David Remnick: Ava DuVernay is a filmmaker with a profound appreciation for history. Nearly 10 years ago, her acclaimed feature Selma dramatized Martin Luther King's role in the voting rights march of 1965. DuVernay's documentary 13th looked at the 13th Amendment and the contemporary prison system, and that film won a Peabody Award in 2017.

Ava DuVernay: Police violence, that isn't the problem in and of itself. It's reflection of a much larger, brutal system of racial and social control known as mass incarceration, which authorizes this kind of police violence.

David Remnick: Given the moment that we're in with book banning rampant and Nikki Haley trying not even to mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War, in this moment, grappling with our past in film or in any other medium, that feels like something very critical. DuVernay's new film is an adaptation of Caste, the best-selling book by Isabel Wilkerson. That book asks us to look at oppression in Nazi Germany, India, and the Jim Crow South through the frame of caste. DuVernay said that she read Isabel Wilkerson's book three times, and she knew almost immediately that she wanted to make a movie. She's called her adaptation Origin, and it opens later this month.

Ava DuVernay: Hi. How are you?

David Remnick: How are you? I'm good.

Ava DuVernay: Really good to meet you. Is it our first time meeting?

David Remnick: I think so.

Ava DuVernay: I'm happy to be [crosstalk].

David Remnick: Isabel Wilkerson has written two astonishing books, The Warmth of Other Suns, which is about the great migration, and it's filled with human stories about people coming from Mississippi to Chicago and Detroit, and that absolutely transformative moment in American history. Then her book on caste, which also has great humanity in it and stories in it, but the theoretical is a very important thing. If I had said, which one are you going to make a film out of? I would have guessed the first every single time. It surprised me. Tell me a little bit about that, because obviously, you're a fan of Isabel Wilkerson's full stop. Why do a film about caste?

Ava DuVernay: I was drawn to Caste. I was drawn to the idea that there were these secret arcs of history that had a foundational connection that I didn't know about. I felt like she unlocked a new language for me personally, to discuss things that I think about often, the way that we treat each other, the way that our society is built, the systems and structures that we operate within. I'm just fascinated by that generally, and so to have a new set of tools, a new word, a new context in which to frame it all was exhilarating. I immediately started thinking about a narrative film.

David Remnick: I walked into that theater not quite knowing what would happen because I thought, "She's making a film about someone I know a little bit, Isabel Wilkerson." My wife sat next to her at the New York Times, a very private person. A very private person who had great loss in her life around the time she was writing this book. She lost her husband and her mother. It's about her quest to write this book, her discovery of these ideas. Tell me about that decision-making and getting Isabel Wilkerson to agree to it.

Ava DuVernay: She is a very private lady. I think that's one of the exciting, most incredible things about this process for me is that this woman was gracious enough and generous enough to understand that my way of sharing the information in her book was through her. As I explained it to her, I saw it as her investigation into Caste, her collecting evidence, her researching her book, and that I would follow her as she researched her book and as she learned it, as she explored more deeply, the audience would as well.

David Remnick: Is that a decision that you made born out of inspiration or frustration or both? In other words, you're faced with this book, and just to summarize it extremely quickly, what it does is link Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews, the Black experience in America of racism, and the Indian system of caste, and particularly what used to be called the untouchables, but obviously the Dalits and how those things are related. Her feeling, her idea, and it's not born with her, is that race is secondary, that a caste system is primary. That's what links these three experiences.

Did you have a go at a script that didn't have Isabel Wilkerson as the narrative driver originally, or were you always inspired to go write for the author?

Ava DuVernay: There was maybe a week where I thought, "Oh, I'm going to find characters in the book and I'll do multiple storylines and watch these characters in these worlds, and they will intersect," but when I realized I don't know enough about these characters, I don't have the characters in her book, I would have to make up characters within the stories. Now I'm getting further and further away from the book. The reason why I don't call the film Caste is because it's not just the book Caste, it's the life and work of Isabel Wilkerson. It is about this part of her life that she generously shared with me through almost two years of interviews.

