Reaching and building the audience for films by black directors was the impetus for AFFRM, the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, which DuVernay co-founded in 2011, and has described as a “distribution collaborative of like-minded people who feel that there needs to be a new approach to black cinema.” I Will Follow was the first film released by AFFRM, and DuVernay has handled the theater booking of the collective’s releases—which number eight so far—herself. Placing films in larger venues, where they might reach a wider audience, is part of the AFFRM model, as is reaching out to existing African-American film festivals and innovating more strategic paths to distribution. Having handled obscene publicity budgets for studio films, DuVernay intuited a way to launch a smaller film, with energy and will in place of money.
Finding a way has always been her way. Born and raised in the Compton and Lynwood areas of Los Angeles, DuVernay learned from watching her mother, who married at 16 and had three children before divorcing DuVernay’s abusive biological father. A human resources executive through midlife, DuVernay’s mother moved to Montgomery, Alabama after remarrying, and pursued the career she had always wanted as the director of a preschool. Approaching college age at the time, DuVernay stayed behind and began her degree, a double major in English and African-American studies, at UCLA.
“If I could have, I would have,” Duvernay said of going to film school. If she regrets her lack of formal training, she knew it wouldn’t hold her back. “The things that I do best are not things I learned in school, they’re skills I picked up in life and in doing my other job,” she said. “I’m able to articulate my aesthetic sensibility, especially around the representation of black bodies, in a way that may not be as technical as other people, but is more technical than some. Can I hang out with grips talking about equipment? No! But I can work with my actors to block scenes, and get to the heart of a scene. I can translate my narrative ideas to physicality on set. That’s not necessarily something you have to be formally trained to do.”
DP Bradford Young and DuVernay on the set of Selma
David Oyelowo, of British and Nigerian heritage, plays a bus driver from Compton in Middle of Nowhere. With his Royal Shakespeare Company background, “I am not going to be your first choice” for that role, Oyelowo joked. But DuVernay “saw something in me and she brought it out, and I can walk the streets with pride, having played that role. She got me there.” Oyelowo became a believer, especially in DuVernay’s abilities to lead and communicate with a wide range of people, from hardened crew to ultra-sensitive talent. “Ava’s one of the few directors I’ve encountered who has all of those skill sets combined with an incredible cinematic vision.”
And so it happened that, at Oyelowo’s behest, Oprah Winfrey became one of the four people to watch Middle of Nowhere.
“Who does that?” DuVernay exclaimed. “I told him, ‘You’ve got some balls on you!’ I mean, I wouldn’t have called her, even if I had known her. I wouldn’t have had the guts to call and ask for something that big.” The whole thing, the way it all happened, DuVernay insists, is “all outside the norm.” Winfrey ended up joining Pitt as a producer on the film, as well as taking a small role as Civil Rights pioneer Annie Lee Cooper.
From the beginning of her involvement with Selma, DuVernay was firm about two things: “I had to be able to hire all of my homies;” she also wanted to rewrite the screenplay. Among the homies in question were cinematographer Bradford Young, who shot Middle of Nowhere, and editor Spencer Averick who worked with DuVernay on both previous features. Hiring her own crew was part of DuVernay’s belief that everyone at work on a film affects its outcome in an almost holistic way.
“I feel so strongly that the people around the image dictate what the image is going to be,” DuVernay said. When the energy is right, the image responds. “I really took care choosing who I added to the existing core group; the existing core group was all there. And so now I have a bigger core group!” New members on Team DuVernay include Selma’s all-star cast, with Tom Wilkinson (who plays Lyndon B. Johnson), Tim Roth, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Giovanni Ribisi, Alessandro Nivola, Tessa Thompson… even Martin Sheen.
DuVernay’s rewrite of the script, uncredited due to guild rules, refocused the film on the procedural and strategic aspects of the protest; it also added several women to the action, including Coretta Scott King, who was only a brief, offscreen presence in the original draft. English actress Carmen Ejogo, who plays Mrs. King, was grateful for a depiction that allowed some dimension into a character often treated as decorative in “great man” biopics.
“Ava understood that there is no Martin without the support of Coretta,” said Ejogo, who met King after playing her once before in the 2001 HBO movie Boycott. Ejogo remembers being struck, watching a 2003 episode of Oprah Winfrey in which King submitted to a makeover, by the sense of a woman literally fixed in time, her hair and makeup unchanged since the 1960s. “Coretta was that veneered personality, in so many ways,” Ejogo said, “but there was more to her, and Ava’s writing allowed both sides to come through.”
If Ejogo had a concern about DuVernay, having seen her previous films, it had to do with their “languid” look and feel. Could she achieve the drama and rhythm that an epic historical scale demands? “What I think is quite brilliant about the film she’s constructed is that she has built that epic action and drama, to the point that at times you think you’re watching a thriller,” said Ejogo, “And yet she’s also really stuck to her guns about where she comes from when it comes to the relationship.”
“Once Ava shifted the focus from the politicking to the man and the movement,” said Oyelowo, they knew they had the right story, and the right director. “I have always believed that movies are momentum,” he said, about the difficulty of finally getting an ideal version of Selma made. “If the momentum starts to dissipate, the thing starts to die on the vine.”
The same can be said of social movements, which so often hinge on that most literal expression of progress, the forward march—an image at the heart of Selma. Ava DuVernay seems to understand this imperative implicitly, the way that momentum, once established, can carry a filmmaker forward. If she couldn’t have predicted Selma, her faith in her own movement was sound. “The work is going to speak for me, and the work is going to lead to where I should be,” she said. “And that’s what happened, in ways I could never imagine.” MM
Tech Box
Selma was shot digitally, using two Alexa cameras for most scenes, and three for larger sequences, such as those taking place on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The film was shot with anamorphic lenses and minimal use of Steadicam and more significant handheld camerawork, as well as a Techno crane for bridge sequences. Some primary assembly was done using Final Cut Pro; the rest of the editing and mixing was done using Avid.
This article appeared in MovieMaker‘s Winter 2015 issue. Stills and behind-the-scenes images from Selma courtesy of Paramount Pictures. All portraits shot by Ezra Wolfinger in New York City, December 2014.
To subscribe to MovieMaker Magazine, click here.
Share:
