Ava DuVernay: "I have always been attached to my darkness" | Television and radio

"I"I can only do this movie now, after doing everything I've done before," says Ava DuVernay on an exceptionally hot afternoon in Manhattan. The famous filmmaker answers questions at a posh hotel in the city center, near Central Park, where the event that inspired her latest project took place exactly 30 years ago.

DuVernay tells the difficult and presumptive story of racial profiling, injustice, lost innocence and media misinformation over a 25-year period. The result is an inspired and often troubling confluence of the themes that motivated her throughout her career, from the best Oscar-nominated film Selma to the 13th documentary on mbad incarceration. "I really thought it would be the first interaction between some people, not only with this case, but with all layers of the criminal justice system," she said.

It was April 19, 1989, when Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old investment bank, was beaten and raped while she was jogging in Central Park. The attack led to the arrest and conviction of a group of black and Latino boys – Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson – who became known as Central Park. Five. Or, as the tabloids called them when they were held in chains and violently forced to confess crimes they had not committed and for which they would be exonerated thirteen years later, a "werewolf" or a "wandering gang".

DuVernay was 16 years old at the time, the same age as the eldest of the five boys. She lived in Compton, on the opposite coast, and remembers calling her cousins ​​in New York to ask what "delirium" meant. Three days after the badault, the New York Daily News used the word to describe the boys, who "randomly attacked the people they found." DuVernay's cousins ​​told him that the sentence was actually "delusional", not "delusional", and that it just meant hanging out. But the term has remained and has become a pernicious abbreviation for a black misdeed: the mayor of the time, Ed Koch, called the badault "crime of the century", while a young and Proud young real estate man, Donald Trump, was spending $ 85,000 in one page ads for the boys to be put to death.

"I wanted to be a lawyer and because I was just a few steps away from the courtroom, I would take some business," recalls DuVernay. As a teenager, she had received a briefcase for Christmas the year before. she listened to U2's music on the theme of social justice and kept her Amnesty International membership card nearby. But the Central Park affair left him disenchanted with the media and what appeared to be the biased and extrajudicial functioning of the criminal justice system.

"I found a direct relationship between the children of my neighborhood and these boys at the news. The fact that unleashed to become unleashed, became wolves, became animals. I remember having timed it and thought, "Wow, they're saying something that's not true to the news."

DuVernay, 46, has come to view the case as a parable of rhetoric, how blindly we absorb and regurgitate the stories told to us above. Without sacrificing the sense of visceral and often overwhelming intimacy that characterizes DuVernay's films, When They See Us is both a narrative deconstruction of the case – its impact on boys, their families and the city as a whole – and a timely call for collective action and suspicion.

"The case was built on a story of emotion completely constructed by exacerbated language, a biased presentation of facts," she says. "That's what we came back to. People call me a conspiracy theorist because I always have the opposite view. But it really comes from: "I do not really know what it is, I'm going to ask more questions and question it myself, that's what I'm asking people to do."

When they see us is the logical extension of DuVernay's work so far, which fights against race, incarceration and institutional oppression. Her second feature film, Middle of Nowhere, tells the story of a woman who was waiting for her husband to complete his prison sentence by paying painful attention to the complexity of marital devotion and individuality. . This paved the way for Selma, who reported on Martin Luther King's efforts to pbad the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The film announced the arrival at DuVernay of a new unshakeable voice in the great American cinema. Then comes the 13th, a surgical examination of mbad incarceration and the amendment of the same name – and his second Oscar nomination. And last year, with the Kaleidoscopic science-fiction show attended by Oprah A Wrinkle in Time, DuVernay became the first African-American woman to make a movie with a budget of over 100 million. dollars.

"I was particularly prepared to tell this story in a way I would not have seen two years ago," DuVernay says, stopping from time to time looking out the window as she discusses from his work with a cleared lack of refreshment. "I needed the Wrinkle scale to tell a story as frankly; I needed to understand the criminal justice system of work that I did on the 13th; I needed Middle of Nowhere to find out what I knew about families, mothers, and wives. It is I who imbibe, ingests and presents it in another way. "

The five years since Selma was kind to DuVernay. Last fall, she signed a $ 100 million contract with Netflix; Last summer, she sat on the Cannes jury alongside Cate Blanchett and Denis Villenueve. She has to make a film adaptation of DC Comics' The New Gods and a documentary about Prince, for which she has the blessing of the singer's estate. She is also the most successful director on Twitter, where she regularly records the commendable gesture of promoting her work and creating a personality aligned with it and independent of it – a brand, if you will.

There, to its 2.1 million followers, it defends the work of other artists and chimes on hot topics like Game of Thrones and the treatment of some colored characters by the series, as well as Liam Neeson, whose recent comments on the revenge against black men for the rape of his friend DuVernay called an example of "white privilege".

