There's never been a film with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the center released in theaters. Ever! One does not exist. You've only seen tele-films and stage plays about him. Yet, we have big screens biopics about all kinds of people. So, I think it's only right that there be a full-length feature about Dr. King. I don't think there could be enough of them, but there should be at least one. So, here it is!
Ava DuVernayIt sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.
Ava DuVernayThereโs something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. Itโs a different perspective. It is a reflection as opposed to an interpretation, and I think we get a lot of interpretations about the lives of women that are not coming from women.
Ava DuVernayI feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.
Ava DuVernay[ Age Of Trump] was something that I really wanted to do, and I also really wanted it to feel evergreen, so we made a lot of attempts not to bog it down in the campaign fight, even though we were right in the middle of that. I wanted it to be something that could live on and be a conversation piece long after this inauguration, whoever it was going to be.
Ava DuVernay