Ava DuVernay sends her vision through ‘Wrinkle in Time’
“Black Panther” has clawed more than $700 million from the global box office in just two weeks of release and is making the name of its young director, Ryan Coogler, as ubiquitous as vibranium deposits in Wakanda. Yet all of that glory could have been going to someone else: Ava DuVernay, director of the 2014 Oscar contender “Selma.”
In discussions with Disney/Marvel to oversee the transformation of the first major African-American comic-book hero from the page to the screen, she ended up walking away from the “Black Panther” project in 2015. The Internet wept at the news. If DuVernay has any regrets, she
keeps them deep undercover. The project she left “Black Panther” for is probably holding any regrets at bay as her $103 million adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time” opens Friday to considerable buzz and expectations.
Based on Madeleine L’Engle’s best-selling and controversial 1962 kid-lit fantasy novel, the Disney project stars Chris Pine, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and relative newcomers Storm Reid, Levi Miller and Deric McCabe as the young people at the heart of a story about interstellar travel and the war between good and evil.
It’s also the first $100 millionplus movie directed by a black woman.
DuVernay couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out.
“I wanted to tell the story of a girl,” DuVernay, 45, says in a phone interview, referring to Reid’s Meg Murry, who sets much of the plot in motion, as one of the reasons she backed out of “Black Panther.” “I wanted to tell a story of a black girl like me who looks ordinary. She’s in a place in life where nothing tells her she can be great. Everything around her and her own head is telling her that she has nothing special to offer, and yet she overcomes that, and I relate to that.
“It was the film that was on my heart to tell, as ‘Panther’ was for (Coogler). It’s beautiful that we’re both able to share our visions with these films.” Planting seeds
Yet “A Wrinkle in Time” wasn’t some long-standing passion project for DuVernay. In fact, she hadn’t read the book before Disney brought it to her.
“I was a huge fan of sci-fi, particularly of sci-fi films like ‘The Never Ending Story’ and ‘Escape From Witch Mountain,’ which I just watched again a year ago,” she says and then laughs. “I wanted to be a telepathic twin and talk to my twin in bed in my mind. It just never worked out.”
Aside from the fantasy element, what attracted her to the project was being able to reimagine Meg, the young protagonist, as a black girl.
“A lot of people in my professional circle said, ‘This is unadaptable. This might not be the next project for you,’ ” DuVernay remembers. “(Then) I talked to Disney about what I would want to do with it, about making Meg a girl of color, and thinking about creating images on screen that I’d never seen before — a black girl flying, a black girl talking to flowers, hopping planets, saving the universe, fighting the darkness. (There are) scenes when she says to (Miller’s character) Calvin, ‘Do you trust me?’ to this little Caucasian boy, and he says, ‘Yes,’ and he follows her into danger. Those are images that don’t exist.
“To do that was worth any risk that it might not work. You just have to try … . Those images plant seeds, and those seeds could really make a difference.”
DuVernay maintains she hasn’t received many complaints from staunch “A Wrinkle in Time” fans about her changes.
“You remember when there was that big kerfuffle about (black actress Amandla Stenberg) playing (the character Rue) in ‘The Hunger Games?’ ” DuVernay asks. “It was really ugly, ugly stuff. But no, we haven’t gotten pushback. Disney was open-armed about it. Book lovers, people who really love this book, have been really gracious all around the world. I’ve received letters and tweets from people who are excited to see it knowing that Storm Reid, a black girl, is playing the lead.” ‘Wrinkle’ and religion
That doesn’t mean “A Wrinkle in Time” won’t be without controversy. After all, the book, originally published in 1962, has been banned in a variety of locales. The American Library Association had it at No. 22 on its list of the 100 Most Challenged Books of 1990-2000.
L’Engle, who died in 2007, was an Episcopalian, and her work is suffused with religious themes, though she was often criticized by more conservative Christians.
In January, the National Catholic Register came down hard on the book and the movie in the essay “President Oprah and the False Religion of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ ” Writer Derya Little says the book promotes a “squishy relativism,” and it “effectively combines forgiving without contrition, and materialism without consequence. As long as a person acknowledges a misdeed — whether she did it or had it done to her — and decides to take a positive step forward, all is forgiven. There is no God, no sin, no justice and no faith. There is no room for moral absolutes or judgement (sic) of sin in the Wrinkle Religion, one only needs to bend the spiritual space to one’s will to feel better. The thought of traveling through the narrow gate in this valley of tears is appalling.”
It was just such fury that made “A Wrinkle in Time” appealing to DuVernay as a filmmaker.
