AVA DUVERNAY BRINGS A NEW ‘WRINKLE’ TO HOLLYWOOD
Ava DuVernay’s path from indie director to helming ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’
There are three parking spaces outside Building 78 on the storied Walt Disney Studios lot. Director Ava DuVernay, scooting between editing sessions for “A Wrinkle in Time,” makes a point to stop and point out who they’re assigned to.
One is for her silver Mercedes. The others belong to “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler and “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris. All three work under the same roof.
“We’re having a moment right now, but it’s only like six of us,” says DuVernay. “So it’s like the
black buildin g. You have three productions headed by black creators here, and it’s a beautiful thing.”
Forgive us for starting this by focusing on race. But race, fairly or not, is one of the major story lines as DuVernay, 45, read iesher big budget adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult classic. She is a black woman in an industry long ruled by white men. “Wrinkle,” which opens March 9, stars Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mi ndyK aling, butits heroine is Meg Murry, a charac- ter transformed by actress Storm Reid. In the book, Meg is white, 14 and lives in Connecticut. In the movie, she’s an African-American teenager from South Central L.A. “She’s just a black girl who
has no superpowers but ends up doing extraordinary things that she didn’t even know she could, and I relate to that,” says DuVernay.
It’s a bold reinvention that’s been almost overlooked in the pre-release hype for the film. From the moment DuVer naygot the gig, so much about “Wrinkle” has been about the money, the headline echoing from the Atlantic to Vanity Fair of “the first woman of color to direct a $100 million film.”
Never mind that whatever the budget, DuVernay’s work speaks for itself.
The poetically paced beauty of 2012’s “Middle of Nowhere,” which cost $200,000 and won her the best directing award at Sundance. The sizzling “Queen Sugar,” a TV series that explores family dynamics, institutional racism and our modern media age. Then th ere’s the 2014 his-
torical drama “Selma,” a project DuVernay revived from development limbo by rewriting much of the script and inspiring a remarkable performance from David Oyelowo as the Rev. Martin Luther King. The $20 million movie scored with critics and at the box office. It also sparked what has become a deep friendship with Winfrey, who helped produce “Selma.”
“I see the rising of myself in her,” says Winfrey. “That’s what people are seeing. They see her courage, her bodaciousness, owning herself. In a way that reflects what you want to be the best of yourself.”
Even as her résumé grows, the work is hard to isolate from the larger vision. DuVernay hires only women to direct “Queen Sugar” episodes, and her company, Array, distributes films by women and people of color while also building community through screenings and digital campaigns.
“Her mission is bigger than one film,” says Witherspoon. “I’ve never met a director like that. I’ve never had an experience where they’ve talked more about other people’s work than their own,”
DuVernay’s not looking to kick white men out of Hollywood. One of those white men, Spencer Averick, is her longtime editor and selfdescribed “brother.” Her goal is to reshape the system so that everyone gets a chance.
And while it may sometimes feel like a grand stroke of luck, sitting with Oprah at the Golden Globes, turning Jay-Z’s latest jam into a star-studded video, DuVernay’s rise is no accident. It is about talent, long hours and the way you treat people. About not doing things the same way because that’s how they’ve always been done. Oh, and always remember: You may be the first to get a $100 million budget, but you’re not the first to deserve one.
These tenets have made DuVernay an inspirational figure even for those who wouldn’t know a key grip from a key chain. These admirers can tick off her firsts — first black woman to win a best director prize at Sundance, to be nominated for a best director Golden Globe, to have her film nominated for an Oscar.
“I don’t really know anyone in all of my life, and I’m 61, who has done what she’s done,” says law professor Anita Hill, who famously testified against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. “It’s tragic that she’s the first. But she is the first, and we have to celebrate that.”
Early stories
Steven Spielberg grew up making short films with his father’s 8mm camera. J.J. Abrams wrote a screenplay in college that made it to the big screen (“Taking Care of Business”). DuVernay had her dolls.
