ARRAY: Filmmaker Ava DuVernay

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2021

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

By her early thirties, Ava DuVernay was already a successful entrepreneur, having founded her own film publicity agency in Los Angeles. But after years of watching other people make films, she started to get an itch to tell her own stories onscreen. Ava's first films were rooted in deeply personal experiences: growing up with her sisters in Compton, performing Hip Hop at Open Mic Night at the Good Life Café in L.A. Her self-funded and self-distributed projects began to draw attention, and in 2012, Ava won the award for best directing at the Sundance Film Festival. She went on to direct powerful projects like Selma, 13th, and When They See Us; and through her production and distribution company ARRAY, she's created a movement that is helping change how movies are made—and who gets to make them.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	When you leave home, can you ever really go back?
0:12.0	Made a version!
0:13.0	Soccer legend Leo Messi and I both left Argentina as kids.
0:17.0	You know you're that piece of a puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere.
0:20.0	To so many immigrants, football is a way to reconnect.
0:23.0	Listen to the last cop in the embedded podcast feed
0:26.0	to hear the latest collaboration from MPR and Fuduro Studios.
0:32.0	Any filmmaker that's in the screening of their films,
0:35.0	not watching the film, they're watching the audience.
0:38.0	Yeah.
0:39.0	So you're watching the backs of heads.
0:41.0	I've become really good at watching the backs of heads.
0:43.0	Like I can tell what you're feeling by your neck at this point.
0:46.0	And for the first time being in the back of a theater,
0:50.0	watching you know just the side view of the light of the screen,
0:53.0	hit people's faces as they smile, as they nod, as they cry, whatever.
0:58.0	That feeling just, you know, it was my first hit
1:02.0	and I was addicted and I've been addicted ever since.
1:11.0	From MPR is how I built this.
1:14.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Guy Raz | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Guy Raz | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.