It was the book and then further research into the stories in the book that really fascinated me.

David Remnick: As I was watching the film, I was also thinking about Selma and trying to make sense of you in terms of your sense of purpose. You want to not only entertain and thrill, but you also want to teach, instruct, and tell stories that you feel haven't been told. What links Selma to the new film?

Ava DuVernay: Well, I appreciate you saying that, just about entertainment, and I don't know if it's instruction. I think it's just sharing. Sharing what I learn and being excited. In 13th, I'd just been studying the prison industrial complex and criminalization, and I was learning about it, and I wanted people to know about it. In Selma, you had King. He is a hero. He is better than any Marvel superhero. It is constructed to be entertainment.

Speaker 3: We will not let your sacrifice pass in vain, dear brother. We will not let it go. We will finish what you were after. We will get what you were denied. We will vote. We will put these men out of office. We will take their power. We will win what you were slaughtered for.

Ava DuVernay: While I'm walking through and taking you through this time in history and the saga, it is constructed in a very traditional way to elicit the kind of big Hollywood entertainment emotion. That's what that film was meant to do. This breaks every screenwriting rule, every rule of filmmaking that I know.

David Remnick: How do you mean?

Ava DuVernay: Well, for the script alone, well, who's the antagonist?

David Remnick: Right? The world.

Ava DuVernay: Everybody. You and me. Right? It's not a good pitch to the studios when they ask you, you know what I mean? "What's it about?" "Caste." "Who's the antagonist?" "Us." It's just the standard three-act structure. The inner cutting, the moves from historical to contemporary to surreal images.

David Remnick: It's also brutal. The depiction of concentration camps, the depiction of Jim Crow South, and finally, the depiction, maybe most novel of all, to an American audience, of the experience of the Dalits in India.

Ava DuVernay: The manual scavengers.

David Remnick: You have a scene in which someone is cleaning public latrines with his body. To be impolite about it, he is immersed in human shit. There's no metaphor there. That's just straight up. It's also tough.

Ava DuVernay: Yes, it's tough. To position those images alongside images of a Black family reunion, sitting with a friend, telling stories, looking through old pictures, staring into the clouds with your mom, and talking about stories. The idea was to try to balance that personal memory, personal loss, personal trauma with our collective memory. Our collective loss and trauma.

David Remnick: For better or for worse, you're immersed in an expensive art, right?

Ava DuVernay: It's expensive.

David Remnick: A novelist sits down, and here she has a--

Ava DuVernay: I want to go into sculpture.

David Remnick: Then you'd have to buy the clay. Here, if you're a novelist, you need a laptop or a pencil and paper and so on and you have to make a living. As a filmmaker, you have to sell other people on your ability to not bankrupt the studio.

Ava DuVernay: That's right.

David Remnick: I want to ask about the experience of taking this idea, this story, with all your track record of success from studio to studio, what were those conversations like, and what was the frustration like because it didn't end in conventional success?

Ava DuVernay: No, it didn't. The good thing about it is that I didn't go to studio to studio. I had experience with one studio, a studio that I

that I worked with before and have a nice relationship with, and they were just on a different timeline than I was.

David Remnick: What does that mean?

Ava DuVernay: They wanted to make it next year. I wanted to make it this year. I shot this film in January and February. We debuted at Venice in September.

David Remnick: That's pretty fast.

Ava DuVernay: It's a very fast turnaround. We shot the film in--

David Remnick: Why?

Ava DuVernay: I wanted it to be out this year.

David Remnick: Why? Because of the election?

Ava DuVernay: Yes. I wanted it to be out this year. I want us to pay attention. When I say us, this whole country. I really feel like we are tired. We are exhausted. It is hard to focus because there's so much going on. We are overstimulated, and we have got to wake up and focus on what is happening. I want this film to contribute to that conversation, this transition of power that is to come, perhaps, that we have to figure this out.

