For far too long, independent voices have been relegated to places where these ideas are not seen on a mass level.
Ava DuVernayRoger Ebert was such a champion of underrepresented filmmakers. He was a very big deal to me. It shows the power of critics. People who write about film, like you, can really affect the confidence of a young filmmaker. He did that for me, so it was such a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk about Roger in the movie.
Ava DuVernayI'm a huge Dirty Dancing fan. I feel like I should be reading [William] Shakespeare, but I'm watching Baby not be in a corner.
Ava DuVernayI really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.
Ava DuVernayI soon found I could not talk about that in a vacuum without understanding the historical, cultural, political context, and giving it some legacy and some roots, and so then it just started to have tentacles that just spread out in all these places, and already a vicious project became pretty overwhelming in scope, and so it was a lot of diligent, day-to-day fighting with the footage, trying to get it down to a place where it was manageable and emotional.
Ava DuVernay