipment at that point,” etc. So what was the next step?
DuVERNAY Well, I just want to point out, I said, “I think I can make stuff,” I never said, “I think I can be a professional filmmaker and make a living,” or “I think I can become known for a certain kind of film.” Just “I think I can make some stuff. I want to try to make some stuff.” And so that was a much lower bar.
You were still a publicist for the next eight years, but also making things. The first was a 2006 short called Saturday Night Life that I believe is sort of connected to your mother…
DuVERNAY Yeah, it was the first time I made something. I didn’t know what the span was between Collateral and the first piece, so three years? Scott Feinberg, researcher extraordinaire! Thank you, Sir. Yeah, no, the seed started there. I told my mom I wanted to try to make a short. I needed to come up with something in one location, because I had read somewhere that if you don’t move, you save money. And in those two years, I was watching a ton of DVD commentaries, reading a ton of books on filmmaking and taking classes at UCLA Extension. I don’t know if they still have them, but you could do weekend classes, like a weekend class on how to block with actors, a weekend class on how to work with a dolly, and they were $200, $300, so I pieced together that film school experience. And I also took directing actors classes with a woman named Judith Weston. I did that for that couple of years, and then I decided I was going to figure out someone who could shoot this. I remember looking for a DP, and coming up with the story that my mom had told me about one night when she was feeling particularly down. She dressed me and my two sisters up in our Sunday’s finest, patent leather shoes, and greased us up, our hair was perfect, our barrettes were in, our little dresses, our little Vaselined faces, and we walked into a grocery store with her, and she did it on purpose so that people would say, “Oh my gosh, your girls are so pretty! Oh my goodness, you’re taking such good care of them, you’re doing such a great job!” Because in hard times, that was something that she needed, that boosted her confidence. And so she told me that story, and I was like, “One location, a grocery store!” And so it’s a sweet little story that now cannot be found anywhere because it only exists in my drawer.
You don’t want people to see it?
DuVERNAY I haven’t looked at it in 15 years. But no, probably not.
Where did the $6,000 come from to make it?
DuVERNAY I had a PR firm, so I had a little bit of money. I had a good business going.
With the early projects after that, it seems like one would do fairly well, and then you would put that money into the next one. And the next one was your first documentary, a year later, Compton in C Minor…
DuVERNAY That was a little doc. I was trying to play with docs, because I’d heard somewhere that docs are cheap. So, I made a little doc, a very impressionistic doc. It was just showing the beauty of Compton. There’s a huge equestrian community in Compton that a lot of people don’t know about — there’s stables, and horses, and a whole community where horses roam the street, but people don’t know about that space — so it was a lot around that, and just other different things that folks don’t associate with Compton. It was a small doc, one of the many that I submitted to Sundance that didn’t make it in in the early years, yeah. And then I made a feature doc, called This is the Life.
This one was slightly bigger — I think you’ve said it cost $10,000 — and was about LA’s hip-hop movement in the early 90s. Fun fact: who is MC Eve?
DuVERNAY Well, Eve was my moniker before— There’s an Eve that is very famous. But before that, there was an Eve who was not very famous, who was me, in LA. It was — they called it backpack rap, a very artsy, esoteric expression of hip-hop, at that time. And it was a whole cadre of artists; many are still working today. And it was just a vibrant, gorgeous time. So, I made a documentary about them and about the scene, which I participated in when I was in college.
A few more documentaries around that time, including My Mic Sounds Nice…
DuVERNAY That was the first time someone gave me money to make a movie. I didn’t use my own.
That was BET?
DuVERNAY Yeah, I’ll always be grateful.
And it was also your first time working with Bradford Young, who has been the cinematographer on many of your projects…
DuVERNAY First time with Brad, yep. First time. I was a publicist, so I was taking films to Sundance — I had been to Sundance seven times as a publicist before I’d ever been there as a filmmaker, isn’t that crazy? So I had seen Pariah when I was there a year before.
The short or the feature?
DuVERNAY The feature. And was obviously blown away by Dee Rees’ artistry and Bradford’s collaboration with her. So I asked him to shoot I Will Follow. He was busy, he couldn’t shoot it, but we kept in touch. And so, eventually, I was able to grab him and he shot My Mic Sounds Nice, and then Middle of Nowhere.
I Will Follow was your first feature, also released in 2010. And it comes back to Aunt Denise, right?
DuVERNAY Yeah, that’s right, it was about Aunt Denise. It was about the time that we spent together when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Before she passed away, I moved us into a house together, in a part of town that she always loved, in Long Beach. And so I Will Follow is another idea of how can you make a movie with very little money, find one location and don’t move. I Will Follow was all about the day that I moved out of the house that I had shared with her — you watch Salli Richardson-Whitfield as she’s moving out of the home that she shared — and through flashbacks, you understand the relationship.
$50,000 budget, 11 days. Is that right?
DuVERNAY Yes.
How did Blair Underwood end up in that movie?
DuVERNAY I represented the show City of Angels for CBS — like I said, I was a publicist, so I’m your grandmother, I don’t have to deal with all of the hard stuff, I just see you on set — so we had a very nice relationship. I worked on a couple little films that he did, and he just became someone who I had a nice rapport with. So I called him up and I said, “This is probably a little strange, but I am making a feature film.” I can’t believe to this day — I talked to him maybe two days ago, he rang me — that he said “Yes.” I remember, he walked into this makeshift set — it was like a part of my office that we had made into a bedroom that he had to be in — and he treated me like a real director. He changed his clothes in the bathroom. His costume was hung up on the thing. There was no department head, there was no nothing. Someone came over and tried to put some powder on him, and he let them do it. He had the bag of Doritos and the El Pollo Loco that were on the table because that was our craft services. And he took whatever horrible direction I gave him, and he played with me. He was there. I’ll always be grateful.
Now, this is the first movie that was widely seen — maybe even widely is overstating it, but seen-
DuVERNAY I squinted when you said “widely.”
But how big a deal was it to have your movie get into AFI Fest?