David Remnick: Again

Ava DuVernay: Again. Coming out next fall, it's too late. While we had to take less money, while we had to have an independent distributor, while all of those things are true for this film, it was important for me to make those decisions so that it could be out now.

David Remnick: You just went to one studio--

Ava DuVernay: I went to one studio.

David Remnick: -they said, "No, certainly not now."

Ava DuVernay: They wanted to make it, and we were going to make it. They just wanted to make it next year.

David Remnick: Fair enough, but you didn't go to a second or a third studio?

Ava DuVernay: I did not.

David Remnick: How come?

Ava DuVernay: Well, because I would still be pitching.

David Remnick: You think?

Ava DuVernay: I know. Well, "What's the pitch?" "I want to make a film." "Oh, great, Ava. What's it about?" "Cast." "You are going to have a cast." "No, it's about cast." It's not what they're looking for. It's not a business proposition that will work.

David Remnick: What do you think they are looking for from you at this point?

Ava DuVernay: From me?

Ava DuVernay: Yes.

Ava DuVernay: Oh goodness. I don't know what they think of when they see me coming.

David Remnick: What do they think [unintelligible 00:11:50] walk through the door?

Ava DuVernay: I don't know.

David Remnick: That didn't work at that-- certainly not at that speed. Then, you did something very unusual.

Ava DuVernay: I picked up the phone, and I followed a hunch that I long had. I love PBS. For years, since I was a little girl, I would see at the end of PBS, "Paid for with the support of the Ford Foundation, with the support of such and such, and MacArthur and all the things," and the man's voice sounds so regal. I just thought, "Wow, these people have got money, and they're good."

David Remnick: Regal money voice.

Ava DuVernay: Regal money with good docs, I'm watching, but they were all documentary, and I always wondered, "Oh, I wonder if they would ever give to a narrative film." I had that idea for a couple of decades, so I picked up the phone and I called someone who would know.

David Remnick: Darren Walker at Ford.

Ava DuVernay: Darren Walker at Ford.

David Remnick: Darren Walker says to you, what? "We don't do movies?", or "That sounds great, let's do it?"

Ava DuVernay: The latter.

David Remnick: How much money did you need to make the film?

Ava DuVernay: We raised 38 million.

David Remnick: What did the film cost?

Ava DuVernay: 38 million. I'm going to use what you give me.

David Remnick: I see.

Ava DuVernay: How about that?

David Remnick: Got you. Now, one of the distinguishing aspects of this film is that you have great performances in it by people that most moviegoers will not have heard of.

Ava DuVernay: Yes. I love that.

David Remnick: Tell me about that.

Ava DuVernay: Well, the reason that I was able to cast my very favorite actors, and as directors, we say they got chops. You know what I mean? These people can go in the scenes, was because I was not with the studio, and so I did not have to hit marks. By having an independent budget, I was able to cast this remarkable woman, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. You have not seen her on magazine covers regrettably. She does not have any social media accounts, and none of those determine what an incredible actor she is.

David Remnick: Where did you find her? What were you seeing that just thrilled you?

Ava DuVernay: I'd work with her on When They See Us. She was nominated for the Emmy for her part in that. The woman is just remarkable. King Richard, she was nominated for the Oscar two years ago for that. The work is just ongoingly superb. Her commitment to her work is dynamic. It's electric. When she comes on the set, everything is just alive.

David Remnick: Ava DuVernay's new film is called Origin. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with the director Ava DuVernay. DuVernay's movies reckon with some of the most painful aspects of American history, and that is certainly true of her new movie Origin. The film is unusual in its approach.

She recreates the story of Isabel Wilkerson, a journalist, as she was writing her book, Caste: The Origins of Our discontents, a book that came out in 2020 and it was a big bestseller. Wilkerson traveled extensively around the world to explore the intersections between the histories of Nazi Germany, Southern India, and the United States. At what point do you think-- and there are a number of scenes.

