ARRAY: Filmmaker Ava DuVernay (2021)

31:00The real estate agent has to be the patient one because they're interfacing with the client. I would be considered the broker. I was the publicist for the film, not the individual people. so I didn't have to deal with how you got your hair done and why you didn't like your sandwich and this person was mean to you and you don't like that question. So my clients were studios and networks, not individual people. And that was by design because I'm not patient. I'm not going to tell you everything's okay if it's not. I'm not going to sit there and listen to your sad story when your sad story is you don't like your sandwich.

31:38You know what I'm saying? I would be the one that would be able to just have the straight talk with the client. You know what I liken it to, guy? I was your grandmother. I'm not your mom, okay? I don't have to go home with you and be with you forever. You come over grandma's house, you have a nice time. She sends you home after a certain period of time. That's what I was. I was with you for the period of this film, and when the film is over, you go somewhere else. So it allowed me to be transparent, to be able to say what I meant and what we needed, and just to talk straight. And I found that that really helped me as a director.

32:17When did you, I mean, because I know you worked with Clint Eastwood and Bill Condon and a bunch of really well-known directors. And I read that you were brought on to work to publicity for the film Collateral, the Michael Mann film, which was kind of a turning point for you and how you started to think about what you wanted to do. Is that right? Yeah, that was a big deal for me to be on the set of Collateral. First of all, it was just so cool, the concept of the film, but it also just had very hot actors at the time. Tom Cruise, Jada Pinkett, Jamie Foxx, a young Javier Bardem, and it was just an exhilarating project to work on.

33:01But yeah, something happened on that set. A couple things. First of all, he was using these digital cameras and it was the first time I'd ever seen a film shot on a digital camera. He was one of the first to use these digital cameras called vipers, which could shoot through the night. You could see the depth of the night. It would capture distance in the night, which is why that film looks so milky. and gorgeous. And then also he was shooting in a part of town that I knew very well, East LA, shot a lot in East LA with brown people and black people. And the story had black people in it and brown people.

33:39And I thought, wow, he's shooting kind of like in the hoods that I know. And I just began watching him and thinking, oh, I want to do that. I'd been on many sets before and it never really hit me like I want to do that. I'd been on sets before where I thought I could do that. I could do what he's doing, you know? I mean, everyone's on a set, watches. Now I know people think that now because they're watching me on a set and they'd be like, I can do, I can totally do that. But it wasn't until I was on that set where I thought, oh, I want to do that. I want to use those cameras. I want to tell a story like this with actors like this.

34:20And so that really catalyzed the idea of trying to make some films. When we come back in just a moment, how Ava made her first 12-minute movie, and how a chance meeting on an airplane would change the trajectory of her career. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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40:57Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So by 2005, Ava DuVernay is running her own successful business as a publicist in Hollywood. She's also watching a lot of other people make movies. And she's starting to think, you know, I want to do this as well. It was my proximity to it that made it feel, maybe this is possible to tinker with. Because I'd been on sets. And so I knew that real people made movies. That they did not, you know, appear. Also, I think the big piece of the puzzle is, and this is a big piece that I don't think I've ever articulated but I've thought about for myself I had no dreams of the outcome other than making a movie like that was it wasn't let me make a movie to get famous to get an academy award to be rich to be famous right that was not in my head.

42:00And the reason why it wasn't in my head is because there was nobody doing that, right? Like there was, I won't say nobody, but there was nobody that looked like me. Like there were very few black women making films at the time. There were a couple I knew by name and I'd seen that they'd made a film, but no one had gone on to great fame and acclaim and all of the things. So I think one of the core pieces of the journey was it started from such a pure place of just wanting to make a movie and to tell a story. It was all about that. And it wasn't about the outcome or the things that would come after.

42:39I think now these days, it takes a lot more because you can see we're out there. There's a good number, nice number of us. You see, I want to be like Shonda or Issa and what did they do and how can I get to that level and do those things? I didn't have that, so I didn't have to think about it. I remember when I was 21 and I was an intern at NPR. I'd never been done any radio in my life. I didn't know anything about it. I just liked listening. And the way I learned how to do it was by cutting reel to reel with a razor blade and doing it really badly. And over time, I learned how to do that, right?

43:23The technical side. How did you start to learn the technical side of making movies? Well, that's a good question. You know, for me, early on, I had to embrace what I did know how to do and not be intimidated by what I didn't know how to do. And I had been around enough filmmakers as a publicist to see that not all filmmakers were technically proficient that the core of what made a great filmmaker was did you know the story not did you know the lens did you know you know the technical aspects but there are a lot of filmmakers out there who are story and performance focused and less technically focused.

