Ava DuVernay on the high stakes making ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

“This is the house that Wrinkle built,” filmmaker Ava DuVernay said, giving a tour of a three-building complex — a large office around a bright courtyard, a two-story production facility and a light-filled event space, in a former paint factory here. It had been hers for about 24 hours, and already she had big plans for the decor. “We’re going to black woman-ify it,” she said.

DuVernay had just put the finishing touches on the Disney movie that paid for it, A Wrinkle in Time, her adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 young adult sci-fi classic. It, too, had been black woman-ified.

Her choices — in casting, tone and vision — have been as groundbreaking as the fact that she was directing it in the first place, the first woman of colour at the helm of a $100 million (Dh367.2 million) studio tentpole. To hear her tell it, though, that milestone meant less to her than the opportunity to plant seeds, as she called it: cultivating, as she always has, a new way of looking at the world. She set out to “feminise” the movie, about a headstrong middle schooler — in this case, a biracial girl — who searches for her missing scientist father and saves the universe from encroaching evil.

Storm Reid, Deric McCabe and Reese Witherspoon in ' A Wrinkle In Time'.

“When you say ‘feminising,’ people think of softness in certain places, but I think of strength in other places,” where it’s normally overlooked, DuVernay, 45, said.

Her previous projects — like the civil rights drama Selma and the documentary 13th, about mass incarceration — and her company Array, which distributes films by underserved directors, have given her an activist platform that seems inseparable from her voice. In Wrinkle, she found a different range: Two weeks before preproduction, her beloved stepfather died, suddenly, and all at once the film became much more personal than she could have realised.

Wrinkle, as anyone associated with it will tell you, is not an easy book to adapt. To rescue her father, Meg Murry, the physics-loving heroine — played by Storm Reid, now 14 — skips across galaxies with her little brother and a friend, encountering fantastical creatures and menacing beasts. But her trajectory is elliptical, and when she finally meets the bad guy, it’s a brain. “The villain is the darkness inside of you,” DuVernay said. “There’s no Darth Vader, no battle scene. Her action is progressive, and it’s internal.”

To translate that to the screen, “it has to be lyrical and intimate” while also balancing a coming-of-age saga, an adventure tale and a story that has been beloved by middle-schoolers for more than half a century, DuVernay said. “That’s why I frigging did it, because it was hard.”

Oprah Winfrey in 'A Wrinkle In Time'.

She had a notable pep squad, though: “I signed on because I thought it would be fun to have the experience with Ava,” said her friend Oprah Winfrey, who plays Mrs Which, one of the kids’ guiding spirits. Reese Witherspoon, as the impatient Mrs Whatsit, and Mindy Kaling, who quotes Rumi and OutKast as Mrs Who, are the others; they were chosen partly for their off-screen acumen as producers reshaping Hollywood.

It was DuVernay’s multicultural casting ideas — Hamilton was a reference — that helped sell her vision to Disney. “Once she presented it like that, it was one of those things where you couldn’t see the film any other way,” said Tendo Nagenda, the executive vice president for production for Walt Disney Studios, who sent DuVernay the script. “And little did she know that the desperation on my part to make sure she did it went to an all-time high.”

Reid and Levi Miller in 'A Wrinkle In Time'.

Nagenda — who was raised in Los Angeles by a Ugandan father and a mother from Belize — added that he saw it as part of his mission at Disney to broaden the narrative. When he realised the film would be the first big-budget, sci-fi fantasy to feature a young girl of colour as the lead, “it made me ask the question, why is that?”

That Wrinkle arrived in the US on March 9, after Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, another Disney film, has seemingly rewritten the cultural code of Hollywood, either sets it up for blockbuster success or makes any disappointing box office all the more bitter. There’s little chance it will be a phenomenon like Black Panther, Nagenda said, but that film — and the marketing lessons it taught — may unlock new theatergoers. “Audiences are responding to stories in which they feel they are represented and have a voice, and where the film itself is cognizant of that,” he said, “and I think our film has a lot of that.”

Mindy Kaling and Storm Reid in 'A Wrinkle In Time'.

DuVernay was careful to note that Wrinkle is not broad fare like a Marvel superhero movie; it’s intended for 8- to 12-year-olds. “I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything like this again,” she said.