There's some sort of wrestling with it, where the penny drops for Isabel Wilkerson that she sees that this conception of Caste is the prism through which she wants to wants to explore, which we might see anew or a new way, what you would call human cruelty and systems of human cruelty? What scene would you pick out where she has that moment, intellectually or otherwise?

Ava DuVernay: I married the scene to what Ms. Wilkerson told me. She told me that when she first started to think about the ideas of caste and how they applied to contemporary life was around the murder of Trayvon Martin and the verdict. She described, and she has an incredible New York Times piece that is published around that time that really shares her interrogation of it.

I won't even say interrogation because I don't feel like she was fully excavating at that time. She was just starting to touch it, starting to touch the idea and play with the idea, in my view.

David Remnick: There's also a dinner that she's having with some friends, and she's kicking around this idea of Caste. Across the table, a very well-meaning woman says, "No. Wait a minute. I think it's very different." In other words, the Nazi ideology was not about shades of difference or social levels, it was about elimination of the Jews in Germany and within the Nazi growing empire.

Speaker 4: There are so many differences between here and there. We are talking about the systematic murder of 6 million Jews. That's the official number. It's just very different than monuments to soldiers and whatnot.

Speaker 5: What are you saying is different?

Speaker 4: All of it. We're talking about deliberate extermination over many years.

Speaker 5: Yes, but wasn't slavery for 100 years, right? Isabel.

Isabel Wilkerson: Slavery lasted 246 years. That's 13 generations of people plus another 100 years of Jim Crow segregation, violence, and murder.

Speaker 4: It is, of course, horrific. I am not downplaying any of it.

Isabel Wilkerson: There were so many millions of African Americans who were murdered from the middle passage until the end of legal segregation that it goes beyond the realm of an official number. There is no number.

Speaker 5: I didn't know that. Stunning.

Speaker 4: It is. I understand you are trying to make sense of American racism. It is noble, but your thesis linking caste in Germany with the United States is flawed.

David Remnick: Isabel Wilkerson is very offended by this. There's a certain sense of-- it's not just an argument, and we are meant to be with her on her side in this argument, I think emotionally. Tell me about your thinking about that, because when the book came out, that was part of the set of ideas that people were wrestling with in good faith.

Ava DuVernay: I don't think that she's offended by it in the scene. I think that she is confronted with opposition to her primary thesis at that point in the movie. She is following the idea that caste animates all of -isms and she's starting to make connections between Nazi Germany and the African American experience writ large. She encounters a woman who says, "These are not the same. The Holocaust was worse than American slavery."

That is what the scene is about. In the scene, she is confronted with someone who is very knowledgeable about what she's sharing and very passionate about what she's saying. Saying, these two things are different in that the Holocaust was a worse atrocity. In that moment, the character does not push back in anger or in opposition. She goes and researches it, and she starts to find how to justify what she feels, which is there is a social hierarchy that determines power and status across continents, across cultures, and that is called caste.

If you're Indian, you're feeling it. If you're in Nazi Germany, you're feeling it. If you're in Uruguay, you're feeling it. If you're in Samoa, you're feeling it. If you're in the United States, you're feeling it. If you're in a room with men and women, equal numbers of men and women, someone in the room is on the bottom, and someone in the room is on the top based on our society, and on our social structure. That is the core of what she's talking about in the book. The film is trying to help you visualize that and feel it emotionally and make those connections.

David Remnick: Some of the discussion about the book when it came out was about the degree to which these systems are movable or not movable, reformable, or not reformable or erasable, or not erasable. This is not a kind of the Obama view of the world, we take two steps forward and one step back, and that there are all kinds of aspects to systemic racism that persist, but great progress has been made. The liberal argument. I read it, both her book and your film, as maybe to some degree darker than that. That the persistence of these systems is stronger than we know.

Ava DuVernay: Absolutely. We are existing within this concrete set of ideas. Yes, you can be hopeful about it, but ultimately we operate in the ways that the systems and the structures mandate that we operate. Until we are able to actually shift systems, our hopefulness, our bright outlook, our dreams can only go so far within systems that are built, that are perpetuated by these sets of ideas, a set of ideas that someone is on the top, someone is on the bottom, and it must be that way in order for a maintenance of power and status to occur.

