Ava DuVernay Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Be passionate and move forward with gusto every single hour of every single day until you reach your goal.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“We [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just "I have a dream." They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“If your dream only includes you, it's too small.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“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.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“Time will tell ... whether folks want to point and stare at the black woman filmmaker who made a certain kind of film, and pat her on the back, or if they want to actually roll up the sleeves and do a little bit of work so that there can be more of me coming through.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“There’s something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It’s a different perspective. It is a reflection as opposed to an interpretation, and I think we get a lot of interpretations about the lives of women that are not coming from women.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“Don't wait for permission to do something creative.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“Hollywood needs more women directors, and Mama Ava needs a carafe and a half of that sweet vino divino.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“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.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“Filmmakers need to realize that their job isn't done when they lock picture. We must see our films through.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“I didn't start out thinking that I could ever make films. I started out being a film lover, loving films, and wanting to have a job that put me close to them and close to filmmakers and close to film sets.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“When I'm marketing a film, whether its mine or someone else's, I work with a great deal of strategy and elbow grease until the job is done.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“If you're doing something outside of dominant culture, there's not an easy place for you. You will have to do it yourself.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“Film school was a privilege I could not afford.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“I tell the stories that are of interest to me.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“I think I am a little jealous of women who have great girlfriends as adults.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“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.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“I wish I could be the black woman Soderbergh, and put the camera on my shoulder and shoot beautifully while I directed.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“Black people loving and losing is something we don’t see enough of. We’re always in these heightened situations like something big is happening, something funny or something violent. And you know what? Sometimes we die of breast cancer or a broken heart. Things happen that are just not being explored cinematically. It’s time we reinvigorated that type of film.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that’s my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I’m interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent.[These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“When you're in your lane, there's no traffic.”
-- Ava DuVernay -
“In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.”
-- Ava DuVernay
