Ava DuVernay: ‘We need to wake up. We’re less than a year away from a transition of power’
Biopics about white men and their intellectual quests are practically a subgenre. Oppenheimer. The Theory of Everything. The Imitation Game.
In Origin, Ava DuVernay flips the script, creating a biopic about a Black woman’s intellectual journey – a story rarely seen in movies.
“I see these films about intellectual quests, men on a mission to uncover a big idea or to persuade people about a big idea, and I just thought, ‘Why not us? Why not her?’” DuVernay said, sipping on a hot chocolate, her fave, to warm up after a walk on a rainy day in New York. The night before, she and the cast posed on the red carpet at a special screening.
Origin, which has just opened in New York and Los Angeles, is a stylistically bold adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In the book, Wilkerson lets the stories of real people drive the narrative. In the film, the Pulitzer prize-winning author morphs into the protagonist who propels us through time and place, gathering evidence that the Holocaust, India’s caste system and the 2012 death of the Florida teenager Trayvon Martin all result from the same system of global oppression.
As Wilkerson defines it, caste is the social hierarchy that determines our power and status in the world, coexisting with but transcending race.
It’s a complex idea for a book and a narrative film.
The genesis of the book was the death of Trayvon, a Black teen killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, which ignited a massive racial justice movement still felt today. Early in the movie, the King Richard Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who plays Wilkerson, tells an editor: “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient.”
DuVernay spent countless hours with Wilkerson, who wrote the book as she grieved the loss of her mother, husband and cousin. Wilkerson’s willingness to share her feelings and the tender stories and memories of the relationships were vital to the screenplay.
“It’s the atmosphere that her personal story sets that allows you to consider the historical in a certain way, but they’re not completely linked and locked,” DuVernay said, adding that she thought of Wilkerson’s personal story and historical sweep of the book and film as “two trains running”.
As a critically acclaimed film-maker with a string of firsts – including the first Black woman to direct a movie nominated for a best picture Oscar (Selma), the first Black director to enter a film in competition at the Venice film festival (Origin) and the first Black woman to direct a movie with a budget of $100m (A Wrinkle in Time) – DuVernay, 51, has the receipts to do what she wants.
She passed on directing Black Panther because of differences about how to tell the story of Marvel’s Black superhero. She was tapped to write and direct The New Gods, part of the DC universe, but the film was axed because some characters overlapped with another DC film.
And in the past four years, her production company had eight series, including two with DC: DMZ, a mini-series on HBO Max, and Naomi on The CW network.
DuVernay won’t rule out participating in other group projects or continuing to try out different film genres. “I’m really interested in ways in which I can take some of the ideas that really fascinate me and wrap them in genre,” she said. But the movie must have a message, she told me when I asked her if she would do an action film or a romantic comedy.
“What would The Bourne Identity look like if it’s about something?” she said, excitedly. “Because I love that series so much. It’s one of my favorites. But what if he was not just running to run? What if it was about something that we could learn about?”
For now, she wants to pursue more intimate projects. “I thrive more from an internal development of material and a very personal connection to the material. I just had to learn that about myself.”
Origin is her vision.
“It’s important to say that Black women have enjoyed an extraordinary trajectory of intellectual life,” said Michele Prettyman, an assistant professor in the communication and media studies department at Fordham University. “We’ve not seen that kind of storytelling and that kind of centering of women’s ideas.”
If there are few stories about Black female intellectuals and creatives in movies, it may be because they don’t trust that their stories will be honored, said Prettyman, a scholar of African American cinema and visual and popular culture.
Ava DuVernay directing Origin. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Neon
“I don’t know that there have been many vehicles that would have adequately expressed the power of the intellectual life of Black women,” she said.
In 1982, Kathleen Collins wrote and directed Losing Ground, about a philosophy professor struggling with her identity as an academic, Prettyman added.
She said that what’s unique about Origin is that Wilkerson trusts DuVernay to shepherd her story.
In the last 20 years, DuVernay has helped to shape the film industry and opened doors for many people. But she also recognizes the doors that pioneering Black women film-makers opened for her.