Her theory which at times I wasn't sure I agreed with, gives us a framework to think about those systems and what it would take to change. At some point, hope needs to have a blueprint. It needs to have a game plan. In order to make a blueprint and a game plan, you need to know the rules of the game. This is part of the rules of the game, and it's been somewhat hidden from us, I feel.

David Remnick: I wonder if you'd share a worry with me. I work at The New Yorker, and it has broadly speaking, a certain politics, and it also has a certain audience. I sometimes worry, no matter how hard we work in our thinking, in our reporting, in our editing and writing, and all the rest, that it's hard not to be preaching to the converted. That the people that will come to these pieces will in large measure going in, agree with their basic framework to begin with. Do you share a similar anxiety with your film that the people who are going to click on your film or go to see your film will more or less not be the people you're trying to change profoundly?

Especially since you tell me that you want to get this out before the election, that tells me you want to play some role in changing minds.

Ava DuVernay: I'm in a position now where I don't feel that the people who are going to be watching this film are the people who don't need it because what we are finding, and my fear around the film is that, and I'm hearing this already, "Oh, I know what it is," and "Oh, it's made by a Black woman and stars a Black woman." "Oh, this is a Black film," and "It doesn't have anything to say to me," and "I got it." I'm hearing that a lot.

David Remnick: From whom, and how?

Ava DuVernay: In Hollywood, we have this award season where people in our industry get the film early before it's in theaters. In just watching the early screenings and watching who's engaging with the film on the screeners and the different early previews, we see a large number of people of color who are watching it and who are engaging with it, and who are talking about it. There feels to be some hesitation from people who are not of color.

David Remnick: In the summer of 2020, we had a racial reckoning so they say. Everything changed, completely transformed, or is that just total nonsense? What changed in the movie business and what didn't?

Ava DuVernay: There were a lot of wonderful sentiments shared. I think a lot of people talked about their dreams and their hopes for justice and equity. I think a lot of people posted about it.

David Remnick: You're not describing a revolution. You're describing--

Ava DuVernay: Polite conversation,

David Remnick: Polite conversation.

Ava DuVernay: There was a lot of that, which I think had its place. Unfortunately, it was defined as a racial reckoning, as a revolution in the way that our industry was going to work. That was not the definition of what was happening at the time. Many of us were aware of that. I was surprised at how quickly things pivoted and swung back in the other direction.

David Remnick: How do you feel that in the movie business?

Ava DuVernay: You had this moment where folks were talking and feeling and striving and wanting to change, to create new systems. That came straight up against the pandemic, which is, in my view, the cascade of those events has left my industry in a very vulnerable place. For me, I look at it as a hopeful place. I see it as an opportunity because no one knows what the heck is going on.

Whether you're a streamer, whether you are a theater, whether you are a filmmaker, whether you are crew, actors. We are all flailing, trying to figure out what the next steps are for a healthy industry and try to make new systems not just exist within and act differently within the old system. We have to think about new ways to do it. That was one of the things we tried to tackle with the way that we put this film together.

David Remnick: You talk about technology and you said somewhere that, "Yes, I work extremely hard on the look of my film and how it's going to look on a gigantic screen." There's unbelievable virtue to that. You know damn well-

Ava DuVernay: It's going to end up on your phone.

David Remnick: -it's going to end up on a lot of people's phone and you're okay with that.

Ava DuVernay: Oh, I am.

David Remnick: Tell me about that.

Ava DuVernay: I'd rather more people see it on a tiny screen than a few people see it on a big screen. I love the big screen and I'm a diehard theatergoer, but I understand that if you want your message to be shared and the films that I make, and certainly this film is one where I have a mission that I want to--

David Remnick: I don't want to put words in your mouth. Your mission is above all not aesthetic are you saying, that it's more political and about message, about changing us?

