Director Ava DuVernay Opens Up About Why She Walked Away from ‘Black Panther’

Fans were excited to hear that acclaimed director Ava DuVernay had been tapped to direct the upcoming Black Panther film for Marvel, so when she announced she walked away from the opportunity, it left plenty wondering “Why?”

DuVernay gave the closing keynote at this year’s BlogHer conference, which took place in New York City from July 16th-18th, and during the talk, told female bloggers the truth about what became of her Black Panther directing gig.

Read what she said about why not signing on to the project was the best decision for her, per The Hollywood Reporter:

“For me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to bed with? Because it’s really a marriage, and for this it would be three years. It’d be three years of not doing other things that are important to me. So it was a question of, is this important enough for me to do?”

“At one point, the answer was yes because I thought there was value in putting that kind of imagery into the culture in a worldwide, huge way, in a certain way: excitement, action, fun, all those things, and yet still be focused on a black man as a hero — that would be pretty revolutionary,” she continued. “These Marvel films go everywhere from Shanghai to Uganda, and nothing that I probably will make will reach that many people, so I found value in that. That’s how the conversations continued, because that’s what I was interested in. But everyone’s interested in different things.”

“What my name is on means something to me — these are my children,” she said of her body of work. “This is my art. This is what will live on after I’m gone. So it’s important to me that that be true to who I was in this moment. And if there’s too much compromise, it really wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film.”

Well you have to give it to her for staying true to herself. If anything, this proves that DuVernay is a director who is more concerned with creating art and seeing her visions come to life, than a paycheck. Hollywood needs more of those.

Photo Credit: Tinseltown / Shutterstock.com