44:19I thought the most important thing is the story. And all these people around me are supposed to know that stuff. So if I can write the story, then I will be the leader of the story because it came out of my mind and no one will know more about it than I will. And from there, I made sure that I surrounded myself with people who did know their jobs and one of the things that I learned from running my own business was to never be shy about saying I don't know and that that especially for women and for women of color black women you know um to feel like you won't be taken seriously if you don't know everything you know uh to feel like you cannot ask a question were all things that I had to combat but the reason why I felt entitled to do it is because I saw white white men do it yeah I say white guys all the time don't know what they're the hell they're doing but you know what they do have confidence they're gonna get out there and say I want to figure it out and I'm sure I'm sure I'll be okay sure I can figure this out and so especially when you're an independent filmmaker you're really putting together small crews of people who will work for whatever money you can give them.

45:34And so there's a lot more grace there because everyone's kind of learning together. So that's what I did in the early years. You made your first film. I think it was a short film, Saturday Night Life in 2005. And it's 12 minutes. I haven't seen it. I've been looking for it. It's hard to find. I have my ways to make things disappear. Well, let's talk about it then just for a moment. Tell me, from what I understand, the story was about when you were a little girl, your mom would dress you up and listen to people compliment you and your sisters. What was the film about? The film was about, yeah, I told my mom I wanted to make a short film and try to make something.

46:28I had been taking kind of these extension classes at UCLA, film extension classes, where you would, you know, there's like weekend courses on two days to talk about how to make a short film, that kind of thing. And so I decided I was going to make a short film, and I was asking my mom, I need to figure out a little story to tell. And she reminded me about this, which is basically that before she met my dad, when we were little, that she was really, really struggling as a single mom, struggling with money, struggling with her confidence, everything. the way that she would cheer herself up was she would dress us up, grease us down.

47:13Now, the greasing down is important. So our skin shines. So Vaseline on our little brown faces and arms and chubby legs. Put us in our patent leather shoes, our matching dresses, because it was me and my two sisters, so there were three of us. Do our hair. Take us in the car on hardly any gas. to the Alpha Beta, which was the grocery store. And we would go there and she would dress us all up just to get a couple noodles or a bag of chips or whatever she could afford. And she would do that. It makes me emotional just to say it. She would do that because she knew that her girls were so beautiful that someone would say, look at those girls, they're so pretty.

47:59You're doing a good job. and she'd buy her pack of gum or bottle of soda or whatever it was. We'd get in the car, we'd split it and we'd drive home. Get ready for bed and just go to school the next day. But that was something that she did because she could get someone to say, you're okay, you're doing good, and to see her. So that's the short. It was a single mom who woke up, who was having a hard time. She dressed up the girls. She took them to the store. And it was the things that were said to her in the store. And then she drove them home. And I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew is I knew how to hustle up getting a grocery store.

48:48We got a store to let us shoot in there. And I think I made the whole thing on like, I don't know, five grand or something. But I made it. Right. And you were not pitching this to the grocery store as a student film, right? You were just saying, I'm making a film or do you remember how you... No, I wasn't a student. I was a grown woman with a PR firm. Right. Yeah. I went and I made it and had no clue how to edit it together. I remember I showed a friend. I haven't thought about this since it probably happened. I showed a friend of mine who made independent films. hey come see my my cut at this film she was like okay so she watched it I haven't thought about this and she said this is really good this is I think this is interesting I think you're on your way to something like all the things I say to people now when clearly it's not good enough you know what you're on your way to something she said you know what you might want to do and I was like what she's like you might want to put some music in here I said music she's like yeah you know how you go to the movies and there's you hear music and i was like oh yeah music yes music yeah i had shown this woman a cut with no music it's dry not a lick of a cue not a piano string nothing was in it that's how little i know about how to put a movie together and did you do anything with the film did you try to um i mean you were publicist you had that experience did you try to screen it and get it out into the world in in any way yeah there was no market for shorts you know which is just further evidence of i didn't really care about the outcome i remember my big goal was ah it would be great if i can get this into a festival and someone was telling someone said oh people don't really care about shorts at the big film festivals you got to go to a shorts festival and the biggest shorts festival there were like three big festivals at the time in the world.

50:49One of them was in the United States. It's the Palm Springs Short Film Festival, really considered one of the top festivals at the time. So I was like, oh, Palm Springs, that's possible. So I submitted it to Palm Springs. And I remember the day I got the letter. I was in my office and I got this letter that the film was accepted. And literally, I did not feel that same joy even when I got the Academy Award nomination like nothing has since felt as euphoric and like breaking me wide open as the Palm Springs short film festival acceptance I thought oh my god isn't this a miracle and the first time seeing the film with an audience it's in a shorts block so it's like six other films and I think my film was fourth or something I remember it was coming up I was so nervous and for the first time being in the back of a theater I mean any filmmaker that's in a screening of their films not watching the film they're watching the audience Yeah.

