Fresh Air - Ava DuVernay Illuminates America's Caste System with 'Origin'

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Award-winning director Ava DuVernay's new film Origin explores a new way to consider the historical subjugation of Black people in America: As the adverse result of a caste system.The film is inspired by Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In the movie, Wilkerson embarks on a journey to learn about caste - traveling to Germany and India to get to the root of the Black experience in America. DuVernay also directed 13th, When They See Us, and Selma.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. When my guest Ava DuVernay first read Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, she was so stunned she reread it two more times. The best-selling book draws a line between India's caste system, the hierarchies of Nazi Germany, and the historic subjugation of Black people in the United States. The book is academic in nature, 496 pages filled with facts

and historical notes. People told Duvernay, an acclaimed filmmaker, that it was too complex of a story to adapt into a film, but she did it anyway, writing and directing origin. In the film, which is opening in theaters this week, Duvernay makes Wilkerson, played by Anjanue Ellis-Taylor, the center of her own story, as she explores how understanding the caste system can deepen our understanding of what Black people experience in America. In this scene from the movie I'm about to play, Blair Underwood plays a persistent editor who asks Ellis-Taylor to write about the recent death of Trayvon Martin, a tragedy that is impacting the nation at the time.

The editor had recently given her the 911 calls of the shooting and now asks her if she's listened to them yet. You listen? Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah? It's a lot. There's a lot there. But longer form stuff, questions that I don't have the answer to. So ask them in a lot. Yeah? It's a lot. There's a lot there. But longer form stuff, questions that I don't have the answer to.

So ask them in a piece. I don't write questions. I write answers. Questions like what? Like why does a Latino man deputize himself to stalk a black boy to protect an all-white community? What is that? The racist bias I want you to explore.

Excavate for the readers. We call everything racism. What does it even mean anymore? It's the default. When did that happen? Brett, where are you going? So wait, so you're saying that he isn't a racist? No, I'm not saying that he's not a racist.

I'm questioning why is everything racist? That was a scene from the new movie Origin, directed by today's guest Ava DuVernay. The question, what does racism even mean, sets Wilkerson on a path of global investigation and discovery. Ava DuVernay is an Academy Award nominee and winner of several awards, including an Emmy, BAFTA, Sundance, and Peabody Award. Her feature film directorial work includes the historical drama Selma about the life of Martin Luther King Jr., the criminal justice documentary 13th, and Disney's A Wrinkle in Time. She also directed the Emmy-nominated Netflix drama series When They See Us, based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case. Her 2016 documentary,

13th, explores the prison industrial complex and won a Peabody and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars. Ava DuVernay, welcome back to Fresh Air. I'm happy to be here with you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm happy to have you. Okay, so I want to put myself in the place where you were when you read Cast three times. So were you trying to understand how to adapt it for film or were you trying to wrap your head around this idea of cast? I think I was just trying to survive the pandemic. You know, I think of, it came out, the book, about two months after the murder of George Floyd, in the midst of a pandemic where I had recently lost someone I loved. And I was in my house. I wasn't working. I was not filming. I wasn't doing the things that I usually do. My

company was shuttered, as was every other place. And the book had sat on my nightstand for a while. And, you know, one of those pandemic days, you pick it up and you start to explore. And it drew me in, but I didn't really understand it. It's a dense book. And when I finally got through it, I wasn't satisfied with my retention of the theory, my real integration of it into my understanding. I felt that I had a surface understanding. And so I read it again just to satisfy myself because it was being talked about a lot in social circles, you know, online and amongst friends. And so when I finally read it a couple more times, I started to feel a story emerge. And the story really centered on the journey to tell the story. And it became a film about a woman in

pursuit of an idea. What was it about dramatizing it and film to approximate truth versus a documentary? I think I've heard you say that people sometimes, some people need dramatization to hold on to the humanity of a person or a storyline. Maybe news doesn't do it, or maybe journalism, or maybe even documentary doesn't always do it. Well, I mean, that's just me being a little biased because I'm in love with film. You know what I mean? I'm in love with film. And so for me, that's the kind of top format. That is the art form that gets inside my bloodstream and really, really helps me orient myself to the world and organize my thoughts is cinema. And so when I read something or I hear a story or there's something that I want to say, I go to that method, that way, that sharing.

