By Adrian Lobb
INTERVIEWAva DuVernay
Ava DuVernay is one of the finest filmmakers on the planet, able to turn her hand to any genre. Her Oscar-winning 2014 drama Selma depicted the Civil Rights era struggle, 2016 documentary 13thshowed the incarceration of black Americans as a deliberate continuation of slavery-era subjugation, 2018’s A Wrinkle In Timewas a big-budget Disney film and When They See Us was a mini-series showing the systemic racism behind the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five in 1989. That’s real range. And some powerful storytelling. DuVernay’s new film Origin is a creative take on Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling 2020 non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, which shows how the hierarchies of inequality are produced. By expanding the frame to include the story of the author writing the book while enduring devastating loss, Origin tells a compelling personal story amid the big ideas as Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, connects racism and injustice across time and place.
THE BIG ISSUE: Origin feels like a film that will change the way people think. Is that what the source material did for you? AVA DUVERNAY: It did change the way I think. Isabel Wilkerson’s book gave me a new language for things I think about quite a bit – the way we see each other, the way we identify, the way we walk through the world, the way we treat one another. I’d never considered caste as part of that equation. It is not something that’s taught or even considered part of American history. So to make those connections and contemporise the idea of caste in a modern context as an African-American woman became something that really preoccupied me.
How did you first come to the book?
The book was being passed around and talked about in the summer of 2020. This is the first summer of the pandemic, the summer that George Floyd is murdered. So there was a lot of introspection, a lot of heightened emotion. So I read it with all those emotions swirling around and was compelled to share the ideas with others.
So the book was almost bookended by racial violence?
I never thought of it that way. The impetus for her writing it, a lot of that came from her reaction to the Trayvon Martin verdict and then it comes out the summer of George Floyd’s murder. The tragedy of that bookending is heartbreaking.
How did you get the actors on board?
All the actors had a beautiful, deep connection to
