Ava DuVernay Quotes
-
Black people loving and losing is something we don’t see enough of. We’re always in these heightened situations like something big is happening, something funny or something violent. And you know what? Sometimes we die of breast cancer or a broken heart. Things happen that are just not being explored cinematically. It’s time we reinvigorated that type of film.
→ -
For far too long, independent voices have been relegated to places where these ideas are not seen on a mass level.
→ -
As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that’s my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I’m interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent.[These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love.
→ -
Stop asking, start doing.
→ -
Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.
→ -
At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.
→ -
Historically, you've had really muddy, unforgiving, unintentional images of black people.
→ -
If you're doing something outside of dominant culture there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself.
→ -
It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.
→ -
I tell the stories that are of interest to me.
→ -
I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.
→ -
If your work is solid, it really doesn't matter what people you know because good work starts to rise to the top.
→ -
I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.
→ -
Usually, you have two people in a scene, and in the history of cinema the hero is most likely going to be the white guy. And the other guy is his friend who is carrying the bag or whatever, and you're not going to light for that guy.
→ -
We're a new world and it's not pretty. It's going to be for the brave to figure out how to survive in this.
→ -
Time will tell ... whether folks want to point and stare at the black woman filmmaker who made a certain kind of film, and pat her on the back, or if they want to actually roll up the sleeves and do a little bit of work so that there can be more of me coming through.
→ -
I think it's a wonderful time to be a black woman who makes films. It's a good time to be an artist period. Traditional models of making and consuming art are breaking down and being rebuilt. I find that to be incredibly exciting as a filmmaker and film marketer.
→ -
[ Age Of Trump] was something that I really wanted to do, and I also really wanted it to feel evergreen, so we made a lot of attempts not to bog it down in the campaign fight, even though we were right in the middle of that. I wanted it to be something that could live on and be a conversation piece long after this inauguration, whoever it was going to be.
→ -
Hollywood needs more women directors, and Mama Ava needs a carafe and a half of that sweet vino divino.
→ -
We [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just "I have a dream." They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids.
→ -
I'm making and marketing my films, by any means necessary, and enjoying life while I do so.
→ -
I make films about Black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a Black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.
→ -
When I'm marketing a film, whether its mine or someone else's, I work with a great deal of strategy and elbow grease until the job is done.
→ -
There's no reason not to employ, seek out and take a chance on a woman filmmaker that you might not have been looking at her direction. She's not done it before because you've not given her the opportunity to do it before, and I'm just happy that folks like Jessica Jones' Melissa Rosenberg and folks like Ryan Murphy are also embracing this idea.
→ -
All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.
→ -
Those [old] days are gone... accept the reality and do it.
→ -
Netflix represents, as well as all the streaming services, something that I've been talking about being so important to inclusive voices around films.
→ -
The terrain of the face is the most dynamic thing you can point the camera at, to me. I love production design and bells and whistles and all of that. I love a technograin as much as the next gal, but a great actor's face? What else should we be looking at?
→ -
When you say cultural icon, I scrunch my nose.
→ -
I love making films. I'm happiest when I'm doing it. For me, the fear is not being able to make the next thing and not being able, as a woman filmmaker and as a filmmaker of color, to put together the resources to make another thing.
→
Related Authors
-
Emayatzy E. Corinealdi Film actress -
Morten Tyldum Film director -
Adepero Oduye Actress -
Gabrielle Union Actress -
Coretta Scott King Author -
-
Venus Williams Tennis player -
Lyndon B. Johnson 36th U.S. President -
Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil rights activist -
Common Hip-hop artist -
Issa Rae Writer -
Tim Roth Actor -
Carmen Ejogo Film actress -
Lee Daniels Film actor -
Alfre Woodard Film actress -
Oprah Winfrey Media proprietor -
Ryan Coogler Film director -
Lorraine Toussaint Film actress -
Rutina Wesley Film actress -
David Oyelowo Actor