In their small house in Lynwood, California, DuVernay would recruit her sisters Jina and Tera to play Barbie on Saturday mornings. The family couldn’t afford doll accessories. So if the girls wanted something approximating Barbie’s dune buggy, they crafted it out of a shoe box. This was serious stuff.
“It was like, this is my side of the room, this is your side,” says DuVernay. “Then the stories started. I mean, my mom would go to work, come back on a Saturday, and we were still on the floor playing.”
DuVernay got her surname, but not much else, from her biological father. She doesn’t talk about him or his marriage to her mother, Darlene, which DuVernay says was abusive. He is, she says, “a stranger to me.”
It was her stepfather, Murray Maye, who died in 2016, whom she called Pops. He had a carpet and flooring business and was as softspoken as the Californiaborn Darlene was a social sparkplug.
Darlene Maye, just 18 when she had Ava, worked as a bank teller and a human resources manager and ran a preschool as she raised her daughters. Jina, the middle sister, remembers one time they went to IHOP for breakfast and a man came out of the bathroom distressed, naked, and collapsed on the floor. Instead of shielding the children, Darlene darted over with her leather coat. She covered the man up until help arrived.
“No manager did that, no employee did that,” says Jina, now the special collections librarian at Alabama State University. “And anybody on the side of the street, you’d give them money. Is there anything I can do for you? Is there any help that you need? That extra inch. She always did that.”
Her Aunt Denise taught DuVernay to love art. She was a nurse who never had any children. (DuVernay, who also says she doesn’t plan to have kids, has a boyfriend, whom she prefers not to name.) Denise took her niece to see a stage production of “A Chorus Line” and Warren Beatty’s three-hour Russian revolution epic, “Reds.” She also loved music, whether lecturing about the underappreciated genius of U2’s “The Unforgettable Fire” or blasting Brahms.
From the start, DuVernay’s family loomed large
in her work.
Aunt Denise’s struggle with breast cancer — she died in 2003 — inspired DuVernay’s 2010 feature debut, “I Will Follow.”
Her Los Angeles childhood, with the backdrop of hovering police copters and the tactical brutality in the era of Chief Daryl Gates,
connected her to “13th,” the 2016 documentary centered on a justice system that targets people of color. Her youngest sister, Tera, who works at Equal Justice Init iative, a nonprofit group made up of attorneys who defend the accused, helped out on that project.
“Selma,” DuVernay’s breakthrough, may be a historical drama about one of the country’s most famous civil rights campaigns. But for DuVernay, it was also personal. Maye, the man she considers her real father, came from Alabama and, as a boy, watched the marchers pass.
On-set culture
Approaching midni ghton a Friday, DuVernay pops out of her office at Disney and down the hall to see a pair of her staffers at their computers.
“Gosh,” she says. “What do you think? What’s your ETA?”
“Well,” one of them says. “It was 12. Now I’m going with 2 a.m.”
“What?” DuVernay says. “Can I get you anything? Pinkberry?” “No, we’re OK.” Back in her office, DuVer- nayistoldthatthisisprobably not standard practice.
That it is unlikely Martin Scorsese has ever offered to m akefro-yorunsforthe crew.
mean, it’s 11:30 at night on Friday and both those women have children, so I’m just, like, sorry they have to be here,” she says.
This is the culture she creates. It comes from the dozen years she worked as a movie publicist before going into directing. She watched how people were treated on set.
“I very much try not to — and don’t — make it a habit of treating my actors differ- ently than I treat the gaffer or the grip or the craft ser- vices manager or hair and makeup, because we’re all making the movie,” she says. “Because I used to be crew, and I would see the hierar- chy and I always thought: I won’t do that. Because this is a grown man. I would see grips and gaffers and, you know, dolly grips push- ing things around a llday… and they would just remind
me, gosh, that’s somebody’s father.”
That applies to how she builds a crew. Witherspoon says she has never, over 40 plus films, seen a team as diverse as the one DuVer- nay put together.
“I said, ‘How did you do that?’” says Witherspoon. “She said, ‘Whenever I was presented with an option, I was told there were no other choices for people for every job.’ She said, ‘I want to see every single résumé for every single job.’”