DuVERNAY That was big. When we look at AFI Fest and some of these festivals, we always focus on the big names and the Oscar bait and all that stuff, but remember, there are films playing in the festival from filmmakers that are the next ones, so you have to go and see those films. I was one of those that year.
How did that movie, I Will Follow, get out to the rest of the world?
DuVERNAY It really was amplified through Roger Ebert. But yeah, I self-distributed.
And back then that was through your company African American Film Festival Releasing Movement, which in 2015 became Array. But what sparked the idea for that?
DuVERNAY What sparked it was, “No one’s going to put out your movie, lady! You’re what, 30-something, an early-thirties filmmaker making a film about a Black woman protagonist dealing with her grief? There’s nobody that’s going to put that out.” But I knew all of these beautiful film festivals around the country, Black film festivals, a major one in every city that had packed screenings and robust lists of moviegoers who paid for tickets, and I started to think entrepreneurially. Probably the same spirit that started a PR firm at 27. “Why don’t I do it myself?” And so I called up all of these festivals and I said, “What if we all work together? Do you all even know each other?” They didn’t. “What if we all called ourselves one thing and we put out films? You put it out in LA, you put it out in New York, you put it out in Seattle and Boston and whatever on the same day? I’ll make the posters, I’ll do the national publicity, I know how to do that, and we’ll just try it. And we did, and it worked that way. And so it was called AFFRM — the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement — which became Array. And we still do it to this day for filmmakers.
Amazing. And you now do it not only for new releases but also great movies that didn’t get their due…
DuVERNAY Yeah, like Sankofa, Mr. Gerima’s film.
So Middle of Nowhere was possible because I Will Follow Made money, right?
DuVERNAY That’s right. We wrote that money into the next one.
And Middle of Nowhere actually started before almost anything we’ve talked about, right? You had written that, but it just went in a drawer?
DuVERNAY Yeah, Middle of Nowhere was the first film I ever wrote. I didn’t make it until later because I didn’t know how to make it right. I didn’t know how to put together a film like that. I didn’t have the money to do it. So yeah, it was rolling over some money from I Will Follow. I had a landlord in the building that I was in who had a commercial production company downstairs, and his equipment is what I made I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere on. So he was a producer on the film, and we raised a little bit of money, but basically, we made that film for $250,000. I remember thinking, “$250,000?! This is going to be something special!” But it was $250,000 and Bradford Young that makes your $250,000 look like more.
Somehow in the moment I didn’t know about I Will Follow, but I heard about Middle of Nowhere because it popped at Sundance. This is the story of a woman whose husband got an eight-year prison sentence, who has to figure out what she’s going to do with her life. This was the first but not the last time you’ve looked at the prison-industrial complex and how it affects Black people. I think I saw a quote where you said you knew someone who was in a similar situation. That inspired you to write the film?
DuVERNAY Well, I had experienced it growing up, not within my family, which is an extraordinary thing, but with people in my neighborhood, across the street, in school — “Where’s your brother? I haven’t seen him in a while.” “Well, he’s locked up.” “Where’s your mom?” “She’s locked up.” People just disappeared. And it always fascinated me, the people who are left behind. I was really interested in the people that I knew who were living a shell of their life, just a shadow of what their life could be, because they were waiting on someone — they were doing time with someone. And I hadn’t seen that portrayed on screen.
You also interviewed a lot of people who were in that situation. You wrote the script. And then you had to cast it. Emayatzy Corinealdi had not starred in a film before, so I’d love to know why you cast her. And then the most insane thing is how you wound up with David Oyelowo in the cast too…
DuVERNAY Well, Emayatzy Corinealdi is a star, and she had a star quality the minute she walked into the audition room. I’m so fortunate that she gives such a sensitive, gorgeous performance in that. Omari Hardwick was in I Will Follow and also Middle of Nowhere — he figured in really prominently to both films, I’m grateful to him. And David Oyelowo invited himself on the movie. Nobody was thinking about David Oyelowo. I certainly knew who he was, but I thought he was way too outside of anything I could get to. First of all, he’s British. That’s intimidating. “I don’t know how to reach you. Where are you, in London? How are we doing this?” The second thing is he had small, memorable parts in major films, big movies.
I think he was in Lincoln that same year, right?
DuVERNAY Working with Spielberg. What am I doing calling and asking him to be in my $250,000 movie? So I certainly was aware of him, but he was not at all in the realm of anyone I even knew how to reach. Turns out he lived three blocks away from my office in the valley! But he had been on a plane with a man who was reading the script of Middle of Nowhere. Why was he reading the script? Because the landlord in the building who gave me the equipment and helped me raise a little bit of money had given that script to this man, who’s Canadian and was on his way to Toronto. David is sitting with him on his way to do looping for Planet of the Apes in Toronto, and they get to talking. It changes my life, this chance meeting. David Oyelowo, who is on the Shakespearean stage and all of that, he’s in LA trying to do his thing, he’s doing well, he’s got Planet of the Apes, he’s got Lincoln, he’s got that thing with Tom Cruise where he’s got one great scene, he’s the Black guy who’s doing the great thing in the big movies, is really what he was doing. But he’s always been scrappy, always been a producer, always had that kind of “I’m going to do more” instinct. So he’s sitting next to a man on a plane who is watching an episode of a show on his laptop called Spooks that David had appeared on in the UK. The man looks at David and says, “Is this you?” David’s like, “Yeah, it’s me.” And David — the most gracious, with the accent, the gentlemanliness, all that — strikes up a conversation. The man takes Middle of Nowhere out of his bag and says, “I was given this script. You’re an actor. What do you think about investing in movies?” David looks at the script and sees my name. Why does David know my name? There’s no reason why David should know my name, except that three days earlier I was on CNN talking about I Will Follow and my distribution model using African American film festivals to distribute films. He saw that, recognized the name and said, “May I read the script?” He read the script, invited the guy out to a steak dinner afterward, they got to talking, he convinced the guy to invest in the movie, then called me because I had my number on the script, and said, “Hi, my name is David Oyelowo. I’m an actor.” Very sweet. “I’m an actor, and I would love it if you could consider me for any part that might be available in your beautiful film.” That was the call.