It's the image. Wilkerson found the word racism insufficient to capture what is like this rigid social hierarchy of the Jim Crow South in particular. And she found how Nazis were influenced and inspired by American racism. Had that been an idea that you had sat with or you knew before you read the book? No, did not know it. So I'm an African American studies major, English major, UCLA. That's crazy. Read quite a bit. Had not come across that bit of information that Nazis had been influenced by the blueprint of American South segregation policies,

that actually they had sent scholars and people to study it, to bring it back. So when I read it in her book, it was fascinating to me, but I had to go look at that stuff myself and read it myself. It's not widely known. And so there's certainly scholarship out there other than Isabel Wilkerson's that shares that information, but none that I'd ever heard of. And so when I'm sitting there and I'm reading the actual notes, the actual transcriptions, the actual letters, it's astounding. It's very matter-of-fact.

And in some spaces, the Germans are shocked and surprised and appalled by some of the things that were done in America and said, that's taking it a little too far. See, now that's crazy. Let's do it this way. Yeah, let's do it this way instead. I don't know if we can get away with that here, but we can do this, this, and this. It's really shocking. But certainly that's a part of the book. And this is what I basically did is all of the parts in the book where my jaw dropped. I put that in the movie. Yeah. I think the challenge that many Americans have in particular

about this notion of caste as it relates to Black Americans, unlike the Dalits in India, is that with Dalits, they can never surpass their lot in life. But black Americans, some would argue, you and I sitting here right now having a talk shows that we can actually move past that. The other side of it is that we might be the exception and not the rule. Well, it's challenging for me, but having read the book many times, studied the book, made the film about the book, my understanding of it is this. While you and I may be sitting here and we might be successful in our careers, what it has taken for us to be in these spaces is a different trajectory than what our white male counterparts have gone through to be in their spaces. In addition to that, outside of this space, when we're walking down the street, when we're in the department store, when we're in various spaces where our scholarship or careers or intellect is unknown

and we are seen only by our outward-facing traits, it doesn't matter. And we are not on the same footing, and that's the way the society functions. And so that's part of what her book, I believe, asked me as a reader to think about, is to really drill down into it and not allow ideas about it to kind of sit inside of sound bites and easy questions. But this is really insidious stuff that affects us all. And it's an invitation to address it, explore it, think about it. Side note, you know, I think this is the first time, this is the first film that I've ever witnessed a protagonist as a black woman intellectual. I know. It's one of the few. There's a film by an incredible filmmaker who's no longer with us

named Kathleen Collins. She was a filmmaker who came to her height in the 70s, I think maybe early 80s. She did a film called Losing Ground, and it's about a woman academic. This is a film that sadly very few people have seen, but they exist. But I mean, when I can count them on less than one hand, we're talking about a real subgenre of films that we see in the Hollywood industrial complex, right? Man thinking, taking on the big subject, tackling an intellectual concept, traveling the world to figure it out. No one believes him, but he knows. He is an intellectual warrior. We can name 10 of those. There are a couple of big ones this year even that follow that trajectory. But put a woman in that place

and tell me how many you think of where the main action is a woman thinking, grappling with big ideas. That is what it's about. And now add a black woman to that. The list gets... Smaller and smaller. Sadly, much smaller, yeah.

So this movie starts with an opening scene of a boy depicted as Trayvon Martin. Trayvon was shot and killed by George Zimmerman while to start thinking about some of these ideas in a concrete way. I remember when she was sharing that with me, I thought, oh, wow, could it open on that? Could the spark that sparked her spark the film? And in really trying to stay close to and honor her process, her life, her genius. You know, I wanted to start where she started. Also, what Trayvon represents in the greater story, because what Isabel Wilkerson, the character in the movie, represents, what she's saying is, this is another black boy who was killed. And what does it mean?

Like, we're just going to tack the word racism to describe what has happened. I need to figure out what this means at the root cause of it. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I mean, it was an entryway into thinking more critically about experiences that we apply labels on that are outdated, that are not robust enough to hold their meaning in their import. And I think that's one of the reasons why I was attracted to the book. There are spaces in the book that I don't – parts in the book that I don't necessarily agree with. But I love thinking about it.

