Quote

We have to find new ways to work without permission, new ways to turn corners and go through doors that are closed off to us to create our own audiences and our own material independently.

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
Without
Materials
Work
Doors
Way
Turn
Independently
Ways
Audiences
Create
Permission
Audience
Closed
Turns
Corners
Find
Material

More quotes by Ava DuVernay

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I don't understand the iPhone. I just don't get it. Don't ya'll have to write serious emails throughout the day? How can you possibly manage detailed missives on a phone with no keys?
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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.
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I wish I could be the black woman Soderbergh, and put the camera on my shoulder and shoot beautifully while I directed.
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At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.
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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.
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When you say cultural icon, I scrunch my nose.
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The fact that's why the prisons and stock in private prisons rose the very day after the election results [for Donald Trump] were announced. The fact that progress that was made for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, are all at risk.
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I think there are pieces of the film [Age Of Trump] that are even more emotionally resonant and more vital to talk about than ever.
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I make films about Black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a Black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.
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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.
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When you force sleep, it doesn't happen.
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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.
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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.
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As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.
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Don't wait for permission to do something creative.
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When I went out to shoot for the first time, I thought this was going to be about the prison industrial complex, purely about prison for profit and the ways in which there's an industry making money and profiting off punishment.
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I didn't start out thinking that I could ever make films. I started out being a film lover, loving films, and wanting to have a job that put me close to them and close to filmmakers and close to film sets.
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I tell the stories that are of interest to me.
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Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.
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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.
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