Ava DuVernay, director of the Oscar-winning film “Selma,” speaks with Rutgers University Professor Brittney Cooper about her experience with race and gender in the entertainment industry for this year’s Susan and Michael J. Angelides Lecture, presented by Rutgers University’s Institute for Women’s Leadership. PHOTO COURTESY OF HILARY WILLIAMS Women making movies does not happen nearly enough, according to Ava DuVernay, director of the Oscar-winning hit “Selma.”
“I think women making film is radical in and of itself,” DuVernay told a packed room of Rutgers University students in Piscataway on April 24. “So I can make a romantic comedy or I could make ‘Selma’ — it’s just the fact that I’m making film. Our absence is so loud.”
As this year’s speaker in the Susan and Michael J. Angelides Lecture, presented by Rutgers University’s Institute for Women’s Leadership, DuVernay touched upon her experience with race and gender in the entertainment industry.
In a conversation with Brittney Cooper, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies, DuVernay explored how she got her start as an entertainment publicist.
Eventually, DuVernay started making her own films and, in 2014, became the first black woman nominated for Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards and Critics Choice Awards for “Selma” — the critically acclaimed story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for voting rights in 1965.
“I had my own stories to tell,” DuVernay said. “I had been working so much in an industry where I was helping other filmmakers have their stories handled and told. That was my job. To be honest, I’d be around some of these filmmakers — some of my white, male counterparts — and I would think, ‘Wow, you’re the director? This must not be that hard.’ ”
As “Selma” made the awards circuit in late 2014 and early 2015, DuVernay acknowledged that she had very few black filmmakers — and very few female filmmakers — to give her advice through the journey. “There’s no one I can say, ‘Well, what did she wear?’ ” DuVernay said. “Like, how do I dress? What do I wear? What did she wear to that? Or how did she handle that?’ Just because in the realm of that whole circus, there was no one who had done it before. … There were no other sisters to call in that capacity.”
Still, DuVernay said she managed to cobble together her own “dream team” of people to guide her through the experience, including “Selma” producer Oprah Winfrey.
“She’s a dream team all by herself,” DuVernay said.
DuVernay touched on some of the political aspects of her film, such as comments that scenes in “Selma” closely resembled real-life footage of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri — which DuVernay said was not at all intentional.
“We had shot it all [before Ferguson],” DuVernay said. “Michael Brown was murdered while we were in the editing room, so the eerie similarities are just proof of the continuum that we’re on. I was watching Ferguson on cable news, and the clips were saying some of the same things, same language [as we had in ‘Selma’].”
In a question from an audience member, DuVernay addressed the controversial decision to include King’s infidelity as a theme in “Selma.”
“My approach [with ‘Selma’] was to say, ‘OK, what do I not like about civil rights dramas that I’ve seen before?” DuVernay said. “There’s this routine of respectability that’s across all of the characters. Everything’s brightly lit like you’re in the supermarket, and you know at the end it’s going to be OK. And I’m just like, that’s not the civil rights movement I read and studied. What is this movie?
“So for me, it was really about deconstructing King — it wasn’t about making anything up about him. It was just trying to get to the root of who he was as a man … so I felt it was disingenuous not to engage in that.”
DuVernay also gave advice to a student about transitioning careers, as she did from publicist to filmmaker.
“I made my first feature film when I was 38, so that’s like ancient … and I was able to do it because I did it gradually, with progression,” DuVernay said. “So often when you think of switching or getting into something new, we feel like it has to be all or nothing, and it all has to happen right now.
“You’re overthinking it. Just take a little step, a little step, a little step — and you’ll find that you’re there.”