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