Finding the 'heart space': Director Ava DuVernay gets personal for new film

When you sit down to interview Ava DuVernay, you quickly realize how she rose to the top of her profession in 12 short years.

Before DuVernay became an Oscar-nominated director with Selma, before her sci-fi adventure A Wrinkle in Time broke box office records for Black female directors, DuVernay was working as a publicist and dreaming of telling her own stories. 

Sit down across from her and you notice the attention to detail as she clocks the placement of the lights and camera, the publicist brain quickly asking questions about the news program.  

To make her newest film, Origin, DuVernay drew on everything she has learned as a director and a documentarian. Based on the award-winning book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, the film explores connections between racism in America and the dehumanizing practices of Nazi Germany and India's caste system. 

It's a lot. But what makes Origin unlike anything she's attempted is DuVernay's decision to make Wilkerson the main character, teasing out the implications of her thesis while struggling with her personal sense of loss. Starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson, the result is a remarkably powerful and potent film with the potential to shake up the Oscar race.

CBC News spoke with the director in Toronto about her decision to personalize the film and her journey from dolls to directing. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was it like in the theatre when the credits rolled? Because, this film — there's so much weight there.

It's been fascinating sharing this film, more than any of the other things that I've made, from Selma to 13th to ... A Wrinkle in Time. 

The reactions have been deeply personal because it deals with grief, it deals with dehumanization, it deals with different aspects of our history that seem to be hitting people in a heart space. Usually after the screening, I can hear sniffles, I see people hugging one another. I see people contemplating what they've seen.

The way you opened up that 'heart space' for this book, which people could see as something that was academic, is you decided to use Isabel's journey as the vehicle. What did you think that we would get from being with her grief?

Even in a Marvel film, your favourite ones are the ones where you're like, "I really like Iron Man" — when you know this guy and you're on the journey with him.

So for this, there was a lot that I wanted to share about history and about our place in contemporary society. But the way to get it to a heart space is to go through a person that you care about. So Isabel Wilkerson as a character became the conduit to open that up. 

You have Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor with this remarkable performance as Isabel. But I'm curious, did it resurface your own grief? As you're helping Aunjanue be Isabel, what did that do for you?