#118: Ava Duvernay: It's Never Too Late To Change Career

Ava Duvernay is an Oscar-nominated film director. Ava made her feature film debut with the documentary This in the Life (2008), a history on the hip hop movement in Los Angeles in the 1990's. This was followed by series of television music documentaries and her first narrative feature film, I Will Follow (2010), secured her the African-American Film Critics Association award for best screenplay. Her follow-up, Middle of Nowhere (2012) won the Best Director Prize at the 2012 Sundance film festival, making her the first African-American woman to receive the award.

Fast forward to the last few years, she is best know for her work directing Selma (2014), Ava was the first black female director to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award. With Selma, she was also the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2017, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her film 13th

Her latest film, out now, is the 2018 fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time, which has a mega cast of Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah, and had a budget exceeding $100 million. She is amazing. I hope you love this episode as much as I do.

Some of the favourite quotes from the episode:

“I didn’t pick up a camera until I was 32 years old.”

“I had made 13th and I had made Selma, and that was really dark subject matter, and just to make something about lightness and joy and black girls flying, and designing talking flowers, brought me joy.”

“What do we treat each other so poorly? How broken are we?”

“I reject the word workaholic. I work all the time but I love what i do, and to not do it would make me less happy.”

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