Ava DuVernay Explains Why She Passed on Directing Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER
Marvel was very close to signing on Selma director Ava DuVernay to helm Black Panther for them. In the end, she passed on the offer to direct Chadwick Boseman in the movie. DuVernay is a very talented director, and Marvel would have been lucky to have her, but she just didn’t feel it was the right fit for her.
While talking to THR about the Marvel gig, she explained why she turned it down:
“For me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to bed with? 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?
"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.
"What my name is on means something to me — [my bodies of work] are my children. This is my art. This is what will live on after I’m gone. So it’s important to me that that be true to who I was in this moment. And if there’s too much compromise, it really wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film.”
A lot of directors would jump at the chance to direct a Marvel movie like this, but she’s obviously not that type of filmmaker, which is wonderfully refreshing. I would have loved to see her take on the project, but her vision didn’t mesh with Marvel’s vision, and she wasn’t about to compromise that.
Marvel has a certain way of doing things because they’ve created a universe of films that need to be in line with each other. They have to maintain a certain level of control to make sure things don’t stray too far from the path that they’ve set for themselves. In one way, that’s a good thing, and in another way it’s not because it does limit the amount of freedom that filmmakers have to express themselves.
In the end, they’ll find a director, and Marvel will get the Black Panther film that they have envisioned for the franchise.