If those two guys had been on different flights, how different would your life be?
DuVERNAY My whole life would’ve been different. There would be no Selma. There would be no David in my life as such a great friend.
Because David, in Middle of Nowhere, ends up playing the bus driver who she—
DuVERNAY Falls in love with.
Her second chance at love. And then we’ll come to how, again, just insanely, he factors into Selma. But first, Middle of Nowhere goes to Sundance and—
DuVERNAY I finally make it in. After nine attempts, yes.
And not only make it in, but win best director, which was the first time that had happened for a Black woman. You have talked about that in a number of ways. On one level, it was a big deal, obviously. On another level, it was uncomfortable, because, as you’ve said, it’s not like other people weren’t also worthy. But then there’s the aftermath. Did that honor lead to a barrage of opportunities and things like that?
DuVERNAY No. No, it didn’t. Yeah, it’s bittersweet. Yes, it’s the sweetness of just any filmmaker winning any award and someone saying, “What you’ve done is worthy of acknowledgment and congratulations.” That’s not lost on you. That means something to an artist. But on the other hand, when you attach “the first” to it, and movies had been made for almost a hundred years at that point, it’s kind of like, “Is it that good? Was there nothing before me that was worthy of any attention?” We certainly know that that is not the case, that there should have been a lot more acknowledgment, that there was an absence there, that there was an error made, so that has to be a part of any kind of dealing with that. And then on the other hand, I came out of it naive. I was still a publicist. I won that award and still had my firm. So I had to think, “Wow, if there’s any time that I’m going to put away the PR and try to do this full-time, it would be now, when I’ve won this award, when I’m going to do ‘the water bottle tour,’ as they call it.” You go to all the studios and leave with only water. But they have to meet you because, I don’t know, that’s what they do. You’re meeting with the agents, you’re meeting with the studios, and you’re doing that process. But I said, “Well, let me try.” So I gave away my clients to other publicists and I tried to be a full-time filmmaker, thinking that that award was going to open doors. But it didn’t quite open doors for me. That award has opened doors for other people. And that’s when I really started to see, “Oh, this is going to be a different experience.”
I’m trying to remember who distributed Middle of Nowhere?
DuVERNAY AFFRM. We got a little bit of support and P&A from Participant — we did a partnership.
It opened in limited release and had a huge audience.
DuVERNAY Wow, you really researched. It did really well — the highest per-screen of the weekend.
Against Argo! So now you thought, “This is going to be all right, now it’s going to be—”
DuVERNAY Easier.
I see around that time you directed an episode of Scandal, which I imagine might’ve come out of that…
DuVERNAY It was a big deal. I didn’t get offered any movies. Counterparts who’d won different awards that year got big offers and did big things, so you see other people passing you by. But I was grateful for that episode of Scandal. Shonda had reached out through a man named Tom Verica. and I remember getting that call and being invited. Scandal was the biggest show. I was a huge fan. So to be able to get a chance to direct that and just to direct something with other people’s money was exciting, with actors who I had watched on television. That was a big deal. And then Prada called and offered me a fashion film, said, “Hey, here’s some money. You can make a movie if you include our clothes?” And so they had started this beautiful thing called Miu Miu Women’s Tales, and I made a piece with Gabrielle Union for that, still probably one of my favorite pieces I’ve done. Bradford shot that as well. And then I got a call from ESPN, and I made another documentary about Venus Williams [Venus vs.].
But it was clear that the next big thing was going to come about because you made it happen, not because somebody else was coming to you…
DuVERNAY It was clear to me that something was going to have to happen, that I wasn’t in the space where studios were going to be offering me movies. I’m still not in that place, where studios are going to be offering me movies. Selma came about because of David and the man on the plane. I need to find that guy. He changed my life.
Almost as crazy as the plane story is the story of Selma. This movie had been around since 2007 when it appeared on The Black List of best unproduced scripts. But that script and a lot of things changed after that, as did the directors attached to it: Michael Mann, Stephen Frears, Paul Haggis, Spike Lee and Lee Daniels. But this is the part that I don’t even remember knowing when you and I were doing Q&As around the time of Selma: you were actually involved with the movie before you were ever involved as a director!
DuVERNAY That’s funny, where’d you get that from? I think I said that to one person 99 years ago! This is really well-researched. I’m impressed. I’m impressed. I have, somewhere in my files, my publicity contract. I had signed on. I had gotten a call about doing publicity for this film years before and being on the film as a publicist. “We are reserving you. When this starts, can you do unit?” “Yes, I can do the unit.” “Can you do the African-American specialty?” “Yes, I can do all that.” So I have a contract. I was the publicist for the film before I was the director for the film.
This was when Lee was directing it?
DuVERNAY I believe it was Lee’s iteration. I’m not sure. I think it was an iteration before Lee.
Here’s what I read, and you can tell me if it’s not correct: Pathé, the company that ended up making the film even when you became the director, was thinking at the time, “We need to reach out to the King family.” Is that right? That you were going to be like an intermediary between them and the King family?
DuVERNAY Yes, you’re right. Oh my gosh, you’re right. Yes, yes. This is making sense because as I was talking, I was like, “Wow, they had me on really early.” They had me on really early. They wanted to bring on a Black publicist to be an intermediary. And I also was going to do all these other things, but that’s why I was on early. I was on early because I was going to liaise with the family. That’s funny, I forgot about it. Holy snacks.
When you eventually came on board as a director, a complication — probably why it took seven years to come from The Black List to screen — was that the actual speeches of Dr. King were not available to use. They’re copyrighted and other people had rights to his full life story. Is that right?
DuVERNAY Other people had rights and one filmmaker had the cinematic rights, the movie rights to them. And that filmmaker is very massive and very famous. And there was no way I was getting them.
And that was to make a full biopic about him, as opposed to focusing on a chapter of his life.
DuVERNAY Yes.
So now David comes back into this. David was first attached to play Dr. King when Lee Daniels was still directing, right?
