a wrinkle in time
Ava DuVernay is updating a timeless story for 2018. We find out how.
t was a story I wanted to tell. I had a vision on how to tell it. And there was a studio who let me do it.” Director Ava DuVernay is very matter of fact when it comes to discussing what makes her the right fit to direct Disney’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel, A Wrinkle In Time, but she’s being somewhat modest. In the span of a decade, DuVernay has gone from documentaries and low-budget indies to powerhouse Martin Luther King Jr. drama Selma, and now she has been given the keys to a major studio blockbuster.
With Wrinkle budgeted at more than $100m, DuVernay is the first woman of colour to direct a film of that scale. And while stepping into the big leagues can often blunt a director’s edges, DuVernay is doubling down on her values here (after having turned down the chance to direct Black Panther because she “didn’t see eye to eye” with Marvel), with a young black lead fronting an inclusive cast that marks a break from the source material. It’s one of many ways in which DuVernay is updating a classic American fable so that it’s relevant to today’s audiences.
Better known in the US than it is outside out, L’Engle’s book was YA lit before the genre was fashionable, bankable movie fodder. It might be 55 years old, but Wrinkle contains some out-there quantum physics alongside the more traditional adventuring. At the story’s core is a young teenage girl, Meg Murry, searching for her missing father, on a quest that will take her across the universe.
While courageous kids and absent parents are part-and-parcel of a lot of children’s fiction, cosmology, quantum physics, tesseracts, distant planets and celestial beings tend to feature less frequently. It’s rare that a family film has shades of both The Wizard Of Oz and Interstellar. Before it was first published, the book was rejected by 26 publishers, and has been consistently ‘challenged’ in the years since as a result of some of its spiritual and religious themes. “To be able to kind of enter into that, a vision that people thought was too much – right now, it’s right on time,” adds DuVernay. “So what a joy to be able to share it.”
THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINE
The story is spun out from the disappearance of Meg’s scientist father Alex (Chris Pine), who vanishes while researching interstellar travel, by ‘wrinkling’ space (imagine Event Horizon’s paper-folding explanation). “He finds a way to travel space time, using a newly discovered field of energy, and in doing that, abandons his family, and then is lost,” says the Star Trek actor. “I play a theoretical physicist, and I was really interested in that. Ava was interested in that, so we geeked out on that.”
Pine’s also keen to stress that DuVernay’s unique voice hasn’t been drowned out by the blockbuster noise. “On these big films, they can kind of feel staid or modular,” he muses. “But she’s not interested in that. She’s stripping stuff away. So I like that kind of guerrilla filmmaking intensity. That was really neat to me.”
With Pine taking a backseat to a female hero again after his turn as Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman, it’s up to Meg to save him, with the assistance of school-friend Calvin and her younger brother Charles.
“She’s imperfect,” says DuVernay of her hero. “She’s all of us. She’s in a package that’s much different than most cinematic heroes. A black girl with curly hair and glasses. It’s the idea that any of us can be a hero.” Newcomer Storm Reid plays Meg in her first leading role. “It was very nervewracking,” the impeccably polite 14-year-old chuckles to Total Film. “It was something that I’ve never done before, and it was just kind of intimidating, knowing that
I’m going to be working with Miss Ava and Miss Oprah [Winfrey] and Miss Reese [Witherspoon] and all of that kerfuffle.”
The job of wrangling an expansive (and in parts dated) book fell to Frozen co-writer/director Jennifer Lee, who admitted she had “been in love with the book for over 30 years” before she landed the job. Despite being busy prepping both Frozen 2 and the smash-hit animation’s Broadway musical spin-off, Lee successfully pitched a take that would appeal to her inner fan of the book while also bringing the story bang-up-to-date for the 21st Century.