Oh, like what? All kinds of things. Like, you know, it took me a really long time to wrap my mind around the idea that there's something underneath racism that's called caste. Or I know a lot of people kind of grapple with the book because they think that the premise is that's not race, it's caste. But that's not what she's saying in my interpretation. She says that's not race only. It is also caste. And unless you can dig down and understand the multiple levels of what this experience is made up of, you can't solve for it. Caste is underneath all of the isms, all of the ways in which we disregard one another,

we organize ourselves, the hierarchies in our societies and in our cultures. It's underneath it. So it doesn't mean racism doesn't exist. It means the foundation, the root, the origin underneath is the very simple premise. Someone has to be better than someone else. Now let's organize why. Pick a reason. He's taller. She's white. This person's a man. This person lives and comes from this part of the world. This person has all their body parts work this way. Whatever it is, someone is better than another, and we organize ourselves as a society in terms of power and justice and fairness around that random set of traits. Were there parts of your everyday life that you looked at differently after you understood this concept in the day-to-day hierarchies, you know, that are just part of our everyday lives? I did. I did. I think I would often, just in my own life, think, you know, that was racist, right?

What has happened or what was said or what? And to be able to dig a little further, it helped me make it less personal because race is really personal to me. You know, I mean, I've grown up feeling like, you know, I walk through the world with a lens. My primary lens is race. And I would say my primary lens is race even more than gender. You know, certainly when I think about caste with that, it animates my thoughts about the way that I am moving through the world, being treated, being regarded in a different way, because beyond just seeing me as black, there's something else at work there in regards to where blackness lies in its value system, in its feeling of safety,

in its feeling of worthiness in any particular situation that connects me to someone else who may be dealt with as lesser than or dangerous. I'm doing air quotes through all of this, right? Beyond my skin color, right? That there are commonalities, that there are connections, that it helped me feel more in solidarity. It helped me feel more in solidarity. You know, it helped me feel more connected to other people, to other plights, to other, you know, other folks that are outside of what is considered normal and valid and worthy. And in doing that, it expanded my worldview. But I still struggle with, you know, an event happens and I call what I think it is. And the awareness of Cass invites me to dig a little deeper. I read that you maybe changed the hierarchies within your work, like on set.

Was that true? Like you thought about this after understanding it. Well, I tried to apply it. I tried to just apply it and really look in my own space. So it's easy for me to say, oh, as a black woman, I'm lower on the hierarchy of America. And that's just what it is. But I'm not a, quote, unquote, lower caste in my company. I said, you know, how can I balance this out a little bit?

Yes, I'm the head of the company. Yes, I run it, and I run my sets in a circular leadership fashion where it's not so much of a pyramid but more of me in the middle of a circle of people equally around me who have a voice. That's the way that I run things. But within that, I can say that everyone is in a circle, but if certain voices are prioritized or if certain people are made to feel more comfortable to even speak, what are the things that I can do to loosen that up and promote it? You can have everyone around a table in a circle, right?

But am I doing the extra thing that makes that person who otherwise would be uncomfortable to speak, I might have to do a little extra for them to tell them, you are here at this table, speak when you want to speak, right? And so with that idea, my colleagues and I started to look at the ways in which we organize ourselves. And the biggest example and one of the most beautiful is with my cinematographer, Matt Lloyd. We started to talk about how could we deal with cast on our sets. And he said, you know, when I look at a film set and a crew, there's a hierarchy embedded in the very names in which we call each other by our titles, by our position titles. And we have ACAM and we have a BCAM. We have, you know, basically junior people and they're all called these things. So as they come to the table, they're already defined and they're already told at that circular table.

Who's important. Who's important. And so we tried to break those down, and he did an incredible job in his department of renaming everything. There was no first camera and second camera. There was an east camera and a West camera. And there were lots of little ways that we just tried to address and play with and push against this idea of cast, simply the idea of how do we organize ourselves. Love is such a strong through line. I'm glad that you point that out. In this film.

