The search is still on for someone to direct Marvel's Black Panther, and there's a chance they could wait until next month's D23 Expo to make that announcement. As one of the most prominent African-American superheroes, a lot of eyes are on Marvel to see how they'll approach Black Panther's first solo movie, which made it interesting when they reached out to Selma director Ava DuVernay. While the perspective she could have brought to the film would have made it instantly different than other Marvel movies, ultimately she decided to turn it down. She's spoken a little bit about her reasons before, but she opened up to THR about those initial meetings with Marvel and why she decided to go in a different direction with her career.
"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?"
So if she was so reluctant to sign up for such a long-term project, why did she entertain all of those meetings with Marvel in the first place?
"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."
DuVernay has come a long way, beginning as a studio publicist before making her feature directorial debut with 2008's I Will Follow. She made a name for herself in the indie realm and worked hard to earn the job directing Selma, which earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination. In short, she doesn't choose her projects lightly, and Black Panther didn't fit into her plan.
"What my name is on means something to me — these are my children. 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."
Despite not taking the job, DuVernay still says, “I think it should be good when it comes out. I’ll be there, watching.”
Black Panther stars Chadwick Boseman and possibly Ernie Hudson, opening on July 6th 2018.
