The first Black woman to direct a $100 million-grossing film is shunning the studios and their rules — and turning to philanthropists like Melinda French Gates.
There is very little about Ava DuVernay’s newest film, “Origin,” that follows the traditional Hollywood playbook.
Like many movies, it’s based on a book, but not a novel. Instead, “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson is a 500-page anthropological door stopper about race relations in America. When Netflix, the studio who originally agreed to finance the project, wanted a later release date than DuVernay did, the 51-year-old director walked away and raised $38 million to make the film herself. She got the backing from philanthropists like Melinda French Gates and organizations like the Ford Foundation in what DuVernay says is the first time this model of financing has been used to support a narrative film (it’s not uncommon for documentaries).
And then she went and shot the movie on three continents in 37 days.
“I knew what I wanted to say,” DuVernay says. “It was very important for me to say it on a very specific timeline.”
What was the big deal about the deadline? The 2024 U.S. presidential election. And mission accomplished, so far: “Origin” debuted at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and hit Hulu earlier this summer. DuVernay says she’s not trying to influence the outcome of the race but instead generate dialogue between people who might have become “closed off” from each other.
Few directors are as adept at opening up social dialogue as DuVernay. A so-called “latecomer” to the film industry—she started her career as a publicist and didn’t pick up a camera until 2005, when she was 32—DuVernay made her directorial debut in 2008 with full-length documentary “This Is The Life” and, by 2014, had become the first Black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe directing award for her work on “Selma.” Four years after that, with “A Wrinkle in Time” (2018), DuVernay became the first Black woman to direct a $100-million-grossing film.
Now DuVernay—one of the featured faces on this year’s Forbes 50 Over 50 list—is entering a new phase of her career. She’s considering ways to make a statement about injustices through the lens of a genre film, say a romance or thriller. She’s also thinking about how to make more films outside of the traditional studio system—this time from start to finish, including the distribution process—dodging the endless loop of feedback and collective decision-making.
“‘Origin’ was the most free I’ve ever been making a project since the early days when I was making $50,000 – $100,000 projects with my own money,” DuVernay says. “These financing partners really gave me that freedom.”
One particular partner is trusting DuVernay with more than a film budget. When Melinda French Gates announced in late May that she would be giving $1 billion to advance gender equity globally, DuVernay was named as one of the individual leaders responsible for identifying recipients of these funds. Specifically, French Gates has told DuVernay that she has $20 million in grants to distribute, as she sees fit, to causes and activists who need extra funding to advance their work.
“More often than not, the stories that get told in our country—and the people who tell them—represent only a small slice of the population. Ava is completely disrupting that model. With her latest film, ‘Origin,’ she challenged the way films are traditionally made and proved that audiences are hungry for stories centered on justice and equality. I was so proud to help support that project,” French Gates told Forbes in an email. “When I thought of the global leaders I wanted to offer $20 million in grantmaking funds, Ava was a no-brainer. She has the creative vision the world needs right now, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.”
DuVernay hasn’t identified her targets just yet, but she does know that she won’t constrain herself to the world of filmmaking when it comes to distributing the funds: “It’s a big wide world out there and it’s going to take some time to really watch and learn and meet and travel.”
In the meantime, DuVernay is not losing sight of her roots. Born in Long Beach, California and raised in Compton, which lacked a local movie theatre, DuVernay is well aware of the “cinema segregation” that can affect Black and brown communities. And so, in 2018, she opened the ARRAY Creative Campus, a 14,000-square foot facility near LA’s Historic Filipinotown that serves as a pre- and post-production center for her production company (also called ARRAY) which doubles as a place to screen films to the community.
Ownership is important to DuVernay. She notes that Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo studios once occupied a whole city block in Chicago; Tyler Perry has a 330-acre lot at the edge of Atlanta. DuVernay borrows a phrase from her mentor, legendary Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, when describing Array and its peers: “liberated territory.”
“You do not have to pass through a studio lot and hope that you’re always in the good graces of the corporate entity that allows you to rent space on their campus,” DuVernay says. “I have my own campus, and that space is mine, and it is free… It’s addictive to be free.”
This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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