DuVERNAY Lee Daniels was hot, hot, hot, and he was going to do it, and he cast David as his King. If you don’t know David Oyelowo, he’s an incredible producer. If you really look at his CV and see how many films and independents and TV shows he’s produced since Selma, it’s really incredible. But he’s a hands-on, true, not just an actor attaching your name to the thing to give me the credit, real producer. He’s raising the money. He’s figuring out the permits. He’s the real guy. And when Lee Daniels left the project because the budget wasn’t moving — imagine the audacity — the actor was like, “Well, I need to find someone who’s going to keep me as King.” Because his dream was to play King. This British actor had always known that he—
It’s only fair Daniel Day-Lewis got to play Lincoln.
DuVERNAY Yeah, why not? So he set out to find a director and make sure that he stayed to be King. How smart! “Before they can get someone who doesn’t want me to be King, I’m going to bring them someone who does. And also, I have to fix the idea that it’s someone who can work within the small budget.”
Which was $20 million, rather than the $250,000 that you were coming off of…
DuVERNAY I had just won Sundance, so I had that little thing that he could say. I was used to working with small budgets. He talks to me about $20 million and I almost faint. “$20 million?! Wait, did you say two-zero and million? Yes, I can do it!” And he goes to them and says, “Look, I know someone who is a woman, a Black woman. She just won Sundance. She’s excited about it. Her father is from Alabama. She can write. She can get this on board.” He hard pitches me. And in one phone call, I get the job.
That’s amazing. Did he tell you or did somebody else?
DuVERNAY Yes, he told me. The fact that he does not have a producer credit on that movie is criminal and not right because he put that together.
There’s another missing credit on that movie, I think [a reference to the fact that despite DuVernay’s rewrite of the script, she is not credited as a co-writer]…
DuVERNAY Facts.
How do you tell a story of Dr. King without his own words? You inherited the existing script…
DuVERNAY There was no oratory from the greatest orator in modern history, so he was never speaking, he was never making a speech. I just didn’t even know how that was going to work. And secondly, there were no Black people in it. I was like, “Hmm, gosh, guys, to the extent that the life and breadth and scope and majesty of African-American people for whom this struggle is being waged, their humanity, their dignity, are missing in a meaningful way from the script. I was invited to take a pass, a production pass, and I then changed the scope of it and brought in those characters and created the environment, brought the story out of the White House into Selma proper, and created character and scene and propulsive activity around a group of people who decided to change the world and did so, and also created scenarios and wrote speeches that sounded like Dr. King. So I would define that as rewriting the script. I turned that in and, with the budget by Paul Garnes, my producing partner, who I also produced Origin with, that’s what we did. We made that script and we adhered to that budget.
Why are you not credited?
DuVERNAY I’m not credited because I was not a [Writers] Guild member, and the credited writer was not a Guild member, and so it was outside of an arbitration scenario. The Guild could do nothing. Of the producers of record, Oprah Winfrey was the only one who fought hard; the other producers of record said, “Well, we’ve got to go by the paperwork.” And the personal appeals to the writer who had had the sole credit to say, “Sir, this is not your script. Why don’t we do a co-write written by both?” No appeals to that worked, and he decided to take the sole credit. So he put his name on my work, and it exists there to this day.
Wow. Well, you mentioned Oprah. Through David, you meet her and she becomes a producer and actress in the film. That was your first time encountering Oprah?
Yes. This is a crazy story. David ended up working with Lee Daniels in The Butler. And in The Butler by Lee Daniels — who was the director who departed from Selma, so I had the space there — David played Oprah Winfrey’s son.
So again, another sliding doors situation…
DuVERNAY Absolutely. So he becomes close with Oprah there. He shows her Middle of Nowhere. She tweets about Middle of Nowhere. I actually faint flat out, actually get lightheaded. It was a huge, huge deal for our small film at that point. And so yeah, she ends up coming on board Selma as a producer and actually playing a small part.
Then you have Carmen Ejogo, another Brit, playing Coretta Scott King, who she’d played before.
DuVERNAY Yeah, pretty incredible.
You mentioned that your stepfather was from Montgomery…
DuVERNAY Yeah, from Lowndes County.
There’s got to have been a lot of surreal moments making that movie, largely in the real locations where Black people couldn’t have gone at the time that you’re depicting. You’ve said that there, shooting at one location in particular provided you with “one of the greatest moments of my life.”
DuVERNAY The Capitol. Yeah. That was the big day because that was in Montgomery and yeah, it was a big triumphant scene. It’s the end of the movie, they’ve tried to cross this bridge three times, and finally the third time they cross — and he [her step-father] got to watch me. We shut down Montgomery, all of the roads to the Capitol were shut. You’ve got extras in period clothing, period cars brought in from Birmingham and Atlanta — it is a movie that has come to this small town in Montgomery, and standing in the middle is his kid. And I’m there calling “Action” and “Cut,” moving people around, and I’ve got David playing Dr. King on this. Please! It’s a day that I look back on now that he’s passed on and I am so grateful to God that I got to do my thing in front of my pops in a place that he cared so much about. I have a lot of empathy for folks who say, “Oh, the person I love the most will never see me do these things.” I hear that, but I am lucky that I don’t have to feel that with him.
That’s great. I will just say that I got a kick out reading — I think in The New York Times, which was following you during some of the shoot — about one other scene, I think one of the bridge crossings. I literally laughed out loud. Apparently, you were yelling to a bunch of extras, “Where are my white racists?!”
DuVERNAY I did. It came out. It came out because the background actors, on the paper, are called “white racists,” “Black voters,” “Black marchers,” “white good people.” Hey, I needed them! I couldn’t make it sound nicer. And they were like, “Here!” Raised their hands. “Here we are!”