52:04So you're watching the backs of heads. I've become really good at watching the backs of heads. Like I can tell what you're feeling by your neck at this point. And watching, you know, just the side view of the light of the screen hit people's faces as they smile, as they nod, as they cry, whatever. That feeling just, you know, it was my first hit and I was addicted and I've been addicted ever since. When you made that film, right, so now you have a real film, like with real cameras that you used and real equipment and with a real cast. It was just 12 minutes, but it was a movie. It was a movie that you made.

52:46You were still also an entrepreneur. You had a business. You were running a publicity business. and did you think to yourself, I think this is where I'm headed. I think this is where I'm going into this direction or did you still think it was just something that you really enjoyed and it was a passion? I really enjoyed it. It was a passion. The reason why is because there was no precedent for sustainable livelihood as a black woman filmmaker as recently as 2012. I'm seriously telling you, this is not humility or me saying, no, golly gee, so I never saw it. Literally, I could look at no one to say she is making a full living in supporting her family alone on making movies as recently as 2012.

53:49like there was a woman named Gina Prince-Bythewood who you know was formative in that I knew her personally knew her or was around her I'd worked I was a publicist on a couple of things and she was actually she and her husband were pretty instrumental in encouraging me and my script writing early on I was they were my clients but there were two of them and they were black filmmakers and she had made a great film called Love and Basketball and they were out pitching their things and making work but yet and still you know they were many years in between the films that they were making and she was the only one I knew like one person so for me what I could see was a woman named Lynn Shelton a white woman out of Seattle who was a filmmaker who made very tiny films that were so good and she somehow made a film almost every year and I thought oh maybe I I can be like Lynn Shelton and make like a little film every year that goes to festivals.

54:49Like she gets to travel with her film. There's like a review in the paper. It's nice. I wanted to be like her. Still thinking I will have to have a job. I will have to have a job. That was the extent of it. You went on to make a documentary about the Good Life Cafe where you had performed back in college. and then I guess right after that you started to work on an entirely different kind of film a narrative which was based on your experience of taking care of your aunt, Aunt Denise who had been sick with cancer a few years earlier, right? Yeah, yeah. She had had a recurrence of her breast cancer.

55:33It was like a stage two the first time she had a... uh, surgery and then it came back like six years later which was the cruel part you know say if you're five years you're out of the woods and then like in the sixth year it came back at stage four and um i remember because we moved into a house together after she got diagnosed i gave up my apartment i moved her out of her apartment and we moved to an apartment near the beach in an area that she always wanted to live in in long beach because at that point she was you know basically given a death sentence a certain amount of time to live and so i went to make sure that she was in a place that she found beautiful and enjoyed.

56:17And so the film basically tells that story of a young woman dealing with the loss of her beloved aunt. And you named it after, I guess you named it after the U2 song, I Will Follow. So tell me about that connection. Yeah, the connection is that Denise, my aunt, was a big U2 fan and really passed on that love of them to me. I remember, you know, one of the things about her is that she loved things that people in her family and in her community didn't necessarily have access to, to love. I won't say they didn't love it. Just say they didn't hear it. They didn't know it. I think they would have loved it if they would have had access to it and felt like it was something that they were exposed to.

57:05but she exposed herself to it and somehow um you know she loved rock and of course she loved all the quote-unquote black music too but she had a broader palette anyway within that she loved U2 she took me to my first Amnesty International concert wow you know crap seats because she didn't have any money, in a concert hall. I think it was the Coliseum. And U2 comes out, and she said, listen to this song. And it was like all white people, and like, this is a very white environment, okay? And I was not used to that. But she walked on up there, we're in there, and she said, listen to this song. It's about Martin Luther King.

57:53Pride. I was like, it's about Martin Luther King. they're saying about Martin Luther King like yeah listen to it Ava listen to it I get emotional I could cry right now thinking about it so Bono and The Edge and Larry Mulder they are up there rocking out to pride I'm trying to catch the lyrics I'm trying to and I start to hear the story and I start to put it together and I was like I think this is about Martin Luther King And that was it. Hook, line, and sinker, can't tell me nothing about U2. Love them, love them, love them. So the title of the film, which is about my last year living with my Aunt Denise before she passed, is entitled I Will Follow, which is a famous U2 song.

58:44And from what I understand, Ava, the film was self-distributed, right? And I'm curious about this idea because I think a lot of people who are not in the film industry don't quite understand how this works. So when you say you are self-distributed, does that mean that you are literally sending it out, like sending out the films to theaters to screen? Like, what does that entail? Yeah, I would liken it to someone who bakes a cake in their kitchen and then has to somehow get it on the shelf of the grocery store. Wow. Like you're a lady who makes cakes. Okay, but how do you get it in the Walmart?