Reid, who has been acting since she was three, understood the effect this role could have on other girls. “I do a feel a sense of responsibility, like that I have to keep them uplifted and I have to keep inspiring them,” she said.

DuVernay thought of Meg as just a regular kid who finds her potential, but to Reid, she is a superhero: “She is an African-American girl that is smart, that is beautiful and that basically realises that she is enough,” she said. With that realisation, “she just taps into her superpowers to be able to save her dad, her brother and save the world.”

The inclusive casting of Meg and the three guides got the attention, but DuVernay spent as much time obsessing over the role of Calvin, Meg’s friend, played by Australian actor Levi Miller. She chose him, in part, she said, “because that was so powerful, to show a white boy following a black girl through the movie.”

Sitting in her new office, she crumpled quickly when the father-daughter part of Wrinkle came up. DuVernay’s stepfather, who helped raise her, died after a brief and sudden illness in 2016, as she was about to start work on the movie. It was as if he had disappeared without warning — just as Alex Murry, the father in Wrinkle (played by Chris Pine), does.

“I felt that so deeply as I was making the film,” she said, “this girl who literally cannot wrap her mind around the fact that he’s gone, and the moment when they say he could still be here...” She broke off, crying.

Her stepfather’s name was Murray Maye. All throughout production, when there was a script note or a lighting change for Pine’s character, she couldn’t bring herself to say Dr Murry, as crew members did; she referred to him only as “the father.”

“I feel like the film is looking for him in a way,” she said, in tears. “And that’s why I don’t care what anybody thinks about it. I don’t care. I don’t feel pressure about the whole first, blah blah blah. I know it’s $100 million for the studio. They’ll be fine. Ryan’s made sure of that for me.” (She and the Black Panther director are close.) “So, you know, this means a lot to me, and I know it’s going to mean something to some people. Some people will see it, see all the things we put in there.”

Winfrey did. “I grew up in an era where there was absolutely zero, minus, images of girls like her in pop culture, she said. “So I do imagine, to be a brown-skinned girl of any race throughout the world, looking up on that screen and seeing Storm, I think that is a capital A, capital W, E, some, AWESOME, experience,” she added by phone. “I think this is going to be a wondrous marvel of an experience for girls that in the future they will just take for granted.”

The entertainment press made much of the fact that DuVernay had never worked with special effects (which is rarely belaboured when male directors make the same leap). But neither had Winfrey.

“My first time being hung from the ceiling!” she said. She found getting up and getting down so nerve-wracking that she asked the crew to just keep her rigged up. “The crew’s going to lunch, and they’re like, well we can’t leave you hanging! I go, ‘Oh yeah, you can!’” she said. (She stayed up there. Just picture it.)

DuVernay, though, “was in her element,” Winfrey said, recalling that when she observed the huge cranes with the camera, “and there’s Ava, in her dreads and her sneakers and her vest and her jeans, surrounded by lots of big guys and lots of big machinery, saying, ‘Cut, stop, let’s take that again,’ it just would make my heart swell, that she had taken on something that was this enormous and was managing it so well.”

Wrinkle is a very girlie movie; at one point, a character is saved from a fall by a field of gossipy flowers. And DuVernay is warm and girlie, too — at our meeting, we talked about the joys and pitfalls of fake eyelashes; crying, she peeled hers off. “I like clothes, I like make-up, I like looking at pretty dresses,” she said. On screen, the Mrs characters change costumes at every appearance: Winfrey described her look as “Beyonce’s aunt from another planet.”

And none of these glitter-tinged fantasies subtract from DuVernay’s own mission, that cultivation of new perspectives and realities. To her, Selma and A Wrinkle in Time share a foundational message: “Civil rights work and social justice work take imagination, to imagine a world that isn’t there, and you imagine that it can be there. And that’s the same thing that you do whenever you imagine and insert yourself in a future space, or in a space where you’ve been absent.”

To imagine a world where a girl like Meg can fly was “super-emotional to me,” she said. “And then to be able to make it so, even on camera for a little while, for two hours - to change the world for that small amount of time, it’s very powerful. It’s addictive.”

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A Wrinkle in Time releases in the UAE on May 17.