I remember the premiere of Selma. It was shown at AFI Fest back-to-back with American Sniper…
DuVERNAY Oh, you remember that? Oh my gosh. That is so incredible. I remember that. I remember being so scared because first of all, it’s my first [audience] I’m showing it to. I mean, I’m terrified! But when you really think of the whole awards season, it was very compressed. We wrapped in summer and we were out by Christmas. I mean, when you talk about, “We’ve got this young filmmaker and she’s doing whatever, she’s going to do what we tell her.” I mean, I had no wherewithal to say, “No, I need more time.” It was like, “Okay, $20 million? Sure. Post for six months? Okay. Great, let’s do it.” But AFI was in November, and we were coming out in December, and I remember American Sniper was also kind of a late-breaking entry. And I remember being at home and being online and seeing the chatter for American Sniper — it was huge — and then the next one was us. I just remember going into the bathroom after I introduced it and vomiting. And staying in the bathroom. In the bathroom at the American Cinematheque, at the Egyptian. I just stayed in there. They couldn’t get me to come out. They could not get me out. And finally, somebody said, “It is in the last five minutes. You must come now.” I was in a total panic attack. I was terrified.
What were you scared of?
DuVERNAY Rejection. Ridicule. It was so big, and it was like, in that moment, the fear hit me. Because I was going so fast: I wrote the script. I turned it in. I did one call. I was hired. We were in production within 60 days. I’m doing this massive thing. It’s a period piece. I’m directing Oprah Winfrey. It’s like, “What?!” It’s King. I’m making speeches. I’m racing towards post. I had never had time to stop and think, “Oh, people are going to see this,” you know what I mean? There was no time to even metabolize that.
It all happened in the bathroom, and I was frozen. I remember walking out and watching the last few minutes — I do a curtain-call credit — and they’re clapping, and then they’re yelling, and then they’re whistling, and by the time my name comes up they’re screaming, and then I walk out on the stage and they’re standing. I just remember, “What is going on?!” I mean, it was just stunning. Even in my body right now, telling the story I haven’t thought about, I’m emotional. I was terrified and elated in the same moment.
So then the New York Times review comes out: “It is a triumph of efficient, emphatic, cinematic storytelling, and much more than that, of course, it would be hard to imagine a timely or more necessary popular entertainment in the year of Ferguson, Missouri. A reminder both of progress made and promises unkept.” And there’s a brief moment there where you could, I suppose, just enjoy the response to the movie. And then around Christmas it started, right? There were some people taking issue about LBJ, and you engaged about that—
DuVERNAY I wish I hadn’t, but yeah. Yes.
There was the non-indictment of the guy from Eric Garner?
DuVERNAY Yeah, he wasn’t indicted. That was a big thing in the culture at the time.
And then the Oscar nominations came out. So, for a variety of reasons, I guess that any conversation about Selma became about—
DuVERNAY Things other than Selma.
And people can go back and forth about what they feel about any one of those things. But what was that like for you?
DuVERNAY I look back on it now and I was so scared. I was so new, you know what I mean? I had been a publicist for other folk, but I had never really dealt with being at the center of something that was so controversial at any point. I didn’t do crisis communication. I wasn’t dealing with this kind of thing. And so I was completely unprepared for it. I look back at that and I remember I had to go on Charlie Rose and talk about the controversy of LBJ. I think back and it’s like, “Kid, you’re sitting there frightened, scared, shaking, to justify your work where you center a Black perspective in the first feature film, major motion picture, about Dr. King, and you are participating in a conversation about the worthiness of LBJ?” I wish that would happen right now. I wouldn’t allow it. I was in a space where I was completely wrapped up in trying to justify my own expression and my own storytelling, and feeling like I was losing a grip on this piece that I had made to celebrate and show the beauty of Black folks and this triumph. And it became this distorted, crazy, ugly thing. Later, I found out where it was coming from. It was a rival studio planting stories and all that stuff. Yeah, there was really a clear paper trail to all that. But the bottom line was I was completely operating out of fear and all of that. And then #OscarsSoWhite happens.
This is year one of two because the next year it happened again.
DuVERNAY We were the pioneer.
Just to remind folks, there are 20 acting slots. None of them went to Black people. Going into the announcement that morning, what did you think was going to happen, and then coming out, what did you feel?
DuVERNAY One of the things that I am adamant to say, if you look at anything that I was saying before that, I never had designs on any kind of director [nomination]. I don’t believe that is possible in my lifetime. I believe that there’s work that can be done so that happens for someone else along the way.
You’re saying [you don’t believe it’s possible in your lifetime] for yourself or for any Black woman?
DuVERNAY I hope that there’s a Black woman who can maneuver through what is involved in making that trajectory happen, right? Because it is far from just merit-based, right? So I will say that my heartbreak was about David. That’s all I wanted was David. My heart had already been broken on the screenplay, so it wasn’t mine. My name wasn’t on it, but my hopes and my dreams and my love were all into David and this happening for him, that nomination, and that really took me down. I mean, the film was nominated for best picture and song and won song. I mean, it’s not chopped liver. That’s why I hate that it has this narrative of like was, are you kidding me? Best picture nod? I’d love to see one right about now [for Origin]. You know what I mean? But at the time, it was so wrapped up in the space of lack, and I was really participating in that because of the loss of that moment for David and what that would’ve done for him. It was a crazy, crazy time.
He was amazing in it.
DuVERNAY He was.
Coming out of that whole period, you were at a different level of prominence. You were suddenly someone who a lot of people knew about, and you became a symbol for a lot of people — I mean, over the years since you’ve been turned into a Barbie, a Funko bobblehead and a flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. That’s not what you were necessarily expecting when you started making films. Coming out of that season, did you feel a sense of, I don’t know, burden or pressure that so many people were investing their hopes and aspirations in you?
DuVERNAY No, I never felt that. No, because I just needed another job. You know what I mean? And they did not come. After Selma, I don’t get scripts. I’m telling you right now, Scott, I don’t get scripts. I think people think, “You’ve got a stack of scripts and they’re coming every week and you’re making choices.” It doesn’t happen.
Is it possible that they think you only want to direct things that you’ve written?
DuVERNAY I think they could ask if there was something that they wanted me to do. The only time that I was offered something outright by a studio was Wrinkle in Time.