59:23Yeah. So that's distribution. And so an independent film is a homemade cake. And theaters are Walmarts. Big chains are Walmarts. Now, it's got to be much easier for that homemade baker to get their goods in a small local bakery. A small independent theater. Yeah. So that's what we did. So we would go to them, and we would talk about the film and try to get the film in these theaters. There's a lot of segregation in those theaters. A lot of, it's another part of the puzzle of Hollywood that's very close to people of color, particularly black people, because they're not owned by us and you have to trust and hope that the person that you're pitching the story to sees the value in the story.

1:00:13So if I'm pitching a story about a black woman who is dying of cancer and her niece and they both love you too and they're just talking about life or death issues in the house, which is what I will follow us, if you don't think that you have an audience for that, If you're not sure how your audience will take to it, then you won't book it because you have seats to sell, right? It's a business. Yeah. And so that distribution is we take this film and we somehow get it into the local bakery, into the bigger chains. And so that was what we did store by store, cake by cake, hand to hand. And so one of the things we tapped into was all the beautiful black film festivals around the country who had supported me as a filmmaker early on with the short films, the early documentary.

1:01:05I went to them and I said, look, you're the only person I know in Boston, Boston Black Film Festival, Urban World in New York. I don't know people out there, but I know you. Would you help me get this film out? Would you help me present this film? and so started to put together a coalition of black film festivals that not only supported my work outside of their festival because they had lists of film lovers, black film lovers. They had relationships with theaters where they showed their festivals. They had a marketing apparatus around their festivals. So I was able to convince those festivals to pull the trigger on their marketing apparatus when their festival was not in session and to split the profits of whatever I made at the box office with them.

1:01:53And so that's how I created the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, which we called Affirm. All right. And basically Affirm becomes like this sort of independent distribution company, I think, like sort of sending out indie films to theaters and festivals. And later, of course, which we'll get to, Affirm becomes Array, which is what it's known as today. And that was covered on CNN and, you know, New York Times and this new way of distributing black film in a very kind of grass rooted way. Eventually, you know, I'm not stopping knocking on doors. I'm eventually, you know, eventually got us into AMC theaters.

1:02:32Yeah. But yeah, you know, also was really accepting and really thinking about where are other spaces where we can show film? Why can't I show film at the museum? They have a screen. Why can't I show film at the university? Why can't I show film at the, you know, black women's sorority, Rotary Club, whatever? So started to count those as screens. That film, I Will Follow, ended up getting some pretty great reviews. I mean, Roger Ebert was basically telling everyone to go see it. I think he said it was one of the best films he'd seen about the death of a loved one. And then after that, you started working on your next film called Middle of Nowhere.

1:03:08And I want to ask you about funding for that because as I understand it, you were financing these films with your own money. Like for I Will Follow, you used the money you'd saved up for a down payment on a house. So when you started to work on Middle of Nowhere, did you also self-finance or did you try to raise money? Yeah. The second one, I used profits from the first one. plus um my landlord in my office building said oh i have some friends who might invest and so he collected 20 000 10 000 50 000 from some you know people he knew that were you know doing pretty well i mean like not film people just people who had an extra 20 grand to spare and we put together like$250 ,000 and made Middle of Nowhere.

1:04:03That film, I think, was also the first time you worked with David Oyelowo. How did you guys meet? How did you come together? Well, this is a very rare example of me getting a phone call from an actor saying I've read the script. He called you. He called me out of the blue one day. I knew who he was as an actor, but he wasn't huge at that time. I mean, I knew he was because I know all the black actors, but he had been like he had had a small part one scene in Lincoln Spielberg's Lincoln you know he played like the bad guy in Planet of the Apes you know he had had like small roles in good films yeah he had been on a plane to do looping which is additional dialogue recording ADR on Planet of the apes he was flying from la to toronto to do adr and sitting next to a man so strange who says oh my gosh is this you the man opens his laptop and he's been watching on his laptop a show that david was in in the uk called spooks spy show and david's like oh yeah that's me you know thank you thank you you know they get to talking and the guy at about a half hour in says can I ask you to ask you your advice on just something that's come my way this weird thing that's coming by it's like I have nothing to do with the entertainment industry but uh I've been asked by my friend to invest in this independent film should I David's like oh bad idea never invest don't invest though in a film you know who is it and he said yeah it's by this woman And this black woman, I thought you might know her, named Ava DuVernay.

1:05:50Just a week before, he had seen me on CNN talking about Affirm, which was our distribution thing. He had said, I just saw her on CNN. He said, can I read the script? So the guy gives him the script. He reads the script on the rest of the flight. He gives it back to the guy afterward. He says to the guy, we should go have dinner. the guy was like this is an actor on a show that i was watching on my laptop yeah let's go have dinner they go have a steak dinner like that night like they get like like the that or the next night or something my god wherein david convinces this guy to invest in the film and then calls me when he lands at lax and says hi my name is david oyelowo and he said you know if there's any part for me in this, I would hope and I ask you to consider me.

