Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San Frig, director, and producer Ava Duvernay.

Over the past 15 years, Ava has become something of an institution in Hollywood.

She's made films like Salma and a wrinkle in Hollywood. She's made films like

Salma and a wrinkle in time, created original television like

when they see us and Queen Sugar. Documentaries like 13th and

this is the life and those are just the projects she's directed.

She's also made it her mission to amplify work by other directors of color, especially women, through a narrative change collective called Array.

She founded the organization in 2011, and they've since created a quartet of mission-driven entities, a film distribution arm. a

film distribution arm, a content company, a programming and production hub,

and a nonprofit group that works to advance social justice through art. If you'd like to learn more about their work,

you can visit their site at array now.com. That's array now.com. The aims of Array and by extension Ava are something we spend a lot of time discussing in the back half of this conversation,

especially as we get into diversity in Hollywood and where she believes

this industry is headed after the past year of strikes.

But we begin today with Ava's new film, Origin.

It's a creative adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson's best-selling book,

Cast, The Origins of Our Discontents.

One half of the film, like the book, explores the hidden cast system that

shapes our society. A cyclical, rigid hierarchy of human rankings that have been passed

down knowingly and sometimes unknowingly from one generation to the next.

And yet the other half of the picture is a lot less academic.

It's more of an emotionally charged story of a writer played by

ingenue Ellis Taylor grappling with tremendous personal loss while somehow

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