Oh, yeah. Like, I caught it because I watched it twice. And, of course, it was there and obvious the first time. But the second time, I was able to see that through line of love, not to spoil the movie. But Isabel Wilkerson's husband dies early on, but his presence is so there throughout the entire film. And what he represents is a breaking of cast. They're a biracial couple. And he makes that decision to be

with her, and she makes the decision to be with him. And we see that throughout the movie. That's one real simplistic way of breaking caste. Yeah. In Isabel Wilkerson's book, she speaks in a lot of detail about the idea of endogamy, that idea of endogamy, that idea of who we are allowed to love. And that's a big part of her thesis, her premise, as she's sharing her ideas about caste with us and teaching us about it, the idea of endogamy being just a key pillar, a foundational element of organizing folks in a certain way is regulating who can love who and who can live life together. And once you start to regulate that, everything else starts to kind of follow that downward slide once you say you two have to be together and you two cannot be. And that's a big part of the modern conversation

about cast. Our guest today is award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay. We're talking about her new film, Origin. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you're already a Fresh Air Plus supporter, you may have heard Terry talking about the first daily national broadcast of the show in 1987. It was still like making a national debut, both to the audience and to program directors, because we weren't on that many stations to start with. Dave Davies talking about his job driving a cab. This is a fascinating city of many diverse neighborhoods. It was fun to just tool around in a cab all day.

Or archival interviews with people like Arthur Miller, Nina Simone, and Audrey Hepburn. Timing you can't rehearse. It's an instinct. Especially comedy. I mean, that's what made Cary unique. That's why there haven't been a whole lot of Cary Grants. Are you not a Fresh Air Plus supporter yet? You could be. Subscribe on plus.npr.org or on Apple Podcasts. This is Fresh Air.

I'm Tanya Mosley. And I'm talking today to filmmaker Ava DuVernay about her new film, Origin, which she wrote and directed. It's based on the best-selling book, Cast, The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. DuVernay has written and directed several films and documentaries, including Middle of Nowhere, I Will Follow They See Us, based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case. DuVernay holds many firsts, including the first Black American woman to win the Best Director prize at the Sundance Film Festival for her second feature, Middle of Nowhere, and the first Black female director to be nominated in 2014 for a Golden Globe Award, receiving a nomination for her film Selma. Her new film, Origin, opens this week in theaters. Well, the entire film is visually stunning,

and there are three scenes that probably will forever be a part of my consciousness. I'm going to talk about two with you, though, and we're going to play some clips from them. The first one is the scene in India where you recreated this degrading job of a Dalit man who, in real life, has to submerge himself in a public toilet trench to clean it. And as part of the caste system, the Dalit people are considered the lowest in society. So this is a job that is his job, his lot in life. Wilkerson, played by Anjanu Ellis-Taylor, describes the life and work of the Dalits in this scene we're going to play, who used to be called the Untouchables. Let's listen. Millennia ago, Dalits were called the Untouchables of India,

enforced into the degrading work of manual scavenging, the practice of cleaning excrement from toilets and open drains by hand in exchange for leftover food. The only thing that they have to protect their bodies is oil, each other, and their prayers. To refuse is to invite severe punishment or death. This persists to this day. That was a scene from the movie Origin, written and directed by my guest Ava DuVernay.

Ava, this scene is so unbelievably powerful. And in the theater where I watched it, everyone gasped at the same time when we actually saw the image. Because this man is literally stepping into what looks like human excrement. Can you describe the process of shooting it? Yes. Well, you know, this scene was one that was shocking to me in learning about the fact that there are people to this day whose profession is that of manual scavenging. And manual scavenging is exactly as described in the clip. I wanted to show and share what that looks like and what it takes for a human being to be required, expected to degrade themselves to perform that service, just to eat, just to exist. So the process was one that I take very seriously in all of my work, which is there's no way that I'm ever doing anything without permission of the people

involved who I am trying to portray. If I am talking about a person who has actually lived. I have made efforts to contact their family. If I am talking about someone who is alive, I have been in conversation or communication with them. It must be done. And so in this, if I'm portraying Dalit people, it was important to me that everyone who was playing a Dalit person was a Dalit. And with these particular men, I wanted to find people who actually did that job. So what you're watching are men who, that is what they do. That is how they live. And so I went to an advocacy group, and they had two men who were willing to perform the act on camera. And they came, and one of the things that I'll always remember is when they came and they saw what our production design had created. We were in Delhi, and of course I'm not having any human being get an excrement. We had created what was needed for the scene with oatmeal and food coloring. So that wasn't—

No, I'm not lowering anyone into it. And so I came to them, and they came over to the set area, and through a translator I was describing what it was. And the man looked at me. I get emotional thinking about it. He looked at me, and he said through the translator, I think we should do it for real. And his point was, people must know what is happening. Will this look real?

