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
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
AWrinkle in Time (PG) opens in cinemas nationwide next Thursday.