With Marvel Studios
offering creative people the opportunity to have their work be seen by millions
of people worldwide, it can be tempting for directors to immediately say yes,
only to later find out that no was perhaps the correct answer. Although it's
true that almost every studio has creative differences at the heart of many
behind the scenes problems, Marvel has a unique problem, which strangely is
also one of their strengths, the MCU.
To create their
shared cinematic universe, each Marvel film has to tie-in and setup (to a certain
degree) characters and events that will later come into play, which is fine
when the director's vision and the studio's wishes align, but when they don't
that's when problems arise, just ask would be Thor 2 and Ant-Man directors
Patty Jenkins and Edgar Wright.
Earlier this month,
Ava DuVernay revealed that she had decided not to helm Marvel's Black Panther
because she and the studio could not see eye-to-eye on certain aspects of the
film. Now, speaking at the 2015 BlogHer conference, the filmmaker elaborated on
why she chose to pass on Black Panther. "For
me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to
bed with? Because it’s really a marriage, and for this it would be three years,"
said DuVernay. "It’d be three years of not doing other things that are
important to me. So it was a question of, is this important enough for me to
do?"
Still,
the director recognizes the unique opportunity working with Marvel presented and that she decided not to pursue. "At one point,
the answer was yes because I thought there was value in putting that kind of
imagery into the culture in a worldwide, huge way, in a certain way:
excitement, action, fun, all those things, and yet still be focused on a black
man as a hero — that would be pretty revolutionary," she continued. "These
Marvel films go everywhere from Shanghai to Uganda, and nothing that I probably
will make will reach that many people, so I found value in that. That’s how the
conversations continued, because that’s what I was interested in. But
everyone’s interested in different things."
We may never find out
just how different DuVernay's vision differed from Marvel's plan for Black
Panther, but it took some levelheaded thinking from the part of the director to realize
that though exposure is a very good thing, what comes first is her art.
"This is my art.
This is what will live on after I’m gone. So it’s important to me that that be
true to who I was in this moment. And if there’s too much compromise, it really
wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film."
Black Panther comes
out on July 6, 2018.
Source - THR
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