Reaching across colour and time
How did Ava Duvernay go from a gang-riven suburb to become the first African-american woman to direct a Disney blockbuster, asks Robbie Collin.
To catch Ava Duvernay you have to be quick. A few weeks ago I was invited to Los Angeles to meet the Oscar-nominated director of the civil rights drama Selma and the prison documentary 13th while she edited her new film, A Wrinkle in Time. By the time I got there, she had already finished it.
Two days before we were scheduled to meet, at 4.07am, she signed off on the final cut after one last tinker with the music. But a little over 48 hours later, breezing into her office with a to-do list tucked under one arm, she has the springy step and sunshiny glow of someone who has just returned from a week-long spa retreat.
It was Disney who hired Duvernay to direct A Wrinkle in Time a little over two years ago, and in doing so made her the first black female film-maker – the first female film-maker of colour full stop – to take charge of a liveaction project with a nine-figure budget.
Duvernay is an energising presence, wildly personable and an enthusiastic hugger – all skills honed in her publicist days, during which she became the go-to expert for studios trying to reach nonwhite audiences. Her mere presence at Disney is part of a historical moment for the studio – which, thanks to both Wrinkle and the billion-dollar-grossing Marvel release Black Panther, has become a nexus of African-american-led blockbuster film-making.
Yet, the 45-year-old Angeleno explains that being at the spearhead of this isn’t the straightforward source of pride I’d assumed. In 2012, Duvernay broke another boundary, becoming the first female film-maker of colour to be named best director at the Sundance festival. ‘‘And I thought it couldn’t be right, because I knew a dozen women who’d premiered beautiful work there over the years,’’ she explains.
‘‘And I felt guilty. I wondered, ‘Why me in this moment?’ It certainly wasn’t that my work was better than everyone else’s. And the bitter part is, why is it first happening in 2018 when cinema has been around for 100-plus years? Shouldn’t that make us wonder how many others have been overlooked?’’
Duvernay’s version of Wrinkle, a contemporary retelling of Madeleine L’engle’s 56-year-old children’s fantasy adventure novel, has been designed to help course-correct. The story’s young heroine, Meg Murry, played by the 14-year-old actress Storm Reid, is now the child of a mixed-race marriage from central Los Angeles – one of a handful of stipulations Duvernay brought to the project.
A touchstone in her pitch to Disney was Hamilton, the hit Broadway musical in which America’s founding fathers are played by a non-white cast, to call attention to their immigrant status. In a similar way, Duvernay’s aim was to ‘‘more fully amplify’’ the themes of L’engle’s novel, in which Meg crosses time and space to rescue her scientist father from IT – a giant, many-tentacled shadow spreading doubt and despair through the cosmos.
In the book, IT was the shadow’s physical emissary: a giant, pulsating brain that demanded unblinking conformity from its subjects. That monster suited the Cold War era in which L’engle wrote, but felt wrong to Duvernay in a film set in 2018, when evil worms its way into children’s lives in more insidious ways.
She’d tried to downplay that in her initial ‘‘final’’ cut of the film, which she finished last December, and describes as ‘‘what I thought people wanted it to look like’’.
The final final version is all hers. ‘‘Because what if it doesn’t do well and it wasn’t the film you intended to make? How do you even live with that?’’
Before lunch, Duvernay takes me to a seminar for Disney employees about the sudden prominence of black creatives in film and television: she is one of two star draws on the panel alongside Kenya Barris, the creator of the sitcoms Black-ish and Grown-ish. Both talk about how remarkable it is that their productions, along with Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, have been so enthusiastically backed by the studio.
‘‘I was cutting my film across the corridor from Ryan, and on the floor above us was Kenya with his two series, and that was different for me than if I’d walked into that building alone,’’ Duvernay continues with a smile. ‘‘Whenever I stepped into the elevator and saw all of our projects, every day I would get a little boost.’’
Duvernay grew up in Compton, a black suburb of Los Angeles wracked by gang crime, police brutality and mass incarceration in the 1970s and 80s. Her mother was a preschool teacher and her late stepfather a carpet salesman: back then, the closest she got to seeing a family like hers on screen was The Cosby Show.
‘‘So for a girl from Compton to grow up and make a Disney movie about a girl from Compton? These are not things that have been historically aligned.’’
After a spell in publicity, Duvernay founded her own public relations firm in 1999, at 27, and started dabbling in film-making six years after that. Her first feature, the hip-hop documentary This Is the Life, was completed in 2008. Her third, Middle of Nowhere,
was the big Sundance hit, but festival acclaim didn’t fast-track her into the blockbuster system, as it so often has for Duvernay’s white male counterparts.
Instead, she found herself at a loose end – and it was only with the backing of her Middle of Nowhere star David Oyelowo that she was even considered for Selma, in which the British actor was due to play Martin Luther King, Jr.
‘‘No one wanted to make it for US$20 million, which was all the budget we had. I told them my last film cost US$200,000, so if they give me US$20 million I can make that movie, and not a cent over.’’
She threw in an uncredited script rewrite that included reworking all of King’s speeches, the original versions of which remain under copyright. At the Oscars the following year, this eighth-choice black woman’s film was nominated for Best Picture.
She has kept herself busy since ‘‘by design and strategy. I saw that women have a lot of time between films’’ – again, there was no wave of offers after Selma – ‘‘so I didn’t just work on films. I got into television directing, I created a show, I made documentaries, commercials, films for museums.’’
Yet she knows that Wrinkle has, at least temporarily, frozen her in her tracks. As the first major family film to be directed and led by black women, it is something of an industry test case. ‘‘And that’s a lot of pressure to put on a movie. But you take the risk, and if it works, then you’ve opened a door.’’
And if it doesn’t? ‘‘Then I keep moving. If they make me stop directing, I can still write the script. My idea is just to stay out here in the game.’’
– The Daily Telegraph
❚ A Wrinkle in Time (PG) opens in cinemas nationwide next Thursday.