1:06:43Wow. And I said, oh, this is really lovely. You've really boosted my confidence today. I just want to thank you because this is really lovely. I know by the time this gets to your agents, they're going to kill. They're going to say no. They're going to say no way because there's no money in it. Look, I'm going to give you a hug at the end. There's no check. It's hugs. What are you talking about? But thank you. And he said, oh, that's kind of you to say, but I just want you to realize one thing. If I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. And you should know my agents work for me. I don't work for them.

1:07:12Wow. I was like, OK. And sure enough, cut to three months later, we're on the set. And his seatmate was an investor in the film. That's an amazing story. It is an amazing story, especially when you consider what happened next. Which we will get to in a moment. After the break, we'll hear more from Ava about the path that led her to Sundance and eventually to making some of the most powerful films of the past decade. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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1:10:02Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and Ava DuVernay has submitted her latest film, the one with David Oyelowo, to the Sundance Film Festival. And by the way, it's not the first time she's submitted something to Sundance. She's done that several times before and been rejected every time. But this time, with the film Middle of Nowhere? I got in. And got into the top category, dramatic competition, and ended up winning. You won Best Director. Mm-hmm. Wow. I think even up until that point, like, you were running a publicity company, and you were really good at it, and you were really successful.

1:10:45But winning Best Director at a film festival like that, that's working at the top of your craft. Like, did you, what did you remember thinking when that happened? I remember thinking I should think about trying to really do this full time. I would think so, yeah. And so I remember thinking, wow, this is, I cannot believe I've won this. and that if I'm ever going to do this, the time is now to try to strike out and do this full time so I can be Lynn Shelton and maybe make a film a year that I don't have to pay for. And that was truly, I thought, gosh, I could just support myself on movies. That's the first time that idea came to my head.

1:11:30And I remember giving myself six months to wean myself off of my business and give my clients to other PR firms and just kind of transition the business into being more of a film distribution entity because at that point I had distributed two of my own films. And I thought, if nothing else, if this fails, I know I can distribute films for other filmmakers. If my films don't continue on, I can help other people's films continue on. So that's how my filmmaking and our business of Array started to become really intertwined. It's what's so interesting is that I'm sure at that time there were people who interviewed you and were surprised to learn that you weren't a full-time filmmaker or that you were that you had a publicity company.

1:12:23But when you think about it, like what you were doing as a publicist was shaping stories and telling stories. And that's what you do as a filmmaker. So actually, as you explain your evolution from one to another, it makes total sense because they're actually slightly different versions of the same thing. Yeah, for sure. It's crafting story. Yeah, I agree. You know, the main thing about being a director is you have to convince people or inspire people to want to do the thing that you need done. Yeah. And through it all, talking to actors, which is a big part of, if you ask any director, young director, what is the piece that they're scared of?

1:13:11Almost all of them will say talking to the actor. But it is your job to talk to the actor and get out of that other human being with their own history, mind, and thoughts, and heart what you think will service the whole project. So talking to the actor, I mean, it's not like talking to your grandma. Like these are, the actor has their own, like some of them are warm and fuzzy and some of them aren't. But for me, publicity have prepared me to talk to the actor, to deal with actors and to be comfortable around them. I think of a director as like a CEO and a COO at the same time. Like you are running operations, but you are in charge and responsible for everything.

1:13:53Yeah, I think of the director as the mayor of a small town because a film has every element of a small town. I mean, a fire department, a hospital, a the medic, you know what I mean? There's some people working construction. There's some people working with the food. There's someone that's in charge of the bathrooms. There's someone that's in charge of the stuff that's going to come after, the visual effects, the color, the actors. I mean, it is literally, you know, it's dozens of departments of everyone doing their little piece, just like in a town. Like, everyone has to know what we're doing, but also feel, I like people to feel free to contribute beyond their role.

1:14:33If you have an idea, say it. If something's not working, say it. And to be able to kind of manage all of that. I read an interview you gave, and you talked about after you won Best Director at Sundance, this was your quote. You said, there was no golden ticket that unlocked the riches of Hollywood for me. There were no studio meetings. There were no studio calls. There were no offers to do things. I mean, you had won this incredibly prestigious award, and you didn't return to L.A. with, like, an inbox just jammed with offers. No. Nope, I didn't. There were some things that came through. I got an opportunity to make a short film for a fashion brand.

1:15:20And while very different than the trajectory of my white male counterparts who had won the award the years before me, who basically slid into movie deals, I found myself making a short afterward for a brand. I was grateful for it. I got to make something on someone else's money, and I loved what I made. It was a piece for Prada called The Door. But it was much different than, you know, one of my fellow filmmakers at Sundance who won the Screenwriting Award that year who within six months had a deal to direct the sequel to Jurassic Park. You know, there were differences. But, you know, kept going.