They have to know. They need to see the truth. They need to see the truth is what he was saying. And I promised him. And so it took a little convincing to have him go into the safe set. But it was just a, I would say, beautiful watching. The beauty in it was the humanity between the two men and the care that they had for one another. You got that? It was such a powerful scene because, of course, visually seeing someone step into excrement is

shocking. But the beauty of it was his partner putting the oil on his body to protect him. And they do that as a ritual every time. Yes. That's what moved you too. That's what moved me too. And that's what we're trying to get at. Yes, you're going to see tough stuff, but within it, that is life. That is our world.

It's the tough stuff, but it's the that is life. That is our world. It's the tough stuff, but it's the beauty in the midst of that. And that communion and that connection between these two men and the care that they had for one another in this degrading circumstance, like you can watch that scene. But what shocks people in the scene is, yes, he drops into this horrible place. But what people are also experiencing is the camaraderie, the love that actually protects them, that allows them to survive and come out and do it again another day. And so I think that that's— He steps out and his friend is there, his partner is there with a cloth to wipe his face.

Yes, yes. So those are moments worthy of being rendered, moments worthy of being seen. My guest is filmmaker Ava DuVernay. Her new film, Origin, is based on the best-selling book cast, The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. We'll continue after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Ava DuVernay about her new film Origin, which is based on the best-selling book cast The Origins of Our Discontents by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. DuVvernay wrote and directed the films Middle of Nowhere, Selma, Disney's A Wrinkle in Time, and the Netflix limited series When They See Us.

Duvernay is the founder of the distribution film company Array, which focuses on films made by women and people of color. Another powerful scene is the Nazi book burning rally in Berlin. And in the scene I'm about to play, the sequence melds the past with the present. Wilkerson is in Germany as part of her research. And a guide is telling her about this time period in 1933 in which Nazis in Berlin burned books by Jewish writers and intellectuals. They are in that plaza where a memorial has been created, and the guide is describing what happened,

and then we hear from the past the chaos of the event. Let's listen. In Germany, there's memorials to nearly everyone victimized by the Nazis. And there's no entry sign, no gate. It's just open both day and night. Just standing to bear witness. 20,000 books were lost that night. Fire! Fire! Fire! Books filled with imagination and ideas and history.

Fire! Fire! Fire! The clip you just heard is a recreated scene of a 1933 book burning in Berlin, Germany, from the movie Origin, written and directed by my guest, Ava DuVernay. This is such a vivid scene, and we're watching men throwing books into the fire. And there's a moment where we just see rows and rows of empty shelves. You shot this in the center of Berlin. And I just want to also know a little bit more about the process of creating this scene because, you know, the wounds are still there. And so you're recreating something that is of great importance and tragedy for that area. Yes, absolutely. Well, you know, this was one of the sequences that I'm the most proud of. This film was made completely outside of the studio system.

So it was made independently. And it was made by a small black woman-owned, black people-run company. It was me and my producing partner, Paul Garns, and that was it. That's where the bug stopped. And I say that for people who may not understand what the studio system provides. The studio system provides departments and departments of people who help support a movie, insurance. The dolly broke, the crane broke, great, we'll send over another one. Permits, permissions, protections, security, all of those things. Without a studio, you don't have it.

Also without studio, you don't have anyone breathing down your neck, anyone pinching pennies, anyone saying we don't think this will work, anyone saying, oh, don't do it in Germany, do it here so we don't have to go. And you have freedom, right? And so we, you know, pivoted from protection and embraced our passions and went out and we found ourselves as two African-American independent producers in Germany and asking the city of Berlin to allow us to photograph and film a recreation of a book burning on the actual site where it happened. That was our request. And we got a yes. So we shot this scene on Bebel Plots, and this is a square in which there is an actual monument to this book burning.

And the monument is called the Empty Library, where you can look down into the ground. There's a hole in the ground, a square in the ground, where you look down into rows and rows of white, empty bookshelves to commemorate and symbolize the books that were burned. And so we recreated the whole book burning on that plaza and to stand there on that cobblestone and to know that that had happened in that place and that I was able to, with my comrades, tell the story to a modern audience so that that moment is not forgotten and that moment is connected to experiences that we are having right now where that we can forget about our past lives by just taking them off the shelves. Including Isabel Wilkerson's book.

