Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay on the Push for “Inclusion” (Not Diversity), Tackling Black Lives Matter Beyond the “Hashtag”
“Everybody gets caught up in the slogan and the protest,” says Winfrey as she and DuVernay sit for a joint interview around TV series ‘Queen Sugar.’ Adds the director: “If you treat being black as a plight, it affects your creativity.”
“Don’t count on me, I’m one person,” says Ava DuVernay, with a light shrug that suggests she’s sorry to disappoint. “That’s not change. That’s an anomaly.”
She’s back in New Orleans, where she has spent a sizable portion of her spring filming the first 13 episodes of the forthcoming cable series Queen Sugar — a present-day drama about a family of sugarcane farmers in Louisiana — and the conversation has turned to Hollywood’s “diversity” problem. It is a word that she bemoans but a subject on which she has become the industry’s reluctant expert ever since her star-making turn as the director of 2014 Academy Award nominee Selma. In the nearly two years since, the former publicist has been courted for (and passed on) a Marvel superhero movie, inspired a Barbie doll of her likeness and, in signing on to direct Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, will become the first woman of color tapped to helm a $100 million live-action movie. She adds with the kind of steely confidence that has earned her a bevy of followers (197,000 of them on Twitter) and a platform that commands the industry’s attention: “The fact that the mainstream starts to gaze at this space doesn’t make it a moment. It makes it a moment for them