It 's on Twitter that she mentions that the idea of ​​a Central Park Five project was launched by Raymond Santana, who was only 14 years old when he was in charge. he was sentenced to five to ten years in a youth correctional facility. "What will be your next movie?" #thecentralparkfive # cp5 # centralpark5 maybe ???? #wishfulthinking #fingerscrossed, "he wrote to him in 2015. DuVernay sent him a message in reply, the rest of which belongs to the story.

The ascension of DuVernay has always been serendipitous. At the University of UCLA, where she specialized in Anglo-American and African-American Studies, she was badigned to the OJ Simpson Unit as an intern at CBS News. . She noted that the television coverage seemed to belong to MTV and that the celebration of audiovisual journalism was not what it had planned. At the age of 32, when DuVernay took a camera for the first time and embarked on the realization of a film in the form of a short film of 6,000 $ entitled Saturday Night Life, she was determined to act beyond the control of the guardians of the industry. In previous years, she ran her own public relations agency, the DuVernay agency, and her direct knowledge of the industry and her scarcity of black filmmakers forced her to do art without being bothered by it. Hollywood device.

"I feel less at the mercy of what the industry thought of my job because I knew what it was going to be. I have therefore created my own work, marketed my own work, distributed my first three films by myself, "she says. "I was not really looking for inclusion in this space before inclusion was the word. I did not expect much.

DuVernay's aversion to compromise is the product of her enterprising nature and her understanding of her own uniqueness in a system, she says, which "prevents parity". But this also comes from a permanent relationship with the power of representation in pop culture. "I've always been attached to my darkness, I felt very connected to blacks and black culture, I think because I went to high school without any black," says DuVernay, who attended a Catholic school reserved for girls during a bus ride. far from his native Compton. In college, she published the black student newspaper. "It's the 1990s, the golden age of hip-hop, it's Public Enemy, the black is beautiful. This manifests itself in different ways for different people, but I have identified myself with the dominant culture. "

Since his first feature film, I Will Follow 2010, the landscape has changed considerably, not only with the recent profusion of women and people of color in film and television, but also with the ability of DuVernay and its peers to conserve the authenticity of their vision.

"There was no precedent for that," she says. "Some black women made films, but I did not see the integration of personality that we now see with women like Lena Waithe, Issa Rae, Shonda [Rhimes]. They did not know how to handle us and we did not know how to handle them. Only recently have I had to meet the industry's expectations because there were none five or six years ago. "

DuVernay, and other filmmakers of the color, are expected to abandon the gender of the tent-pole genre to men. "I am not offered much, and what I get is usually historical or something that has to do with women and blacks," says DuVernay. "For example, I will not have John Wick 3, although I would love to do it. I have a good friend who led the second unit on Star Wars and who kicks bad. I have a friend who is on Westworld right now. Are there enough of us? No, certainly not for the lack of interested or able women. "

Another is that these artists, historically excluded from the influence of these institutional monuments, should seek to enshrine them. "All filmmakers are told that they should be concerned about these things," DuVernay says, referring to the Oscars, Emmys and Palme d'Or. "But the main inventors of this point of view are white and cis men. When I went to Cannes, I really thought about my dress, although I like watching movies with other filmmakers and I can even say that I would like to show my work there one day. But I know people who would have cut their left arm to play in certain festivals and in certain rooms. I've tried to worry about it, but it has nothing to do with what I make and why I do it. "

DuVernay recently told me that she was telling one of her friends that her television show was not nominated for an Emmy. You have had your Oscar nomination, he tells him, then you can say all that. "No, no, that's not it!" DuVernay recalls, shamelessly stretching his arms in a strangling motion. "It's been learning to get to a point where I can reconcile that." Gal Gal, on the theme of the camp this month, the first time of DuVernay, was an exercise in this reconciliation. "I can not say that I had fun, but I can say that I was fascinated. I enjoyed it as an expression of art, but there was a lot of judgment. "

Although his work compels us to face indelible stains on American history, DuVernay understands himself as a storyteller and not as a historian. But she also knows that some viewers will learn about the case of Central Park Five through When They See Us. "It does not bother me anymore that people use my work as a point of entry into history. "she explains. "With Selma, I felt something like," So how are you going to learn about civil rights, through this film? " "These days, however, the boundaries between politics and pop have collapsed. type of cultural osmosis in which the series draws its inspiration with the inclusion of archived press footage of a trump bloviating. "His 15 minutes are almost up," says a character.

"Politics and pop culture are only one," DuVernay says. "I mean, AOC is a rock star, Stacey Abrams, Michelle Obama. For the moment, this seems to give priority to women and people of color, but I'm sure the white men were like: "JFK is a rock star" or Reagan, as they went crazy about him. "

These days, they become crazy about DuVernay, as evidenced by the swarms of people, including Oprah and Al Sharpton, who went to the Harlem Apollo Historical Theater later that night for the world premiere of When They See Us. DuVernay presented a typically New York story, an American story, in front of a crowd of New Yorkers in awe. And in the center were Kevin, Raymond, Yusef, Antron and Korey, arms tied, fists raised to challenge and redeem.