Including her own book. Because her book is on several banned books lists. Yes, the symmetry of that, the pain of that, the beauty of that was not lost on us. You're at the top of your game. You are Ava DuVernay, so you're at the top there, along with other filmmakers, where you had a $100 million project with A Wrinkle in Time, and you're talking about independent filmmaking.

It's different, right? I think, yeah, no, it's definitely different, but you have to consider the kind of film that I was trying to make. So consider the pitch meeting. So I take it out of Netflix and I go to where? Let's say I go to Warner Brothers. I didn't, but let's say I go to a studio and I say, hi. I walk in and they say, Ava, so good to see you.

Yeah. I'm good to see you guys too. We said we wanted to work together. Yeah. What's the pitch? Well, I want to make a film about cast. Yeah. a pitch. Well, I want to make a film about cast. And so that's just not, you know, on its face, I know enough about my industry to know that that is not an easy pitch, that that is not something

that I wanted to spend two, three, five, ten years of my life on trying to get done. And that just said, let's try it a different way. I was really interested and adamant about this film being out for an election year. I wanted this film to contribute to and be a part of a conversation and a wrestling with and an interrogation of and an excavation of where we are as a country. And in order to do that, I believe we need new language. We need to become fluent in concepts and constructs that we currently are not. And we need to be able to call a thing a thing and drill down into it. And so it was very important to me that this film be made in a certain amount of time and that it reach people while folks were considering the future of our country.

Are awards important to you? It's interesting. It's interesting you're asking me that. Should I answer honestly or not on NPR's Fresh Air? You should. I don't know. I'm grappling with it right now. You're grappling with it. I am.

I really am. What's the thing that's... I'm grappling with, how to say, I'm grappling with my own shame in the wanting. And I'm disappointed in myself that I am feeling that the film is not achieving those industry benchmarks. It is happening because of forces outside of my control. But ultimately... What do you mean?

Forces outside of my control that I can't speak of. But ultimately... The game that's played behind the scenes on what movies get elevated to be considered. Absolutely, and the reasons why and what is needed to participate in all of that. And this film doesn't have it. And so it's been interesting for me to— Like a big studio backing and stuff like that. That's right.

That's right. That's right. And so it has been surprising to me and somewhat alarming to me for myself that it has hurt and it has surprised me how much I am hurt by the fact that Andra New Ellis Taylor is not being recognized for that work. It breaks my heart. I should feel that she should have every flower. This is how I felt for David Oyelowo and Selma. I felt like, why? And as I've moved through the industry, I understand the why, but it doesn't make it any tougher.

And so it really makes me lean more into the independence, more into what matters, Ava. What matters is there's not a screening that I have for this film and a Q&A that I have for this film where someone does not walk up to me, lock eyes with me, touch my hand, and tell me what it meant. Tell me what they got from it. Tell me how they felt. Nothing else matters. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is filmmaker Ava DuVernay.

We're talking about her new movie, Origin, based on the best-selling book cast, The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Ava DuVernay about her new film, Origin, which is based on the best-selling book cast The Origins of Our Discontents by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. DuVernay wrote and directed the films Middle of Nowhere, Selma, Disney's A Wrinkle in Time, and the Netflix limited series When They See Us. You actually toyed around with being a journalist after college.

And I'm just curious, what kind of journalist had you envisioned yourself? Did you think about it? Yes, I was very specific. I wanted to produce broadcast news. I had an internship with CBS News with Dan Rather and Connie Chung at a very small time where they sat together. And they sat together during the start of the O.J. Simpson trial. And I was an intern there. And I remember going into the newsroom and having my pass to walk into the CBS News West Coast Bureau and just thinking, this is it. What changed?

I was an O.J. Simpson unit intern. And I was sitting outside of a juror's house. And I think I really do track it to a year where things turned, you know, in terms of the public interest in celebrity and in the salaciousness of that. And it was at the very beginning of it, and I became disenchanted rather quickly and thought this isn't what I thought it was, and it's not what I want to do. For those who don't know, in your 20s, you opened and ran your own public relations agency. And I've heard you say you were fearless during that time. You look back at yourself like, wow, who was that girl? I don't even know what she was doing.