Before that happened, you and Oprah decided to do Queen Sugar…
DuVERNAY After Selma.
This show ran from 2016 through 2022, for seven seasons and 89 episodes—
DuVERNAY Let’s say that again: Seven Seasons. 89 episodes.
It had the highest-rated premiere on OWN. But I think its greatest legacy may be the fact that you employed so many female directors — exclusively female directors. Those 89 episodes were directed by 42 different directors, 39 of whom had never previously directed episodic TV, including some of the people who came before you, like Julie Dash, and some of the people who are sort of the next wave, like Garrett Bradley.
DuVERNAY Well, Oprah gave me the reins and allowed me to have this show and to make it in the likeness of whatever I wanted, so I decided to make it in the likeness of myself and people like me, women from the independent film world, women who were outside of what an episodic director would look like — like choosing Christina Voros, who is now the showrunner/main director on David Oyelowo’s Bass Reeves hit show. She was a cinematographer who wanted to direct, and so she directed the first episodes of Queen Sugar. There were women who had made independent films, a professor of film or a documentarian who wanted to make the transition, a cinematographer who wanted to make the transition, an actor who wanted to make the transition, who I’d follow closely. If they’d made a short, if they’d made something, we’d give them the shot. But I wanted to create a community around people who were like me, kind of on the outside edges, and create a show that served them and allowed them to serve the show. And while the women directors are a big part of it, the show is a show that follows a Black family for seven seasons — the growth, the beauty, the tragedy, the triumph, the suffering, the sexiness. And it just had not been done. And although it never really reached mainstream success, it is so loved by the people who love it that it is one of the crown jewels for me.
During the run of that show, you did 13th, a documentary examining the prison-industrial complex — 13th refers to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as a form of criminal punishment. It was the first documentary to ever open the New York Film Festival. Nobody even knew you were doing it until an announcement dropped…
DuVERNAY I know! You remember? It was a surprise.
How do you keep a secret like that?
DuVERNAY I started working on it. I got a call from Netflix asking if I wanted to do something. I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, but the call was if I wanted to make a documentary special that would be a companion piece to Orange Is the New Black. I don’t think I ever said that anywhere. I was like, “A companion piece? Like what?” I don’t know. It’s just something that would talk about it side by side. “No.” But that morphed into, “What about a real thing? Like a real piece about prison and what that is?” And having done that research and learned so much about it for Middle of Nowhere, my other film, I had a lot to say and a lot to explore about it. And so it became its own standalone piece.
In a documentary like that, you might expect to see Angela Davis as a talking head, but Newt Gingrich?! And that brought your belated first Oscar nomination.
DuVERNAY That was the first Oscar nomination. The only. Hey, I’ll take it.
The year after that you did the “Family Feud” music video for Jay-Z and Beyonce…
DuVERNAY My first and only music video.
The year after that, A Wrinkle in Time, an adaptation of this book that had been out there for generations. For you, it started with the possibility of directing Black Panther.
DuVERNAY Two different divisions. Two different divisions ended up in the same company, but different folks. Yeah.
Yeah. And Tendo was the person who—
DuVERNAY For Wrinkle. Yeah. Remember, Wrinkle in Time is the first and only studio film I’ve ever made. Selma was made by Pathé and sold to Paramount. 13th was made by Netflix as kind of this one-off, but it wasn’t a standard studio process. So Wrinkle in Time was actually the only time that I got invited to the lot. I mean, of course, I’m on 10,000 lots, but invited to the lot. And I had a deal with Warner Brothers at the time. I’m doing Queen Sugar, I’m doing other things. But to come on a lot for the purpose of, “The studio wants to present you with an opportunity.” They hand you the script in the room. You know what I mean? The people are there. They’re talking very specific. “Please come make this movie.” It’s the first and the only time I’ve ever experienced it. “Yes, I will go make this movie.”
Was it surprising to you that that is the story they wanted you to tell?
DuVERNAY I was surprised they wanted me to tell anything. You know what I mean? And they had an interest in making the girl be a Black girl.
Was that your idea?
DuVERNAY No, that was what they were interested in.
Wow, interesting. The girls’ father, Chris Pine’s character, what was his name?
DuVERNAY It’s in the book, Mr. Murry.
Which is—
DuVERNAY My [step-]father’s name is Murray.
And he had just passed…
DuVERNAY He had just passed away. It was very difficult because I was just hearing his name everywhere, so I would just call him “the father.” The whole crew called him “the father.” They were like, “I don’t know why we’re calling him that.” Because I would just say “The father this, the father that. We need the father’s clothes. We need the father.” And so then everyone just started saying “the father.” But the reason why is because I just couldn’t hear his name.
VFX — had you ever done that before?
DuVERNAY No. So fun. Loved it. My VFX supervisor on Wrinkle in Time was my VFX supervisor on Origin.
You had said once, quote, “I had my experience with Wrinkle, which wasn’t a horrible experience. It was an experience.”
DuVERNAY I think that’s a pretty neutral, diplomatic quote, don’t you think? I’m going to leave it at that. I mean, it was a studio experience, and I’m an independent filmmaker who has a flair for the entrepreneurial. I like to build my own things. Queen Sugar, I thrived on that. It was my show. I was doing my thing. This campus that we’re sitting in is my show to do my thing. So I struggled. I don’t know if I struggled outwardly, but certainly inwardly, in a process that I had a lot less control over almost everything than I’d ever experienced.
Would you still want to do another studio movie?
DuVERNAY At this point, that’s why I’m sitting here with an independent film called Origin. I don’t think so. It would depend. It would depend on who and what was involved and what the circumstances were.
One other thing you made during the period of Queen Sugar was the limited series When They See Us, which was biting off maybe more than anything you’d ever bitten off before, five-and-a-half hours?!
DuVERNAY Yeah, it was a lot.
How many shooting days?
DuVERNAY Too many. Too many in New York. New York is a rough place to shoot, especially when your days are filled with prisons and detention centers. It was hard stuff.
That format, you’ve talked about studio films, indie films, limited series TV.
