Award-winning writer and director Ava DuVernay is one of the most influential change agents to emerge from the African American community in years. Unlike Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr., DuVernay tackles civil and social disobedience through her words and camera. DuVernay has earned a Primetime Emmy Award, two NAACP Image Awards, a BAFTA Film Award, and a BAFTA TV Award, as [she has been] nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe. She is thankful, but DuVernay cherishes her work’s impact on her community more than Hollywood’s validation.
Her new film, Origin, culminates everything she’s worked on since her directorial debut, I Will Follow, in 2010. Origin interprets Isabella Wilkerson’s 2020 bestselling nonfiction book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book breaks down the “caste” theory, which addresses any class or group of people who inherit exclusive privileges or are perceived as socially distinct. The philosophy is not easily digestible as it connects various cultural practices and belief systems that weren’t perceived as connected.
“It’s empowering to know that this is intentionally done. There are structures and systems set up to increase power and status in other people, but it’s not earned, it’s not deserved, it’s not inherent; it’s set up to do this by suppressing the brilliance, the community, the intelligence of other people. It’s the only way that supremacy functions. It’s not real. It can only exist if something else is depressed or stomped out. And then whatever is left rises to the top based on this false construction. That, to me, is the knowledge that we should all have,” DuVernay explains.
“A big part of the way oppression works is to isolate. By keeping everyone separate, you can’t be strong together because everyone feels isolated in their oppression. Caste doesn’t replace race, not my interpretation of it. Race sits on top of caste. Caste props up racism and sexism and homophobia and all that. Unless we can understand it’s a part of it, there is a piece we [can’t] solve. It gives us a new fluency to having these conversations,” she says.
A former celebrity publicist, DuVernay understands the gravity of strategic messaging and positioning. One of her first stops on her promotional tour with Origin was the Ron Clark Academy, a nonprofit middle school in the heart of Atlanta. DuVernay praised the school’s ability to nurture young scholars by providing them a space to learn and grow without the usual constraints on young minds.
“Listening to the feedback from the children after watching the film was interesting on so many levels, but one of the most interesting things I took away is they used the word ‘they’ a lot as if it was so far away. They are still in a time where it’s not ‘us’ it’s them. And I loved it because it meant that the marks and echoes of castes and racism hadn’t quite touched these young people. After all, they haven’t internalized it. They haven’t experienced grief in the same way and the societal luggage that we all carry. Watching kids metabolize the story gives a completely different connection to things. It’s completely different,” she says.
DuVernay knows Origin is a career-defining project for her and, in many ways, believes it was the culmination of the work she’s put in over the last 14 years.
“My growth with this project came from the fact that I felt so in [my] pocket. For maybe the first time in my career, I completely knew how to do this. Everything I’d done before led me to feel so comfortable and confident [about] what I was doing with this project. For example, a sprawling cast, I had a bigger cast with ‘When They See Us’; an international production, I’d done that with A Wrinkle in Time; doing [deep] research, I’d done it with 13th; the management of a crew and how to really be able to set that tone, I’d done it with seven seasons of ‘Queen Sugar’; dealing with real historical pieces and estates and shooting in real places, Selma; the romance piece I did with Middle of Nowhere and I Will Follow; so at this point, I was ready, and it was like, let’s go!” she exclaims.
Anyone striving for excellence lives by the mantra that proper preparation prevents a poor performance. For DuVernay, years of practice have established trust with her audience and peers, making her one of the most influential voices and resources shaping culture. Particularly with 2024 being an election year, the conversation Origin can potentially evoke in this political climate is vital.
“I think the bar is pretty low right now, and I just want there to be a conversation. This election is coming and it’s looking like it’s going to go a certain way. I feel like we’re being gaslit and too many of us are not paying attention. If Origin can contribute to a conversation we should be having to enlighten and wake people up, then that’s what it was supposed to do,” she says.
After months of all-encompassing work as a writer and director of the film, DuVernay says the final product was exactly as she envisioned it when she read the book and decided to bring it to film.
“This is exactly what I envisioned, and that’s [unusual]. You’ll [often] start making something and [change it] as you get into the creative process. But this is almost exactly the way I envisioned it, so it was a different process but very satisfying,” she shares.
As DuVernay looks forward to continuing the conversation on race and caste and challenging her community and the world to examine our painful past to move forward, she says her biggest wish is for the Black community to begin to prioritize health in a much more vital way.
“I want us to be healthy,” she says. “I see so many of us not taking care of ourselves because we’re taking care of others, just trying to survive. I look at my own father and his passing, and I wish he [had taken] care of himself. It’s not the way we’ve been taught to live. We’ve been taught to put ourselves last. We’ve been taught not to deal with mental health because that’s weird. Our families were just trying to put the ends together to meet. We’re great at staying healthy in spirit, but we need to be stronger in our physicality. It’s what’s been on my mind lately as I age, and I’m observing my family. It’s what I wish for all of us. I wish us good health.”
Origin is playing in select theaters now.
Cover photo by Norman Wong
Photos credit: Atsushi Nishijima, courtesy of NEON
