Ava DuVernay: 'Follow the white guys'
Ava Duvernay is offering advice for women and people of color trying to make it in Hollywood: "Follow the white guys."
Speaking to an audience of mostly female bloggers at the 2015 BlogHer conference, the Selma director, 42, spoke about working and trying to work in the modern film industry, and suggested that women and minorities effectively lean in to the white-male-dominated world. She shared her advice to the conference (via The Hollywood Reporter):
"You gotta follow the white guys. Truly. They’ve got this thing wired. Too often, we live within their games, so why would you not study what works? Take away the bad stuff — because there’s a lot — and use the savvy interesting stuff and figure out how they can apply. It’s a good one for the ladies.”
She added, speaking about the professional habits of women specifically:
"Women have been trained in our culture and society to ask for what we want instead of taking what we want. We've been really indoctrinated with this culture of permission. I think it’s true for women, and I think it’s true for people of color. It’s historic, and it’s unfortunate and has somehow become part of our DNA. But that time has passed.”
DuVernay also addressed her decision not to direct Marvel's upcoming Black Panther movie, which will be the first from the studio to have a person of color in the starring role (Chadwick Boseman).
"For me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to bed with?" she said, speaking of Marvel. "Because it’s really a marriage, and for this, it would be three years. 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?"
She continued:
"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. 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. That’s how the conversations continued, because that’s what I was interested in. But everyone’s interested in different things."
Although she did note that she'd be excited to see the film when it hits theaters. “I think it should be good when it comes out. I’ll be there, watching," she said.