DuVERNAY Docuseries.
And series TV.
DuVERNAY Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where does the limited series format fit for you?
DuVERNAY I like it. I really like it a lot. We did DMZ for DC Comics, a great piece with Rosario Dawson and Benjamin Bratt. I did Colin in Black & White for Netflix. I like that format. I think we’re going to see less of it. It’s expensive. You can’t amortize it across anything. You’re putting up these sets, you’re putting all this stuff up, and it’s a one-shot thing. I’m hearing, “We want more ongoing work.”
When They See Us was originally, I think, titled Central Park Five. Why did that change?
DuVERNAY Well, as I got to know the men, they didn’t identify as the “Central Park Five,” and this was through their lens. They identified as the “Exonerated Five,” and I felt like there was something happening that’s really related to caste in that idea, that we can put all these boys together under this moniker and we know who they are and what that means, and that just wasn’t who they are. So we were interested in finding something that broke that up a little.
And just for the record, because you have all these crazy stories about how projects came about When They See Us may be the craziest…
DuVERNAY When They See Us ended up with six Emmy nominations and started from a tweet.
One of the few good legacies of Twitter…
DuVERNAY Yeah. Raymond Santana, one of the five, tweeted me and asked me if I would make a movie about them. “Could this be next?” And the answer was “yes.”
Okay, that brings us to Origin. Did you know Isabel Wilkerson before the project? Obviously, the work’s been prominent — she won a Pulitzer Prize for her first book, 2010’s The Warmth of Other Suns, and then came back with 2020’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. But was she somebody that you personally knew?
DuVERNAY No, I did not know her. I know a lot of people. You know, you pass by people. But no, I’d never met her. It was a completely cold call.
What even made you think to place the cold call?
DuVERNAY Maybe around the second time of reading it [Caste], I had this idea that I could make a movie out of these really tough ideas if I had her as a character guiding us through the research of the book. I liked that idea. When that hit me, I thought, “Ah, that’s a movie!”
Did you know about all the stuff that was going on in her personal life as she worked on it?
DuVERNAY I only knew about her father and her husband, so I didn’t know if that was going to figure prominently into it. I didn’t know what I was going to find. I didn’t know what her life was like. But I knew, wow, a Black woman solving the mystery of a global phenomenon is pretty [interesting]. If I can get how she came up with this, there could be something there. Let me talk to her about it. But as I talked with her, what I got was a story that I interpreted as one of real grief and loss, a woman who was writing this book to anchor herself to the world to keep going. And then that became very fascinating to me because of my own experiences with loss, and so they became very intertwined, and it became its own adventure that I hadn’t even predicted.
And she’s a storyteller, obviously. She got what you wanted to do with it?
DuVERNAY I think that’s because she’s a storyteller. I remember talking with her and I said, “I regard you as an academic.” And she’s like, “I regard myself as an artist.” From that artist/storyteller space, she just gave me the stories and said, “I know what you need to do. Go do it.”
And you, by that point, had formed your stock company of actors, in the same way that Scorsese has his people and any number of great filmmakers have theirs. You’ve got Niecy Nash-Betts, who was in Selma, When They See Us and now this. And then as your lead, what made you decide to cast Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor? She had been in When They See Us and got an Emmy nomination, which probably led to Lovecraft Country and King Richard.
Well, gosh, we all have our actors who we love. And she, in that category of Black woman, adult, grown in her craft, knowing how to use her instrument, I just think that she’s far and beyond how a lot of other folks are approaching the work, and I needed that kind of rigor in this. There are a lot of incredible actresses that do a lot of different things in a lot of different ways, but I needed her mind, and I knew from working with her on When They See Us, this woman is an intellectual being. Some actresses and actors that you work with, you’re like, “Wow, real spiritual kind of actor.” It’s more spirit or it’s more physical. But with Aunjanue, it is a thinking process, and I needed that for this, and I wanted to be in partnership and be thinking with her, and it was exactly that.
So, she comes on. Did you connect her with Isabel? How involved was Isabel as this thing was coming together?
DuVERNAY She was very gracious in allowing us to take the ball and run with it. I mean, when I look at it from the outside, she is looking at a project that is going to chronicle the greatest losses of her life — her husband, her mother, her best friend who was her cousin, back-to-back in a very short amount of time — that led to the writing of the book. I don’t think I would even tell that story to anyone, let alone want to be involved in the day-to-day of it. She was gracious over a two-year process to tell me those stories, to entrust me with them and also to entrust me with the interpretation of them. She gave me the stories and then she allowed us to interpret it and tell it.
And the fact that you guys, 37 days to make this film in three countries, U.S., Germany, and India, three different continents—
DuVERNAY Seven time periods.
With how much of a budget?
DuVERNAY 38 [million]. 18 more than Selma.
Did it feel like that?
DuVERNAY No. Well, it felt great, because we controlled every dime. There was no fat. There wasn’t this extra bit going here and there. Paul Garnes had that budget down to the penny, and we knew exactly what we valued and what we wanted to spend every dollar on, and we did.
Obviously, it is an unconventional sort of film. I can’t think of another like it. Maybe there is one where it’s about the author arriving at the story, but here the story itself kind of interwoven.
DuVERNAY Yes.
And you had some resistance to that. This movie has moved around. It ended up where you wanted it to, but maybe some people had a hard time seeing what you were trying to do?
DuVERNAY Yeah, I think so. I mean, the book, it’s almost unfilmable. I get it. When people read it, it’s like, “What is she going to do? How are you going to do this? What is it going to be?” I get the question of, “Why didn’t you make it a doc?” I get all those things, but I felt I saw the story in it. And so originally, Tendo Nagenda was at Netflix and had bought the rights for me to make it at Netflix. He leaves Netflix right around the time that I’m turning in the script. And at that time, there’s a feeling of, “We like it. We want to make it next year.” I was like, “Wait, wait, no, no, no, I’m ready. If we’re ready to go, we’re ready to go this year. We’re making it this year.” “But we want to make it next year.” “Well, then how’s that going to work? Because I don’t want to wait.” So, I asked them for it. I said, “Let me buy it back. Let me buy it back and let me maybe bring it back to you on the other side, but I’ve got to make this now. This is in me to make now.” And so they were gracious enough — they did not have to — to allow me to take it, and we’re really good partners in that way. I’d had a great relationship with them before. I did 13th with them, an extraordinary experience. Colin in Black & White. When They See Us. Extraordinary experiences with them. And so it was a parting that was fine.
