133 Quotes by 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.

Some black filmmakers will say, “I don’t want to be considered a black filmmaker, I’m a filmmaker.” I don’t think that. I’m a black woman filmmaker.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t understand the iPhone. I just don’t get it. Don’t ya’ll have to write serious emails throughout the day? How can you possibly manage detailed missives on a phone with no keys?

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.

I make films about black women and it doesn’t mean that you can’t see them as a black man, doesn’t mean that he can’t see them as a white man or she can’t see them as a white woman.