Italian
Ava DuVernay said the United States is “run by criminals” while reflecting on the timely resonance of her Oscar-nominated documentary “13th” during an on-stage conversation with Rosalie Varda at the Marrakech Film Festival.
The politically-engaged filmmaker and activist denounced a double standard in the U.S. judicial system, saying “that criminality is seen as completely different than a Black kid on the corner who might sell marijuana. And so, you know, the Black kid is in prison for years and the criminals get reelected and make millions of dollars and sell electric cars.”
She said “13th” was meant to address “that idea of who is criminal and what and who is deciding who is right and who’s wrong.”
DuVernay said she thought the documentary “would sit on the back pages of Netflix and no one would see it. When it first debuted and it shot to number one in multiple countries, I think it really says something about where we are and the way that we have much more in common when it comes to prejudice and the hierarchy of people and different societies around the world.”
Popular on Variety DuVernay also talked about transitioning from being a film publicist to becoming a filmmaker in her 30s, and said she first realized she wanted to become a filmmaker on the set of Michael Mann’s “Collateral.”
“I was working as a publicist on that set, and I was watching Michael Mann direct Tom Cruise and Javier Bardem in a scene. I thought, ‘Oh, I want to do what he’s doing. I want to be Michael Mann.’”
She said a moment in particular that stroke a chord was when “Mann was trying to explain something, not to an actor, but to someone else, and I thought in my head, ‘He should say it like this.’”
Ultimately, she continued working as a publicist while making her first three films. Even after she won a prize at Sundance for Selma, she was back in the office the next day.
The conversation with DuVernay is part of Marrakech Film Festival’s lineup of 15 conversations with prominent filmmakers, including Tim Burton, Justin Kurzel, Alfonso Cuaron, Sean Penn, Justine Triet, Walter Salles and David Cronenberg.
