Ready for her blockbuster
DuVernay stepping forward with her long-awaited film of ‘Wrinkle in Time’
LOS ANGELES – 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 building. 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, readies her 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 Mindy Kaling, but its heroine is Meg Murry, a character 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 super powers 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 DuVernay got 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 Sug-
ar,” a TV series that explores family dynamics, institutional racism and our modern media age. Then there’s the 2014 historical 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 m kick white men out of Hollywood. One of those white men, Spencer Averick, is her g longtime editor and self-det scribed “brother.” Her goal is to reshape the system so that everyone gets a chance.
And while it may sometimes feel like a grand stroke m of luck, sitting with Oprah at the Golden Globes, turning Jay-Z’s latest jam into a star-studded video, DuVery nay’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. y 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.”
One evening last year, after DuVernay dazzled a packed auditorium at a talk with Questlove, a group of young black women huddled, raving about the director.
“I’m an attorney,” said Nneka Udoh, 36. “Hearing her speak, it gives me a lot of confidence to do just what she does. Which is to be true to herself. Not being afraid to stand up for what she believes in, stand up for her values and also be inviting about it.”
--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 soft-spoken as the California-born Darlene was a social sparkplug. The girls would watch in half-amused awe, every morning, as he ironed his jeans before heading to work.
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. She taught them the sorts of lessons you won’t find in a Girl Scout manual. 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. It’s no wonder that her youngest sister, Tera, who works at Equal Justice Initiative, 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. Murray Maye, the man she considers her real father, came from Alabama and, as a boy, watched the marchers pass.
--Approaching midnight on 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 okay.” Back in her office, DuVernay is told that this is probably not standard practice. That it is unlikely Martin Scorsese has ever offered to make froyo runs for the crew.
“I 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 differently than I treat the gaffer or the grip or the craft services manager or hair and makeup, because we’re all making the movie,” she says.
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 DuVernay 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.’”
Her ability to find, elevate and keep talent can be seen across her staff. Averick, 39, studied film at San Francisco State University, but he had almost no experience when he took a job editing on DuVernay’s first film in 2008. Now he’s the lead editor on a potential Disney blockbuster.