1:16:02What can you do? You were not originally meant to be the director of the film that really became the first major film that you would direct in terms of budget, which was Selma. You were originally not meant to be the director of that film, right? No, I think I was the eighth. Wow. The eighth, seventh or eighth or something. And not like seventh or eighth director that they called. sixth or seventh director who was actually had a contract to make the movie like wow that many people had dropped out and part of it was because the budget was so small right yeah the budget was so small 20 million dollars or something 20 million dollars imagine i mean i just told you what i was making films with before right so imagine someone says 20 million dollars to make a film i'm like are you crazy yes i can do it i can do it i have no idea but i promise you i can do it and of course that opportunity only came to me because of david who called you because he read your screenplay on a on an airplane and then was in your film middle of nowhere he was cast in Selma and how did what happened I mean how did he get you involved in he was cast in in Selma by the director who left the film before because of budget he had always knew and his mother rest in peace had been very much a champion of him playing Dr.

1:17:43King and he always knew that somehow he's going to play Dr. King. So he, this is something that's been with him for many, many years. So this King movie is moving around town. He, I think the story is that he had auditioned for it with another director and didn't get it. And when the director before me auditioned him, he was cast as Dr. King. But when that director, I don't know why I'm pretending like it's, it's Lee Daniels. Okay. I mean, what the heck? Why are we, you can Google, right? There's a thing We can call Google now, guy. We've got to say the names. So when Lee Daniels left the film, basically David being scrappy, the same scrappy guy that's going to take a stranger on the plane to steak dinner to advocate to invest in a film for a woman he doesn't know and a film he's not in, said just because the director's left doesn't mean I can't still play Dr.

1:18:35King. So he says to the producers, If I can find another director who will do it for$20 million, can you consider still making the film? And I can still play Dr. King. So cut to this woman he just worked with on this film, one Sundance. He says to me, you're going to need to rewrite this film and make it for$20 million. But would you consider doing it? I never saw myself making a civil rights drama. It's just a kind of movie that I would never watch. And he said, well, could you make one that you would watch? And I thought, ah, that's interesting. And having not a lot of options on the table at that time and having that challenge from him, I started to become very attracted to the idea of doing it.

1:19:36And so I said, I will take a swing at this script and I will try. And the whole deal was if I could write a script that could be made for$20 million that was good, they would make it. You had to rewrite the entire script. And from what I understand, I mean, the King family owns the rights to his speeches. You couldn't, you had to recreate his speeches without using the same words. The King family doesn't have rights to his speeches, but an estate has the right to his speeches. And the estate had already given the rights to the speeches to another filmmaker who was much more famous than I was. Because nobody knew who I was.

1:20:16You know who it was? Was it Steven Spielberg? Look at this guy, well-researched. Yes. Steven Spielberg had the rights to the speeches in film at that time. and so in order to tell the story the way around it was to approximate or to rewrite Dr. King's speeches easy no problem right how did you do that I don't know I I remember writing it I remember doing the story first which needed to be changed from something that was a lot of kind of trying to have political intrigue. It was a lot of stuff with the president and to really imbue it with a sense of black people on the ground in Selma. The film was called Selma, not President Johnson, right?

1:21:08So it was about taking what I'd learned as an African-American studies major at UCLA, what I learned as, you know, a daughter of my father who was from Lowndes County, Alabama, which, you know, sits right two minutes from Selma. What I knew about all of my summers growing up, visiting my father's family in Alabama in the summers, and to just pour all of that into the screenplay. And then afterward, I tackled the speeches. And I remember submitting it and getting a really fast answer back, we're going to run a budget on it but this is fantastic and if we can get this down to 20 million you're going to be in production wow and then we were you filmed i think it took you like 30 days to film that movie which is kind of nuts right i mean to make a whole feature yeah it took you 30 days feels like Like, oh, it just took you 30 days.

1:22:10Or you had only 30 days. Okay, maybe that's what it was. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you had. That's what I had. It was like 31 or 32 days or something like that. Yeah. So to make that work, you have to probably spend twice as much time, like, organizing every minute of the day. Right? Like, planning that out in super detail. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a lot of heavy prep and really important to have people around you who know what they're doing. The challenge with a period piece, as one can imagine listening is, if I'm making a movie about now, I can go out, find a location. And if there's a scene in a grocery store, I just walk into the grocery store and I shoot.

1:22:58if I'm making a movie about you know the 60s I've got to find a grocery store that still looks like the 60s or change it to look like the 60s and every single thing that's on the shelf has to look like the 60s and every actor has to be dressed like they're in the 60s so I can't just pull clothes off the store everything has to be made and rented and so that's how why period pieces cost so much and that's why the 20 million you know goes quickly because every every street light sign shoe car everything has to be period so the way that this film came about I always trace back to that random flight that David had on the film before and I know that that's not random For me, that's a part of the design of why I'm supposed to be doing what I'm doing and how things fall into place.

