Having been linked to Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther movie for a number of months, Selma director Ava DuVernay revealed earlier this month that she’d pulled out of contention for the Phase Three movie, and now during a chat with The Hollywood Reporter the filmmaker has explained why she passed on the opportunity to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“For me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to bed with?” states DuVernay. “Because it’s really a marriage, and for this, it’d be three years. It’d be three years of not doing other things that’re important to me. 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 and culture in a worldwide, huge way that they do in a certain way: flying, exciting action, fun, all those things, and yet still be focused on a black man as a hero — that would be pretty revolutionary. These 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 — these are my children,” she continues. “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. If there’s too much compromise, it really wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film.”
Black Panther is set for release on July 6th, 2018, with Chadwick Boseman starring as T’Challa.
https://youtu.be/5zpb9S9uD1s?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published July 20, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