Lee didn’t want the screen version of Meg to wear her emotions on her sleeve as readily as she does in the book. “A lot of kids, today, carry things more internally,” she says. “You look at her, and you can
‘THE VISION AVA DUVERNAY HAD TO CREATE THAT VISUAL STYLE IS INCREDIBLE’ oprah winfrey
feel all that’s rumbling under the surface. That’s what Storm is amazing at bringing… [Our take on the book] is that Meg is us, and Meg is as messy and tumbly as us. So getting to see her triumph will mean a lot. I hope!”
Reid’s co-star Levi Miller, who plays Calvin, had a little more big-budget experience, having starred in 2015’s Pan at the age of 12, alongside fellow Aussie Hugh Jackman. “Subconsciously, I suppose, it’s travelled with me,” he says of that formative experience. “It was weird. Pan was [filmed] back in 2014, but it still feels so close to me.” The book didn’t reach Miller in his native Australia, so he hadn’t heard of it before he read the script.
The five-month shoot covered locations in California and New Zealand and required plenty of greenscreen and stunt work from its young cast, lest we forget this is a big-scale adventure and not an advanced physics lecture. The use of a robotic hydraulic arm brought Miller back to his days on Pan. “The same people that worked on that for Pan were working on it for A Wrinkle In Time, so it was nice to see them again… It was kind of like reliving old memories!”
“It was a lot of greenscreen and a lot of special effects and harnesses that I have never worked with before,” gasps Reid. “So at first, I was really scared and like, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ But once I got used to it, it was great.” The reason for the location work and greenscreens is that Meg, Calvin and Charles travel to various regions of the galaxy, including the tranquil planet Uriel, to stop an encroaching darkness that’s swallowing up worlds. But the kids don’t just master inter-planetary travel by themselves, and that opened up another avenue for DuVernay to boost Wrinkle’s inclusivity.
SPACE OPRAH
Their voyage is aided by three supernatural beings, known as Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who, played by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling respectively. In an interview with Time, DuVernay confirmed she wanted these three woman to be “black, white and someone who wasn’t either”, and looked for “icons” and “leaders” as much as actresses, settling on three big names who are known as much for their producing chops as they are for their on-camera work.
These astral travellers show Meg and co. the ropes. Dressed like they’re starring in a sci-fi panto, the three clearly relish their roles, with Witherspoon waxing lyrical to TF about the “amazing costumes and wigs”. The three Mrs. have undergone significant change during their transfer to the big screen. “The casting of the three of us as characters who are, in the book, described as three older – much older – elderly Caucasian women, it’s just really exciting,” adds Kaling. “And so I think without Ava, the reimagining…
I don’t know if it would have happened necessarily.”
As for their mission, Winfrey explains that the Mrs. are “looking for warriors who can bring hope back, and warriors come in all forms… And warriors are those who are willing to fight the darkness”. Drawing attention to the timelessness of the overarching themes, Witherspoon adds, “Humans were always fighting darkness, right?”
The Mrs. are emblematic of the film’s bold, out-there vision, as well as its diverse spirit. “As we’re filming it, we can see there’s going to be a visual style that’s pretty incredible,” explains Winfrey, “but not until we actually saw the trailer did we recognise Ava’s vision as we now all see it. But we were in the middle of a field and we were like, ‘Where are we going? Where are we now?’ And trying to not step on
our dresses. So the vision she had to create that visual style, along with Paco [Delgado, costume designer], is incredible.”
While Winfrey is wowed by the visuals, it seems the rest of the cast were equally impressed by being in the presence of a genuine legend. “Ever since I was… I don’t know how [old], I’ve always wanted to meet Oprah,” marvels Miller. “A worldwide role model. I could never have predicted in my life that I would ever meet her. She was so humble and kind.”
Lee wanted the three Mrs. to each to have their own distinctive traits. According to Lee, Winfrey’s Mrs. Which is “a wise old soul… I like to joke that she’s a hard-truth therapist kind of a being”. Witherspoon’s Mrs. Whatsit is “very young – well, young in terms of the Mrs”. (She’s 2,379,152,497 years old.) Mrs. Whatsit is also described as “much more of an antagonist for Meg then she was in the book”. Finally, there’s Kaling’s Mrs. Who, who “speaks in quotes for most of the movie”, adds Lee. “This a real challenge. Mindy just brought such a beautiful new approach to it.”