Ava DuVernay: I'll tell you that I care just as much about every frame of my film as Christopher Nolan cares about his.

David Remnick: No doubt. To see it on a phone doesn't bother you?

Ava DuVernay: I'm going to say, I care as much about every film as he does, but I would sacrifice in a heartbeat all of the work that I put into the way the thing looks, and every decision of every pillow, every flower, my lighting, my sound, that Skywalker sound that I've worked on for three months, the color grade, I would sacrifice it all for you to see the film, not get those aesthetics, I'll call them virtues, and hear what I'm trying to say rather than looking at the way that I'm saying it. Like watching somewhere on a plane, if I looked at it just for aesthetics, it would break my heart because it's washed out and it looks like crap.

Then I see people smiling or crying or feeling or watching with their eyes glued to the back of that seat. What would you choose?

David Remnick: It's also a matter of economics and access. I would think that probably the income level of people who are getting to theaters on any consistent basis and paying $25 is a lot lower than the number of people who have a Netflix account.

Ava DuVernay: Absolutely. It's very personal to me. I grew up in Compton. There's no movie theater in Compton.

David Remnick: What's the nearest movie theater?

Ava DuVernay: We would go to the Lakewood Mall, which was a bus ride about an hour away, my aunt and I.

David Remnick: It was rare?

Ava DuVernay: No. It was often. We took that bus ride once a week to see movies.

David Remnick: You screen the movie at the Venice Film Festival. Upon entering the festival, you said this, "For Black filmmakers, we're told that people who love films in other parts of the world don't care about our stories and don't care about our films." Tell me about that.

Ava DuVernay: If you want to have a fun exercise, think of your favorite films made by Black directors starring Black folk, and go check and see how it was distributed worldwide. Usually, they're not distributed around the world.

David Remnick: Because it's considered parochial and it won't do any business. What's the thinking?

Ava DuVernay: The myth is that Black films don't work overseas. The message to Black filmmakers is, "Your films don't work overseas. They will not come. They're not interested. We cannot sell the film. We cannot market the film overseas." We know that that's not the case. They're just not in that system. That international distribution system is very difficult for Black filmmakers, for Brown filmmakers. For filmmakers that are outside of the studio system, it's difficult.

David Remnick: How do you break through?

Ava DuVernay: I don't know. I'm trying to figure that out, and I'm going to. If there's one last thing I do, I'm going to figure out how to move our films and I want to start with my own films. I've learned distribution in the United States. I need to learn how to connect our work with people around the world. Right now streamers are the solution, streamers are the answer. If you've made an independent film like I have, and you are doing it hand-to-hand on your own, we have to be able to find ways of connection.

David Remnick: Ava DuVernay, thank you so much.

Ava DuVernayThank you so much. I'm so happy I got to be here with you.

David Remnick: It was great.

[music]

Ava DuVernay's new film Origin opens nationwide later this month. It's based on the book by Isabel Wilkerson. I spoke with Wilkerson when her book, Caste, came out in 2020.

Isabel Wilkerson: Every aspect of life was so tightly controlled and scripted and restricted. Emerging from the research and to that era, I realized that race was an insufficient term to capture the depth and organize repression that people were living under that was sufficient was Caste. I find it at this moment of upheaval that we're currently in, that we need new language. We need a new framework for understanding the divisions, and how we got to where we are. In some ways, it is still held captive to the hierarchies that were created many centuries ago before any of us were here.

Caste is essentially an artificial hierarchy, graded, ranking of human value on a society, determined standing, and respect, and benefit of the doubt, access to resources, through no fault or action of anyone's own, it's what you're born into. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions that undergird the more visible delineations that we make among ourselves. In other words, as I as often say, caste is the bones, race is the skin, and then class is the diction, and the accent, and the education, the clothing, the things that we can control, as we present ourselves to the world.

David Remnick: You can hear that at NewYorkerRadio.org.

[music]

 

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