We talk to Ava DuVernay, director of “A Wrinkle in Time.”
Ava DuVernay is building a directing career that resembles a colorful patchwork quilt, its latest panel being her adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 fantasy novel “A Wrinkle in Time,” about a young girl’s search through time and space for her missing father.
Other panels — so distinctly different — include DuVernay’s second feature, “Middle of Nowhere,” a 2012 drama about a woman coping with her husband’s incarceration; “Selma,” her 2014 epic focused on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, which was nominated for a best picture Academy Award; and “13th” (2016), a documentary diving deep into the U.S. prison system that was nominated for a best documentary Oscar.
“I do have a map for myself,” DuVernay, 45, says of this array. “It’s to not let myself be put into a box and not put myself into a box. I think in this industry, as a black woman filmmaker, there’s no precedent. There’s no one I can look to and say, ‘There, that’s how she did it.’ ”
“One of the things I really look at are filmmakers that I admire: Mike Nichols, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, Ron Howard. Steven Spielberg will make ‘Jaws’ and he’ll make ‘Schindler’s List.’ He’ll make ‘The BFG’ and he’ll make ‘The Post.’ These guys genre-jump. It’s just about the best story that’s in front of you at the time and not being afraid to pursue it, no matter what it is.”
DuVernay’s path to a filmmaking career began in a different place than most. She began as a publicist, even opening her own firm, the DuVernay Agency. She worked as a unit publicist on set, dealt with the talent and press on junkets, booked stars on talk shows, and through it all, absorbed lessons about the business.
“There’s no rhyme or reason to what connects with audiences,” she says. “Being a publicist really taught me that I don’t need to think about publicity. I don’t need to think about marketing when I’m making a film. I know that’s blasphemous for a lot of filmmakers. They will sometimes get caught up in trying to create a film that’s marketable as opposed to telling the story that they want to tell.”
Storm Reid (“12 Years a Slave”) is Meg and Chris Pine the missing dad in “A Wrinkle in Time.” Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling play the otherworldly beings who help Meg in her journey. The story was filmed once before as a 2003 television movie. L’Engle complained it didn’t capture the wonder of her book. DuVernay says she was warned the novel was unadaptable, but she saw
town. When the outlaw is reported dead, the widow romanticizes their tryst in a book that becomes a best-seller.
“Noon” highlights Ireland’s elegant beauty as counterpoint to her husband’s brawn. But while you can look at this couple all day, listening is harder. “Noon” requires Bronson to abandon his usual stoicism for heightened emotion. The strain shows. Ireland sounds convincingly human on about every other line, as in most of her Bronson films.
Yet “Noon” fascinates, because it is so unlike other Bronson movies. Once seen, it becomes an indelible part of one’s impression of him, loosening the airtightness of his enforcer persona. Seagal never made a film like this.
Bronson’s best ’70s film was “Hard Times,” in which his measured presence, as a Depression-era bare-knuckle fighter who barely speaks between punches, balances out James Coburn’s electric performance as the boxer’s huckster manager.
Ireland is good, too, as a woman who catches the fighter’s eye but cannot tame him. This movie’s quality so far surpasses that of other ’70s Bronson films that it seems he must have picked it by accident.
Or maybe he wanted the taste of “Wish,” from the year before, out of his mouth. That film’s overwrought tone did not suit Bronson, whose trademark quiet strength competed with the theatrics and lost. His performance seems wan. But “Wish” made a lot more money than “Hard Times,” so you can see why one inspired sequels and the other did not.
One wonders what might have happened had Bronson taken greater control of his career, the way Clint Eastwood, whose early career paralleled Bronson’s (spaghetti Westerns, exploitation movies), did when he became a director.
But even though Bronson’s career lacked the dimensions of Eastwood’s, it was still more three-dimensional than the algorithms suggest.
Carla Meyer is a Northern California freelance writer.