Along the way, Meg and Calvin will also run into the similarly flamboyantly costumed Red (Michael Peña) and the Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis), as well as at least one huge, cabbage-headed being that flies like a giant gliding leaf. However, alongside these elements of pure fantasy, much of the story’s magic is drawn from science-fact.
IT’S ALL RELATIVE
Part of Lee’s screenplay pitch included the scientific angle that would update L’Engle’s text in line with 21st Century science. “I happen to love a lot of things in cosmology and quantum physics, and there’s so many discoveries today, and that whole angle [the studio] loved,” explains Lee of her treatment. “And that certainly supported [L’Engle’s] fantastical ideas, but they were rooted in some form of science today. So I had a blast playing with that.”
Winfrey has previously described the film as “the new Wizard Of Oz for another generation”, and on the surface, the shoe (well, the ruby slipper) fits. A young girl is spirited away
to a primary-hued fantasy world on a quest to stop the rise of an evil force. It’s a comparison that Lee stands by. “I think from an emotional standpoint, certainly from the journey itself, and also just in terms of what Meg goes through, Wizard Of Oz is perfect,” she says, when TF puts it to her. But the influences don’t stop there. Lee admits to being a huge science-fiction and outer space fan – Star Wars was the first film she saw as a kid – and the genre has had a big impact on her. “Science-fiction always has undertones of looking at ourselves, emotionally and spiritually and politically.”
DuVernay pushed Lee to further explore this side of Wrinkle. “She once said to me, ‘Write a scene that disproves Einstein’s theory of relativity,’” recalls Lee. “I like that, because she wasn’t in any way thinking that it could be disproven, but she was saying, ‘We want to make it seem like we could challenge that.’ I really appreciated someone who’s just willing to go there.”
One thing seems certain: Wrinkle is shaping up to be a child-friendly film that won’t talk down to its audience. “We always said, ‘We never write down. We never write for kids in such a way,’” explains Lee. “But really, I find that if you link the concept to something real in life – like, even if it’s as simple as linking the idea of quantum entanglement to love; as soon as you do that and you describe it, everyone gets the concept.” OK, now it’s starting to sound a lot like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar… Lee laughs. “I joke because Interstellar mentions the tesseract, so I think it’s a little more that Interstellar was inspired by the book of A Wrinkle In Time…”
On the subject of inspiration, Lee hopes that the film might encourage more children to explore the cooler aspects of science that never seem to make it onto the curriculum: “If I knew about quantum physics when I was a kid, I would have gone after it like crazy.” But in a cinema landscape where Star Wars and superheroes dominate, a family flick this ambitious sounds… kinda risky. “I hope that after it comes out, everyone will not think it’s risky at all,” says Lee. “This story, these ideas, they’re so universal. They’re so timeless – no pun intended.
So my hope is that once it’s out, it just shows [that] this is a story that we’ve been waiting for, that needs to be out there.”
As for DuVernay, who has been quietly achieving a groundbreaking feat without ever seemingly losing her cool (she found time to direct an ultra-starry Jay-Z video during post-prodiction), she exudes the happiness and confidence of someone who’s been able to make a personal project on the biggest scale imaginable. “They could have done this a completely different way, but they allowed me to come in and really kind of massage the material and share it from my point of view,” she says. “They celebrated me and championed me every, every, every single step of the way.” It’s a show of support that could lead to a huge leap forward for family blockbusters, and there’s no better time for that than now.
A WRINKLE IN TIME OPENS ON 23 MARCH.
‘IF I KNEW ABOUT QUANTUM PHYSICS AS A KID, I’D HAVE GONE AFTER IT LIKE CRAZY’ JENNIFER LEE