Selma director Ava DuVernay, 42, spoke at the 2015 BlogHer conference in New York City and during it she discussed why she passed on the opportunity to direct Marvel’s Black Panther.
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She didn’t take the decision lightly. When DuVernay met with Marvel Studios’ executives she wanted to see if they were compatible and if Black Panther was worth investing her time and effort in when she knew a commitment like that would surely force her to pass up more projects that are more meaningful to her.
“For me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to bed with? Because it’s really a marriage, and for this, it would be three years,” DuVernay explained. “It’d be three years of not doing other things that are important to me. So it was a question of, is this important enough for me to do? At one point, the answer was yes, because I thought there was value in putting that kind of imagery into the culture in a worldwide, huge way, in a certain way: excitement, action, fun, all those things, and yet still be focused on a black man as a hero — that would be pretty revolutionary.”
One of the positives that weighed heavily on DuVernay was the international exposure that would come from directing a Marvel film.
“These Marvel films go everywhere from Shanghai to Uganda, and nothing that I probably will make will reach that many people, so I found value in that,” she said. “That’s how the conversations continued, because that’s what I was interested in. But everyone’s interested in different things.”
In the end, the decision came down to compromise. She couldn’t rationalize putting time and effort into a film that at the end of the day “wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film.”
(via THR)
Black Panther, starring Chadwick Boseman (Captain America: Civil War, 42), is scheduled to arrive in theaters July 6, 2018.
