Still just as sweet
For the second season of her ‘Queen Sugar,’ show creator Ava DuVernay sticks with hiring only women as directors
BY MEREDITH BLAKE >>> When Ava DuVernay began to think about the directors she wanted to work on “Queen Sugar,” the Louisiana-set series she created for OWN, she wasn’t interested in the usual suspects.
“I wanted people with my sensibility, who care about the things I care about,” says DuVernay, who wrote the series pilot and directed the first two episodes of the first season. “People who make films that I love and I knew would embrace the luxurious pace and the attention to detail and the love of nuanced characters.”
As it turns out, those people were all women. Among them: Tanya Hamilton (“Night Catches Us”), Victoria Mahoney (“Yelling to the Sky”) and So Yong Kim (“For Ellen”).
It occurred to DuVernay, a trailblazer in an industry under scrutiny in recent years for its dismal record on diversity, that hiring only women to direct the series would be “quite a radical statement.”
“The statement came after the, ‘Oh, yeah, I gotta get my friends to do this,’ ” says DuVernay, the first black woman to direct a film nominated for a best picture Oscar (“Selma”). “And then it was like, oh, wait, these women haven’t directed television, but they want to. We should really take this as far as we can.”
Based on the novel by Natalie Baszile and executive produced by Oprah Winfrey, “Queen Sugar” follows the three Bordelon siblings as they return to their family’s Louisiana sugar cane farm following the death of their father. It was a ratings hit for OWN as well as a critical success, praised for its lyrical storytelling, strong sense of place and thoughtful depictions of characters rarely glimpsed in pop culture — African American farmers in the rural South.
For Season 2 of “Queen Sugar,” which returns with a twonight premiere beginning Tuesday, DuVernay was again determined to give more women — especially gay women and women of color — the chance to work. Instead of going through the typical Hollywood channels, she sought filmmakers whose intimate, character-driven work had inspired her over the years, even resorting to tracking people down