1:23:57I believe that everything's for a reason. And so that set was really intense with a spirit of this is meant to be. Even when Selma came out, it was and is widely praised. But you were not nominated for Best Director. And I know that this is probably kind of a sensitive question, but I don't know. I mean, did it matter? Were you hurt by that? I wasn't hurt by not getting Best Director, and I'll tell you why. I was hurt by David not getting Best Actor nomination. For him not to be nominated, that was, I remember the moment, I just, that was the moment where I was, you know, really had the wind knocked out of me.

1:24:43The reason why I wasn't hurt by getting Best Director is because statistically speaking, there was no way for that to happen. And people are like, Ava, what are you talking about? I just, I had worked in the industry as a publicist. I've done Oscar campaigns. And it's a campaign. It is a campaign. And it is a very specific route to the nomination. And it just wasn't going to happen. I do not know at that time, did not know any of those people. and they did not know me. The academy electors or members, whatever they're called? My branch, the director's branch. Okay. Right? I did not go to film school.

1:25:24I did not interface with them. I did not live in the same places. I did not speak the same film language. I didn't know them and they didn't know me. On top of that, no black woman director had ever been nominated in the history of the academy, which at that point is many decades. So that's against me. So when I say no, I wasn't pushed out of shape about it, people have to remember what the times were. There was no precedent for it to ever happen, so I was not delusional enough to think, oh, I'm going to be the one. I'm curious about what you think makes a great director. Do you think that great directors are great because they can get actors to give them their best work?

1:26:15Is that a definition of what makes a director strong? No, I don't think so because I think that's a part of it. But you can have a great actor give a fantastic performance in a film that's, yeeks, not working. We've all seen that. For me, it's a film that I can look at a film and say, oh, that person got their vision out. They told the story that they wanted to tell. Like I made a film called A Wrinkle in Time. I look at that film and for all of the beautiful experiences that I had on it and for the beauty that I think is in the film, it's not my film, right? It was the first time I made a film for a massive studio and went through a process of kind of like group filmmaking.

1:27:14You know what I mean? Like a lot of people with a lot of opinions who have a lot more power than you do. And ultimately you compromise and you get to the end and you say, okay, I think this will be okay. You know, and sit back and say, oh, okay, that wasn't quite what I meant. not quite what I started out wanting to do. And that was okay. That was what that experience was for me in my career. And so many, you know, directors go through that. There are many people around the world that I continue to hear from about the film, you know, in ways that are nourishing and necessary and beautiful. But I look at the film and I remember the process and it was a process that wasn't all my process.

1:28:00So I think that, you know, the successful film is the film that the filmmaker can say that's more that is more of what I had in mind than is than it's not and the closer you can get to that being kind of 100 percent is you know now you're in freedom land and that's what I experienced on I will follow because no one cared. Middle of nowhere because no one cared. Selma because really no one cared. You know I mean they cared but they really let me have that. It was still yours right. It was still mine. Yeah. I thrive in smaller environments and so after that went on to do 13th and to do when they see us in spaces where I could get a hundred percent of what I wanted out out.

1:28:52And so that's my deficit is I kind of have to have room to move and can't really make movies by committee. I can make movies with collaborators. I can hear, you know, insight and criticism and ideas, but I can't really, like, give up parts. You know, I can't. It's hard for me. Could you imagine working on a big-budget film like A Wrinkle in Time Again? Or not really? not that you want to kind of focus on things that that you shape i've had the most success with the work that i have done unhindered yeah you know whether it's the independent films and success that they had selma which was a really hands-off process 13th which was and when they see us which is netflix saying hello ma 'am would you like this money to make something that's important to you?

1:29:49Well, yes. Thank you. When will I see you again? Oh, when you're finished. That is the perfect time for me to see you again. Thank you. Whether it's my film, my TV projects now, you know, I have the most, you know, success with networks that are really saying, hey, ma 'am, we're paying you for your voice and we're going to let you do you. That's the stuff that really works. So if there was something that was big budget where that kind of space was allowed or given to me, afforded to me. And it exists. It exists for some filmmakers. If I was ever presented with something like that, and it was something that meant something to me and I was attracted to, sure.

1:30:29But, you know, right now the things that I'm focused on are much, you get more leeway when you are spending less money. So I'd rather have leeway and less money. I mean, it's interesting that this idea of creating your art on your own terms, right? Because that is what you are doing with your company, which you rebranded. It's now known as Array. Because it's not just a distribution and production company and a nonprofit, but it's kind of like a movement, right? Like you do all kinds of outreach and you've got a database of people of color working in the industry. I mean the ambition of what you built there is big.

