Ava DuVernay Doesn’t Need Permission to Tell the Truth

Ava DuVernay’s career in film almost reads like a happy accident. The Oscar-nominated director had a less-than-traditional introduction to the medium at 32, creating projects in secret while working as the head of her own PR company, DVAPR, which supported the work of other filmmakers before she got her start. Then she got the bug.

“I read this filmmaking book and started to make films during my time off, and on weekends and vacations from my day job. I continued making films full-time with my job for my first three films,” she recalls over Zoom from the comfort of her sunlit office in Los Angeles. Not too long after, the accolades started pouring in. “Then I won Best Director at Sundance for Middle of Nowhere, and the next day, my client at Warner Bros. called me.”

Before earning praise at Sundance in 2012, DuVernay lived a “dual life” by straddling her budding passion for directing and keeping her full-time job in public relations. But earning the title of Best Director gave her the courage to pursue a brand-new path. “I finally said, ‘I should try to take this award and push.’ So, I sold my company and I became an independent filmmaker,” she says.

In the years that followed, DuVernay’s profile steadily rose. Her 2014 film, Selma, about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, earned a Best Picture nomination and Best Original Song win at the 2014 Academy Awards. It was the first Best Picture nominee directed by a Black woman. By 2016, DuVernay would get a second chance at an Oscar with the release of 13th, her Netflix documentary that analyzed the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, its intersections with race and mass incarceration, and its disproportionate effects on the Black community. The film earned a Best Documentary Feature nod at the 2017 Academy Awards. After that, she showed off her range with a sci-fi film, a star-studded adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, and an Emmy-winning limited series, When They See Us, which shed light on the young men wrongly accused in the 1989 Central Park jogger case.

Though a sequel to 13th seemed like a natural progression for DuVernay’s career, the inspiration didn’t strike until President Donald Trump sought a second presidential term. What followed was a brand-new documentary titled 14th, filmed to provide an in-depth look into the 14th Amendment, its intricacies, and the subsequent dismantling of its fundamental pillars. It will make its world premiere at the New York Film Festival tomorrow and hit Netflix on December 4.

“My desire to make a follow-up came from events unfolding around me. Between 13th and 14th, we’ve experienced a decade of Trump and Trumpism as a global society, but it really was the second Trump presidential campaign that ignited my thoughts about 14th,” she explains. “He spoke so heavily of immigration policy in his speeches, and I felt it touched on birthright citizenship, which is governed by the 14th. I thought, ‘I’m gonna do it. We’re gonna talk about birthright citizenship, just like we talked about mass criminalization in 13th.’”

DuVernay soon discovered that unpacking the 14th Amendment would be a laborious undertaking. The amendment—created after the Civil War to ensure equal protection under the law, particularly for formerly enslaved people and Black Americans—contains five parts spanning citizenship, representation, public debt, congressional power, and dismissal from office. In the film, DuVernay dissects these elements through the lens of the Lost Cause myth, a white, Southern narrative dating back to the 19th century that intentionally obfuscated the origins of the war’s central conflict. Southern states claimed the war was fought to preserve their rights, not to maintain the Confederacy, keep slavery intact, and oppress Black citizens and other people of color. 14th uses the Lost Cause to draw an unsettling yet timely comparison to the present day.

“I have to explain the Lost Cause, because it has since evolved into MAGA. They’re the same thing, like two parallel trains running alongside each other. Frederick Douglass says that there will always be these two sides,” DuVernay says. “This animating force within American society will be passed down from sire to son. It will not end in a year, it will not end in an age, unless we face it square on and folks are sober about what’s around us,” she adds, paraphrasing Douglass’s 1865 post-Civil War speech, “What the Black Man Wants.”

The aim in highlighting the Lost Cause was to “take out all the secrets buried in books, amplify all the things they don’t teach us in school, and offer to people as much information for their lives now,” she says.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams, and Jasmine Crockett are among the Democrats in the documentary who spoke to Trump’s many violations of the 14th Amendment, but when DuVernay asked to hear from Republicans in order to provide an unbiased view, most declined to participate. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman for Florida, was one exception who did sit for an interview.

“I would have included a lot more,” DuVernay says. “We requested over 300 Republican interviews from every sitting representative, congressperson, senator, and every mayor of a major city. Some people passed politely, some people passed impolitely.”

Though the exact reasoning for their rejections is unknown, the filmmaker notes, “I wish we would have had more Republicans participate, because their current-day thinking is an important voice to add to the story. And is a big part of that story.”

On a cellular level, DuVernay could understand the anxieties that come with putting potentially incendiary material out into the world. While she is unafraid to spotlight systemic injustices against Black citizens and other citizens of color in her work, there is an ever-present awareness that backlash may find her. She continues making films like 14th anyway.

“I think it would be unwise to think that making a documentary like this may not cause tension, but the payoff to putting out something in the world on Netflix and reaching 190 countries is very rare as a Black woman director,” she says. “The impact is more positive and nourishing to me as an artist than any blowback. So I feel much more comfortable putting out what I believe in compared to how afraid I was to speak my mind about Selma. There are repercussions doing something like this, and I accept them.”

It’s no mistake that 14th arrives in the same year as America’s 250th anniversary. Official celebrations across the country have rarely alluded to the nation’s complicated history with slavery and the intentional suppression of Black rights, the tens of thousands of ICE arrests this summer, or the administration’s push for mass deportations.

“There’s a lot of talk about what the 250th anniversary means, and I wanted to offer an alternative to show how we got here, but from my perspective as someone who is not squarely in the dominant culture by way of gender, race, and culture,” DuVernay explains. “That was a big part of feeling like this was the right time and the right piece. I think this documentary doubles as a fire alarm that I’m pulling to get people’s attention about what’s happening in the current moment.”

The ability to create a documentary as compelling as 14th—especially amid what DuVernay calls “a time of great transition and trauma” for the entertainment industry—is born from a firm belief in her work.

“Hollywood is tough for everybody right now. A lot of industry people are not receiving the support we usually have gotten, and when you add gender and race into that, it’s exacerbated,” she says of being a Black woman in film.

“It’s always been important for me to make my own work whether or not I’m the flavor of the month for the studios and the networks,” she adds. “It doesn’t matter at this moment if a studio never hires me again or anything. We continue. Nothing’s gonna stop this, except me.”

DuVernay offers similar advice to upcoming women filmmakers from marginalized backgrounds, and urges them to place less importance on landing specific managers, agents, and studio backing—instead, she wants newcomers to simply “try to make something great.”

“Get into your art. Build your audience. That’s really what I’d focus on, because the rest you can’t control,” she adds. “I always had a collective of artists I was trying to cultivate for myself, and so I would advise anyone, regardless of any color or gender, not to depend on any corporate entity to nourish you or support you. Think of them as a cherry on top, but you’re the ice cream. You’re the main event, and your work is what matters.”