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I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

Ava DuVernay

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Ava DuVernay
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: August 24
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Screenwriter
Showrunner
Television Producer
Writer
Long Beach
California
Ava Marie DuVernay
Interest
Tell
Stories

More quotes by Ava DuVernay

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Netflix represents, as well as all the streaming services, something that I've been talking about being so important to inclusive voices around films.
Ava DuVernay
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There's no reason not to employ, seek out and take a chance on a woman filmmaker that you might not have been looking at her direction. She's not done it before because you've not given her the opportunity to do it before, and I'm just happy that folks like Jessica Jones' Melissa Rosenberg and folks like Ryan Murphy are also embracing this idea.
Ava DuVernay
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I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.
Ava DuVernay
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You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.
Ava DuVernay
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We're living based on laws and ideas that we, as a society, embraced back in the days of slavery.
Ava DuVernay
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I think that women definitely have a special bond as friends that is hard to describe to men, and we don't often see that portrayed narratively.
Ava DuVernay
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Be passionate and move forward with gusto every single hour of every single day until you reach your goal.
Ava DuVernay
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Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.
Ava DuVernay
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True change is a long game, and it remains to be seen if this is change. We've had years before where there have been great years for filmmakers and performers of color, LGBTQ filmmakers and performers, women.
Ava DuVernay
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We [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just I have a dream. They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids.
Ava DuVernay
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A lot of work was done with one of my best friends and editor, Spencer Averick, who's edited everything I've ever made from the very, very first documentaries the very, very first films I made were docs, so we learned the form together.
Ava DuVernay
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Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.
Ava DuVernay
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Folks can look at this issue and read it and it can feel like medicine, it can feel epidemic. We wanted this to hit people in their gut, and the hope is that by doing that, we can get more people to think more deeply about these issues.
Ava DuVernay
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The terrain of the face is the most dynamic thing you can point the camera at, to me. I love production design and bells and whistles and all of that. I love a technograin as much as the next gal, but a great actor's face? What else should we be looking at?
Ava DuVernay
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I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.
Ava DuVernay
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I think I am a little jealous of women who have great girlfriends as adults.
Ava DuVernay
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For film, you know, the Tarantinos and Nolans of the world who are very focused on a certain kind of film aesthetic and a certain kind of presentation, to be honest, that comes from a place of privilege. It comes from a place of always having access to such, but when you ain't never - you can't see it because you can't even get to it.
Ava DuVernay
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Working full-time as a filmmaker has been a dream come true.
Ava DuVernay
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These are dark times for a lot of people who believe differently than our incoming administration [of Donald Trump], but there's also joy there, and there's also something in unifying around the things that we do believe in.
Ava DuVernay
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I'm not the most athletic gal, but because making a movie is very physical, I slow down on the Krispy Kreme and Ice Blendeds. I start to get leaner and more focused - like I'm going into a boxing match - because I'm about to really try to put this idea on its feet.
Ava DuVernay