Each year, Hollywood trots out an obligatory-film-about-black-transcendence. Last year, it was the forgettable Antebellum Porn flick 12 Years a Slave.
This year, it’s Selma.
Lo and behold, it turns out that Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, is… drumroll… an angry black woman!
Rolling Stone has an interview with her (held “in a vegan Mexican restaurant in Hollywood”)
Of the film’s ‘controversial’ (translation: historically inaccurate) depiction of LBJ as a reluctant participant in the move to a Voting Rights Act, DuVernay has this to say:
“Every filmmaker imbues a movie with their own point of view. The script was the LBJ/King thing, but originally, it was much more slanted to Johnson. I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma…
“This is a dramatization of the events. But what’s important for me as a student of this time in history is to not deify what the president did. Johnson has been hailed as a hero of that time, and he was, but we’re talking about a reluctant hero. He was cajoled and pushed, he was protective of a legacy — he was not doing things out of the goodness of his heart.”