1:31:16And so it seems to me that actually you can do many bigger things by doing it on your own, right? Yeah. I mean, that's interesting, this idea of doing it on your own, because I was just talking to – I just did a panel with some fellow artists for Freeze in New York, this kind of art week in New York. and I was talking about like sometimes wishing that I was one of my white male counterparts who does not have to labor on top of the film like who can just make his film who doesn't also have to go make the speech to the independent film right cinema houses who doesn't have to like try to create film literacy in our community and build a screening room that's free for the community to learn about films from around the world because there's no movie theaters in our neighborhoods like who doesn't have to create initiatives on my sets where you know I have to focus on you know equalizing opportunities for women directors like who just doesn't have to do that like my white guy friends don't sit on panels about this stuff like they don't get called for articles about this stuff they don't have to do it they just can make their stuff yeah you know I talk to filmmaker friends at a you know these days it's a zoom but you know you run into someone in the store or something and you know what are you working on and they're telling you about a film what am I working on dude you don't want to friggin know like I'm talking to CEOs about inclusion I'm fighting for you know to get more black folks in these unions so that they can be hired as crew Like I'm doing a lot more than just being able to sit home and make my movie.

1:33:06Yeah. And so I'm in a place right now where I really have to interrogate my feelings about doing that, where in some moments of the day I'm like, I shouldn't have to do this. You know, if this is an equal playing field, then it should be equal for all of us without me having to do this extra work on top of my art making. But within that, the joy, right, the freedom of expression, the building of new ideas, the disrupting of systems, the innovation that I've experienced by doing all that outweighs the days where I think, I wish I didn't have to do all this. So I think right now, Array is 10 years old.

1:33:52It is a nonprofit that has community outreach and educational initiatives and learning guides for everything that I create. It's physical buildings. You have a campus. It's a four-building campus in historic Filipino town in Los Angeles. We have, you know, we're vaccinating people and community screenings and literacy and, you know, A three-day film festival to educate the community about Philippine X films or the French New Wave or to teach kids how to read subtitles. There's all kinds of stuff going on, right? That stuff is magic. It's beautiful to me. And it's come out of a place of absence, but it has become a place of abundance.

1:34:34There's a quote that I read in an article, an interview you gave. and you said you're talking about the entertainment industry and you said we need to be thinking more broadly about how we not only reform the system but rebuild the system, which is huge, just a huge, enormous task ahead. Do you think that's either happening or will happen? Yeah, I think it will happen. It may not happen and be fully realized in my time, but someone's going to see it, right? in the future or someone's going to be activated by it. And, you know, this whole journey is just all of us taking our own little steps, like especially the journey of black people, the journey of women, the journey of black directors, like each person's lifetime is just one step and a long walk to get to a certain place.

1:35:30And so I'm hoping that my step can be a big one. I'm like trying to leap and get us a lot further in my time. And that's really my hope for Array. This is something that even after I'm gone, you know, even after my time on this planet is done, could the principles and the work and the, you know, way of working that I'm trying to embed in this kind of Array way, can that continue on without me? That's the goal. When you trace your life story, just everything that you've experienced and all of the, just the, I mean, it's a life of somebody who followed their curiosity, really. How much of where you are today do you attribute to just the grind and how hard you worked?

1:36:24and does any part of you attribute any of it to luck as well, or what do you think? I guess I attribute it to luck, but I don't call it luck. I think it's my path, and these are blessings. This is designed, and it's up to me to work to live up to these moments that are put in front of me. But certainly in the way that you're defining it, I would say, look, yeah, work really hard, but you could work really hard and never get the breaks. You know, you work really hard and never be seen, be heard. You can work really hard and, you know, no one reads your scripts on a plane and calls you the next day and says, let me be in it, who ends up being the same guy who gets you Selma that gets nominated for the Oscar that does the day.

1:37:15that you could make 13th, and it sits on the back channels of Netflix and doesn't really get seen or move, but it moved. You can make when they see us and not change the lives of the five men. It doesn't completely revolutionize who they are as human beings. They live differently than they did when it first came out because no one saw it and it didn't make a difference, but that did. and so you know there's only so far that the work can get you and that's far like I believe I would have gotten far from just sheer hard labor but there's been a furthering beyond that that has been blessings that have come into my life that are beyond my control and some people call that luck.

1:38:09I'll take it. That's Ava DuVernay, filmmaker and founder of Array. Our conversation was recorded back in 2021 and since then, Ava worked with Colin Kaepernick on a six-part series about his formative years called Colin in Black and White. And she recently wrapped production on Origin, a film based on Isabel Wilkerson's best-selling book, Cast.

1:38:37Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's totally free. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner with music composed by Ramtin Ereblui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Liz Metzger. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Carrie Thompson, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, and Ramel Wood. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

1:39:17If you like How I Built This, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Thank you.