Ava DuVernay gets candid about making her latest film, ‘Origin’

Director Ava DuVernay has disrupted Hollywood by telling and supporting stories that most likely would never get the big screen treatment.

Director Ava DuVernay has disrupted Hollywood by telling and supporting stories that most likely would never get the big screen treatment. “Origin” fits that mold. 

DuVernay takes on the task of adapting Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 bestselling nonfiction work “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which argues that caste, a social hierarchy, is the overall framework to racism, antisemitism, and other forms of oppression and subjugation.

After a strong showing at the Venice Film Festival, where it received an 8 minute standing ovation at, "Origin" opens a broader theatrical run this weekend.

In opting to center Wilkerson, portrayed by Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and her process of writing and researching the book, the “Selma” director ties the author’s intellectual challenges with her many personal ones. Caring for an ailing mother, grieving the sudden death of her husband and struggling with her dear cousin’s cancer battle, all while still working, is reality to a lot of people, not just those with New York Times bestsellers and a Pulitzer Prize. It’s an approach DuVernay admits she herself had not initially foreseen.

“As I was reading the book, I felt emotional,” she told NBC News in a phone interview. “I felt like there were revelations that would be better served through a narrative film rather than a documentary. So I had to set out to find characters in the book. And the character that I found most surprising was the author herself in that she writes in the first person here and there about her research. The thought was ‘let me use her beautiful journey to kind of travel us through [and] allow us to ride with her through her research.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/ava-duvernay-gets-candid-making-latest-film-origin-rcna134193

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