DuVernay didn’t go to film school, instead majoring in English and African American studies at UCLA.
Making movies was never the plan. DuVernay’s debut, 2008’s “This Is the Life,” is a raw documentary about the hip-hop scene at acafeshe performed at as Eve. It was done simply to document a fleeting moment.
But “I Will Follow,” released two years later, marked a shift, as DuVer- nay realized she had stories to tell. The film took 11 days to shoot, cost $50,000 and featured a small, unpaid performance from Blair Under- wood. He did the favor
because of how hard she had worked as a publicist for his series, “City of Angels.”
As DuVernay moved behind the camera, she realized how much she had learned from hanging out on sets as Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and others directed.
She beefed up her technique by religiously listening to directors’ audio commentar- ies on DVDs and taking private directing classes.
Her next film, 2012’s “Middle of Nowhere,” marked an artistic leap as she told the spare story of Ruby, a nurse trying to cope with her husb andg oing to jail. The film
introduced her to Oyelowo. The British actor, in turn, brought the film to Winfrey when they were working together on “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”
Winfrey was moved by the film and then Googled DuVernay.
“I loved her face, her warmth,” says Winfrey. “I loved her glasses, and I thought, I’m going to be friends with this person.”
DuVernay turned to Winfrey during a vulnerable moment after “Selma.”
The film had been a huge success. After it, DuVernay expected offers to roll in. Marvel did talk to her about “Black Panther,” though she decided their visions didn’t match. Now, DuVernay found herself down in New Orleans, scouting locations for “Queen Sugar,” and feeling unsure of her next film.
“I need a movie, I need a movie, why am I not making a movie … why don’t I have what all my white boy counterparts have,” she remembers thinking. “He is the whip- pingboyfor all this and he issuchaniceguy,buthow does Colin Trevorrow go from ‘Jurassic World’ straight into Star Wars, you know what I mean? From the little indie that we both did, sitting side by side at Sundance with our films in 2012, and goes from that to ‘Jurassic World’ to Star Wars, and I go from that to ‘Selma,’ and there is noth- ing else on the horizon? That
didn’t feel good, and that had me in a depressed place. Not depressed, but just desperate. I felt desperate I was trying to make something happen.” She called Winfrey. Her message would be direct. DuVernay, she said, needed to stop feeling desperate. She couldn’t just take anything that came along. Her path was too important.
“It’s not abou tt he phone calls, it’s not about your per- ception,” Winfrey said. “It’s about what you’ve actually come here to do. Look at where you are right now. You’re in New Orleans look- ing for locations to create from scratch this idea that you have for a television series. How many people have ever been able to do what you’re doing right now? And when you can relax into understanding that, there’s a bigger thing, bigger than you are?”
They spent two hours on the phone. The next day,
after DuVernay joined her crew to start scouting for “Queen Sugar,”’ she got a pair of emails. One was from Spielber g’spro duct ioncompany asking her to consider making a film with Lupita Nyong’o. The other was from Disney about “A Wrinkle in Time.”
“I was like, what is that?” she says with a laugh. “Never heardofit.”
Building worlds
The pressure should be unbearable. That first woman of color, the $100 million budget. That whole thing.
The pressure, DuVernay says, is not necessarily the money. It’st he big ide ad riv
ing “Wrinkle.” The reimagined Meg.
“It’s a big swing,” she says. “It is a fantasy where a black girl goes to a nother planet
and saves the world.” That “world” is a long way from the Edmund Pettus Bri dgeorRuby’sbusrides in “Middle of Nowhere.” The visual language is of sweeping landscapes, animated creatures bathed in bright colors and majestic costumes fit for a cast of celestials. DuVernay knows nobody would blink if Spielberg or James Cameron were behind the camera. But what about, as her Twitter profile reads, “A girl from Compton who got to make a Disney movie”?
“All of those guys,” she says. “They can build worlds. Will you respect my world? Me building a planet?”