Ava DuVernay Quotes

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.

Film school was a privilege I could not afford.

Working full-time as a filmmaker has been a dream come true.

I love making films. I’m happiest when I’m doing it. For me, the fear is not being able to make the next thing and not being able, as a woman filmmaker and as a filmmaker of color, to put together the resources to make another thing.

At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.

Stop asking, start doing.

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?

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.

I thing for female filmmakers a big issue is making their second and third films. You see the statistics, and the dropoff on the second and third [films] , are dire.

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.

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.

The idea that we criminalize fellow human beings based on optics, based on the need to progress in politics and gain power, and for economic reasons and financial reasons, for financial gains, and we throw out humanization for criminalization.