How she got the job making A Wrinkle in Timefor Disney:
AVA DuVERNAY: The interesting thing about this movie is that I did not pitch them, they pitched me. That’s a rare thing. It happened because there were people at Disney that were forward thinking, so I have to tip my hat to them. It’s the same company that asked Taika Waititi to make
Thor, that had Ryan Coogler make
Panther, and that has Niki Caro as the next woman with a $100 million budget, making
Mulan. They’re really doing some interesting things there, so I tip my hat to them. For me, there was a high-ranking black executive there, who’s the VP of production, named Tendo Nagenda. He was the one in the meeting, talking about
A Wrinkle in Time. They still can’t tell me how I came into their head. Maybe it’s because there was a girl at the center and they were looking for a woman to do it. I don’t know. I heard they were talking to Tim Burton and some other people. But he saw something in
Selma and he, along with Jim Whitaker and Sean Bailey, brought me in to convince me to do the book. I had not read the book and I wasn’t interested in the book ‘cause I hadn’t read it and didn’t know what it was about. I went home that night and read the book, the script and the graphic novel, and I called in the morning and said, “This is mine! No one else can do this book!”
The reason why that meeting went so well – and it speaks to the whole idea of inclusion and diversity in the industry, even though I don’t like the word “diversity” – and I could have a very relaxed, passionate conversation with those guys was because I knew them. I knew Sean Bailey because I sat on the board of Sundance with him. I knew Tendo Nagenda because he’s black and there’s 16 of us in Hollywood. I saw him down the black Hollywood hall and went, “Hey!” So, I knew him through black Hollywood circles. I was able to walk into the room and just have a conversation with them about the work. Usually, I go into the studios and I do, “Hi, I’m me, and this is who I am,” and I present myself because I don’t know them. At that moment, when I walked into Disney for that meeting, I walked into that meeting like a white guy. So many of the people who are the mainstream of this industry know each other or they have similar experiences. They know their wives, or they’re in the same neighborhoods, or they went to the same college. Even if they don’t intimately know each other, they know each other, just like when I walk into a room with black women that I’ve never met and I’m like, “I’ve got you,” because I know them. They’re able to walk into these rooms and my white male counterparts have a comfort there that’s inherent in the privilege of being who they are in this industry. I walk in there and I never have that privilege. I’m always a little step behind, in having to try to prove myself.
Image via Disney
But in this meeting for
A Wrinkle in Time, the reason it was so special, from the very beginning, was that I walked in there, they knew me and I knew them, and we sat down and just talked about the work. It wasn’t anything else. It was just the work, in a relaxed environment. That’s how it began. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that more of us are in the room and that we know each other, and we know our counterparts at the studio. They don’t have to look like us, but we can still know each other. There’s something more than quotas, internship programs and checking boxes. It’s knowing each other that makes us feel comfortable, and that’s where we have a long way to go in this industry.
On directing the first project that she didn’t write:
DuVERNAY: When you put your own words on the page, writing what you intend to direct, there’s something really powerful about being a writer and director, for me. So, the prospect of working with someone else’s words and working with a writer, in that way, I didn’t know what it was gonna be like, but Jennifer [Lee] was a dream. We really collaborated to make sure that the script that was there really took Madeline L’Engle’s intention from the novel, which was written in 1963, and what she really meant and updated it. We wanted to make sure that we were capturing her intention, but updating it, so that contemporary audiences could enter into the fantasy in a way that felt vibrant to them. It was a beautiful process with a lot of back and forth. What I wanted to do was have the Mrs. look much different than what they looked like in the book. I wanted them to come to life and change hair and costumes with every planet that they jumped, so we needed a visionary costume designer like Paco Delgado, and we needed the hair, so I had to have Kim Kimble. We infused the costumes and the hair into the script, and reverse-engineered some of the design into the script.
On whether the script changed, in terms of the story in the book:
Image via Disney
DuVERNAY: We wanted to stay true to the book, so the rhythms of the book, the motivations and the general character movements are there. There was some culling down. The book gets really dense in places and we wanted to make sure we had room to support things cinematically. We wanted to see the pretty pictures and not explain so much. We really shaped the story in the editing process that I worked on with Spencer Avarice, my longtime friend and collaborator. We let some things be a little more obtuse, so you can lean in and figure out what things are. That came in the script phase, but also the editing phase, which is also the script phase with picture. There were not a lot of radical departures from the script. The story was all in line.
Ava DuVernay on Why She Made 'A Wrinkle in Time', Choosing the DP and Composer, and More