The last time you made a movie without somebody behind it, it cost $250,000…
DuVERNAY That’s right. Yes, sir.
This is $38 million. Was that scary?
DuVERNAY Yeah, but the common denominator was Paul Garnes. I’m telling you, the man is an incredible, hands-on, real-deal, hardcore, exceptional producer. And so to be able to make something for 250, to be able to make something for 38 — he produced every episode of Queen Sugar on the set, moved his life to New Orleans for that show. So, you’re able to do it when you have a partner like that.
There are scenes in this movie that are pretty haunting. You’ve got the slave ship. You’ve got the book burning. You’ve got, in India, the manual scavengers. You’ve got segregation-era stuff in this country. Was there something that hit you the hardest while you were doing it? I mean, there’s a lot of probably traumatic stuff in these projects we’ve been talking about. Are you at the point where your skin is so thick that it doesn’t sting as much anymore?
DuVERNAY I think for me, I’m telling stories about triumph and survival. But in order to tell a story about triumph, you have to understand what’s being overcome or there’s no triumph. To tell a story about survival, what are you surviving? I feel like it’s part of a beginning, middle and end of a story. And if I want to tell the story about the glory and the magnificence and the survival and the resilience of a people, then I have to tell that story. And that story requires telling it and showing it and being there. When I’m dealing with trauma and violent things, my goal is to make it deeply specific and very humane. We will focus on the hands. You will see the eyes. You will understand the skin. You will know that person who is being harmed before they are harmed so that they are humanized, so that this isn’t just violence writ large for violence’s sake, which is what I see every day in every movie and every time I turn on the television. My God, these guys are making films that’s just killing and murder and violence and horrible things that are happening across so many movies for no reason, for no reason. This reason is because it really happened, and I’m trying to explain how this mirrors what we’re experiencing now. It’s challenging for me, the trauma in it. John Wick is trauma. You know what I mean? That stuff is traumatizing, to see that kind of pain, but it’s got cotton candy around it, so it’s okay. Mine doesn’t have cotton candy around it, so it feels more painful, but it has a reason. There’s an objective. There’s an intentionality to the reason why it’s rendered.
This movie is now going out into the world. It’s obviously a passion project, not that others weren’t, but you’ve had to really fight for this one.
DuVERNAY It’s different. Yeah, for sure.
So just if we want to make this a time capsule, it’s January-
DuVERNAY 2024.
January 6th, 2024…
DuVERNAY Is it the 6th?!
Oh, yeah. Happy anniversary.
DuVERNAY Indeed.
As you’re fighting to get this movie the audience that it should have, as you’re looking at the society that you’ve made many of these projects about, as you look at our own community — you are now on the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This is exactly a decade after Selma. What’s your state of mind?
DuVERNAY Interesting. Wow. I’m all messed up. I’m all mixed up. You know what? I’ve learned a lot over this past decade, and I am happy with what I’ve done, and I’m going to start doing things differently. I have given a lot of time to boards of various institutions that are the pillars of our industry, whether it’s DGA or AFI or the Academy. That’s a lot of Saturday meetings and conference calls and votes and reading the minutes and subcommittees and all of that work that I do, and it was all done in a quest, in a belief, that there could be change, and that everyone should be able to put their hands on this thing called our industry and help shape it and move it to a different place. I think I believe that a little less these days. I don’t regret the time that I’ve spent, because I’ve learned a lot — a lot. But now I’m interested in marrying those learnings. The Sundance board, AFI board, a lot of boards, a lot of insight into the way the institutions work, a lot of good people in those spaces, but these are institutions that are ingrained in a certain way of being. And I’ve worked to try to shape and contribute to what they are, and I think now I’ve decided that I’m going to focus on my own institution-building, which I’ve been doing at the same time with ARRAY, and just to focus on that full time. So I’m finishing out my terms of everything and won’t be doing it again. I tried. I did some things, but there’s only so much you can move in each of our time, in each of our journeys. I think the arc, it’s a journey, and each person has a role to play. I think mine will be ongoing. I’ll play different roles, but that institutional, “Let me get inside and try to be a part of it,” I think that’s passed for me.
It’s sad to hear that on one level, but it’s interesting to hear about your evolution on this. I remember one of the things you said at a certain point was, “No more panels.” That was another thing.
DuVERNAY Yeah. You know what I mean? You have to learn it. You remember that. Yeah, no more panels, and I don’t do them anymore.
Diversity panels or whatever?
DuVERNAY That’s right.
Just figuring out where can you be most effective…
DuVERNAY That’s right. And so it’s not a headline, “I’m resigning from boards.” It’s none of that, and I hope it’s not used as that. It’s just saying, when you asked me where I am right now, I am more interested in this time in our industry where everything’s unsure — studios buying each other, streamers that you thought were solid being not solid, people fighting, strikes, coming out of the pandemic and this election that’s about to come up. It’s all very uncertain, but it also is ripe for opportunity, and so why continue to play in the same sandbox? There’s some sand over there. There’s no box around it, but it’s still fun. It’s the beach. Let me go over there and see what’s happening. And so I’m going to pursue some of my ideas that are outside of that box, and thankfully, I’ve always been doing it. ARRAY is a living being, thriving, real institution in its own right.
That’s not going anywhere.
DuVERNAY It’s not going anywhere and it’s going to grow. That’s what I’m doing.
Well, thank you for all the fascinating work and for doing this, I really appreciate it.
DuVERNAY Thank you for the research. The high regard that goes into someone doing the kind of research you’ve done is not lost on me. It’s rare for me, so, much respect.
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