“What drew me to it was that it’s one of the most banned books in recent American literature. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m all about it,’ ” she says. “When you really read the history, it was banned for so many reasons. There were people that were critical around the way that they thought she dealt with Christianity. There were people who thought that (L’Engle) was a communist. There were people who thought she was talking about witchcraft. There were all kinds of reasons why, at some point, people didn’t tolerate or were intolerant about what Madeleine L’Engle was trying to do, which just attracted me to it even more.” Late bloomer
That DuVernay is making big-budget Hollywood movies would probably strike some observers of her early career as a miracle.
Born in Long Beach, Calif., and a graduate of UCLA, she interned in the early ’90s at CBS News in Los Angeles, where she became part of the team covering the O.J. Simpson trial. Ultimately, she gave up on journalism — “It just wasn’t for me,” she says now — and moved into public relations. She opened a firm, The DuVernay Agency, which included such clients as the films “Spy Kids” and “Dreamgirls.”
But she wanted to do more than promote movies, she wanted to make them. In 2005, DuVernay directed a short subject, “Saturday Night Life,” about a single mom and her three children, that aired as part of Showtime’s Black Filmmaker Showcase. She followed that with a variety of low-budget narrative and documentary features until she got the chance to make the $20 million “Selma,” a film starring David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. and set during the famous Selmato-Montgomery, Ala., march for civil rights.
Coming to filmmaking in her ’30s has given DuVernay a different perspective from her contemporaries. “A lot of my stories are about race and gender, but it’s also about age,” she says. “I didn’t pick up a camera until I was 32. Ryan Coogler’s made three films, and he’s 31.”
Much of her work has been either intimate stories of trying times (“I Will Follow” dealt with coming to grips with the death of a loved one) or looks at under-exposed outcrops of black culture, such as the alternative hip-hop documentary “This Is the Life” and the documentary “Compton in C Minor,” a film that painted a portrait of a city far more complex than the gangland headlines would indicate.
One of her most celebrated films is “13th,” the Oscar-nominated, 2016 Netflix documentary that examined the “prison industrial complex” and the negative effects of high levels of incarceration on the black community.
Behind the scenes, she created and produced the TV series “Queen Sugar,” a family drama set in rural Louisiana, that airs on Winfrey’s OWN network and launched Array, a collective supporting up-andcoming filmmakers.
For his part, Coogler is a fan and sees her as an inspiration. “She’s put her arms around all of us and taught us the way,” Coogler recently told Variety while attending the L.A. premiere of “A Wrinkle in Time.” “We support each other. We give each other notes and talk through situations when they’re tough so we can learn from each other’s mistakes and build off each other’s victories.”
Still, such a career wouldn’t seem to be the best way to get Disney to come calling. But DuVernay thinks it’s important for people of color to tackle the mainstream blockbusters, too. In her case, she found the transition to working on a film she didn’t write to be easy, as was the move to an expensive, special-effects-laden studio film with lots of moving parts.
“It’s not hard to spend money,” she says with a laugh. “You can use the budget and resources to get what’s on your mind on film.” Beyond ‘Black Panther’
Though DuVernay is encouraged by the success of “Black Panther,” she’s not sure if it represents a structural shift in Hollywood just yet.
“I don’t think it’s a sea change,” she says. “I think that these are beautiful moments that have happened, but it’s not real, systemic, structural change in the way that we do business here in Hollywood. Until we can count the directors of color and women on more than two hands — you’ve got a girl like Patty Jenkins (‘Wonder Woman’), Ryan Coogler, Barry Jenkins (‘Moonlight’), Jordan Peele (‘Get Out’), Steve McQueen (‘12 Years a Slave’), that’s not even 10. If we can get to a place where you can’t count them on two hands, or even four hands, until we’re all just integrated, then we’ve got a long way to go.”
Her next project will be far from the space-traveling heights of “A Wrinkle in Time.” “Central Park Five,” which she’s casting for now, is a five-part Netflix series that tells the story of the young black men wrongly convicted, and later exonerated, of raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989. The case became a sensation with thenprivate citizen Donald Trump taking out full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for a return of the death penalty.
But she wants to be able to return to science fiction and fantasy if she desires, and she thinks it’s important that such films include people of color.
“It’s really important for folks to see themselves in historical context, which obviously I’ve done. It’s important in a contemporary context, which I’ve done … but the future context is something that’s really eluded us,” she says. “I like to hop genres. I think of all the filmmakers I admire — Spike Lee, Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg — who are allowed and encouraged to jump genres. Spielberg can go from ‘E.T.’ to ‘Schindler’s List’ to ‘The BFG’ to ‘The Post.’
“I aspire to be able to do that. You have to take the risks and the big swings, and get in there and do it.”