Yeah. That's wild. I opened my own agency at 27, had studio clients, represented every major studio in town. And films. I was a film publicist, so I didn't represent people. I represented the film, the talent that the actors were in. And got to just construct campaigns for movies. I love movies.

So it was a beautiful career. And if I wasn't making films, I'd still be doing that or waitressing. Well, it was waitressing. Oh, I was a fantastic waitress. I was great. What do you mean? I was a waitress all through college. Right, but you loved it so much you could see yourself doing it?

I will always be okay in this world. I may not be able to always make films, and I may not be able to get someone to give me money to publicize their film. But I am telling you, waitressing, it was a beautiful, beautiful time for me. You get to meet people. You get to present yourself as a different character at every table if you want. You get to interact with people, and you get the opportunity to make money on every table. That's true. It's fantastic. It was on the set of Michael Mann's film Collateral, when you were a publicist,

that you first considered making your own film. What was it about that set, that storyline, Mann, that made you say, this is something I could do? It was a bunch of different things. He was shooting, Michael Mann, the great director, was shooting on digital cameras. And at that time, digital cameras were not being widely used in the studio system. This was a studio movie, big studio movie.

Tom Cruise is the lead in this really, really great film. And so they're shooting on digital cameras and they're just moving faster. The digital cameras move faster, less reloads of film in the camera. Everything's just moving at a different pace. And so I recognized that, noticed that, and was interested in learning about the digital cameras and their ease. Come to find out, obviously, the advent of the independent film genre as we knew it in the late 80s, early 90s is all very, very steeped in digital work. So that was inspiring and it's cheap, right? So that was an entry point. The other thing is he was shooting in all of these parts of Los Angeles that are predominantly black and brown parts of LA that I was very familiar with. South Central, East LA,

you know, he is in Watts, he's in Compton, he's in where me and my friends lived and where, oh, I went to the club there, or, oh, that's my mom's favorite bakery or whatever. And so I felt like, wow, this big filmmaker shooting in these spaces with these cameras, and then I can do that. Can I not do that? And so just that math of, wait, he's here and these cameras are available, you know. And then, you know, it's Tom Cruise. It's Javier Bardem. It's Jada Pinkett. It's Jamie Foxx.

It's Mark Ruffalo. And it's like all of those people are in these areas and they're shooting with these cameras. Well, if they're doing it, then maybe I can do it. And there was something in that. I was a publicist. I had do it. And there was something in that. I was a publicist. I had a company. I don't know what crazy thing got into my head to think, well, if you're interested in it, why don't you give it a try? And it's the folly of youth. Yeah. But also, you stepped into it with such purpose. The types of stories that you decided to tell right from the start, you kind of had a very clear vision, it seems like. Did you play at all?. I mean, I'm going film to film with hopes that the door is still open for me to make the next film.

That's how I worked for a very long time. That's why I made so much in the first 10 years. I had a fear that the door would close and I would not be allowed to make more. So I would be in post-production, which is the end of one movie, and in pre-production, which is the start of the next movie at the same time, which is, you know, it's very hard to do, but I did it four or five times because I never wanted there to be a gap where I couldn't open back up again. I had an idea in my head that if I stack them that way, that they can't stop me. Because by the time they look up, I'm already halfway through the next one. And, you know, there might have been some truth to it. I don't know. It's not true for me anymore. Yeah, you don't work that way anymore, do you?

Well, as of this film, so this is the very first film. This is the first one. Origin is the first film since I started making films in 2010 that I don't have a film after. How does it feel? Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. It feels really good. It feels really good,

and I kick myself a little, like, oh, why did it take you so long? But it's okay. It feels great now, and I'm going to take my time and figure out what I want to do next. Ava DuVernay, thank you so much for this conversation and this film.

I love sitting with you. Thank you for having me. Ava DuVernay is the director of the new film Origin. It opens in theaters this week. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, tripping on utopia. We speak with history professor Benjamin Breen about the early scientific research into psychedelic substances. Pioneering anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson hoped to unlock human potential through mind expansion. But their research led to secret CIA experiments using psychedelics for interrogation. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews,

follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Nyukundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.