Ava DuVernay Explains Why She Turned Down Offer to Direct Marvel's 'Black Panther'
It had been long rumoured that Marvel were going to offer Selma director, Ava DuVernay, the directing gig for their upcoming Black Panther movie, which is set to star Chadwick Boseman as the titular character.
At first, DuVernay had been linked with the directing jobs for either Captain Marvel or Black Panther. When reports later emerged that Marvel President, Kevin Feige, had spoken with the director, Black Panther seemed the more likely job for DuVernay and everything seemed to be in place. However, the director recently announced she had declined the studios offer to helm the superhero movie.
Recently, DuVernay sat down with The Hollywood Reporter and explained her reasons as to why she passed on the job.
"For me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to bed with?" the director said. "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?"
DuVernay admits she was tempted to take the job due to its audience potential.
"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."
Towards the end of the interview, DuVernay explains what her work means to her and that she enjoys a freedom of expression in her films, which ultimately led to her declining the offer.
"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."
The release for the movie has since been changed with Black Panther now scheduled for release July 6, 2018.