Collins, Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Cheryl Dunye and others were making movies in the 1980s and 90s. When she attended the Venice film festival this year, DuVernay remembered that Euzhan Palcy, the legendary film-maker from Martinique, had walked the halls of the festival decades before her.
Today, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Kasi Lemmons, AV Rockwell and other Black female film-makers write and direct in a very different and more expansive environment, where theaters aren’t the only place to experience movies.
Early on, DuVernay knew Origin wasn’t a studio film.
“The marketplace right now is not one, and never has been one, set up to support films about women on an intellectual quest, films about Black women and films about large, weighty subject matter and social ills,” she said matter-of-factly.
So she turned to philanthropy to pay for the film.
“I just had this little idea for years and years. I love PBS and would always see these funders at the end of the [documentary]: ‘with the support of’ whatever foundation. We’ve all seen it. I always thought we should do that for narrative films. So it was way in the back of my head,” she said.
DuVernay started with Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. Array, an arts and social impact collective founded by DuVernay, is a Ford grantee.
She asked Walker if the foundation had ever considered supporting finishing funds for a narrative film. Walker looked into it and later gave her $10m of her $38m budget. Other philanthropists came on board, including non-profits funded by Melinda French Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs and the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation. The foundations are using the film for their education programs and other activities, DuVernay said.
“I think other film-makers should consider ways to make their work outside of the studio system. It is a system that doesn’t really know itself post-pandemic with the streaming wars and the different corporate changeovers and takeovers,” DuVernay said. “There is just a crisis of knowledge about what works and the new landscape related to Hollywood and films.”
That includes going to a theater to see a movie, “a part of the puzzle that’s in crisis”, she said.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Origin. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Neon
“So do we as artists sit there? We’re caught in the middle, trying to figure out our own path. Whether it’s the path that I took or another way, this has been a legacy of independent film-makers forever: you figure out how to get it made outside of the studio system.”
Though she found a way to produce Origin and has helmed acclaimed works – the documentary 13th and the TV miniseries When They See Us, both for Netflix, amplified conversations about race, justice and power – that doesn’t mean her talent and right to be in the room aren’t questioned.
In an Instagram post from last month, DuVernay thanked Beyoncé for talking about gaslighting in Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, the artist’s concert movie about her record-setting world tour.
“I never expected to feel so seen in a concert film,” DuVernay said in her Instagram story, referring to a scene in the film when people were doubting and short-changing Beyoncé. We don’t see who is doing it; we just hear their voices, she said. “I thought it was so audacious to put it in the movie,” DuVernay said.
She has gotten better at responding to the slights because she knows what she has achieved. But it doesn’t get easier emotionally when someone diminishes her work.
She said: “Often as Black people, as Black women, we turn that doubt on ourselves and start to think, ‘Am I wrong?’”
But DuVernay never doubted her decision to make Caste into a narrative film. Some reviewers have suggested that she should have made a documentary instead.
“I wanted to make something that was emotional, emotionally propulsive, and that had characters that brought you into the heart of the history,” DuVernay said, then adding dismissively: “I think they should make a documentary if they thought it should be a documentary.”
DuVernay admits that Origin bends and breaks the rules of narrative film. It doesn’t have a linear structure. It doesn’t have a clear antagonist. It dashes through “cultures, continents and time frames”.
The crowd at the New York film premiere didn’t appear bothered by the film’s rule bending. When the credits began to roll, the audience, an impressive assembly of Black intellectuals and artists – including the Ford Foundation’s Walker, New York Times columnist Charles M Blow, author Jacqueline Woodson, visual artist Mickalene Thomas, the Columbia Journalism School dean, Jelani Cobb, and rap icon Snoop Dogg – leaped to their feet applauding.
DuVernay wanted the film to be released a year before the 2024 presidential election to get people talking about the nation’s future.
“My hope is that the film catalyzes conversation, discussion, disagreement, but gets in there and gets messy,” she said. “We need to wake up. We’re less than a year away from a transition of power and going in a direction that most of the country disagrees with. I wanted the film to contribute to that conversation.”
Origin is now out in select Los Angeles and New York cinemas and will be released in nationwide on 19 January and in the UK on 9 February