Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Origin is a bold new film written and directed by my next guest, Ava DuVernay. Rolling Stone said, "It may be the most important biopic of a book ever made." It's based on Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's groundbreaking nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, in which the author argues for understanding racism in the US as part of a caste system like that in India.

If this sounds familiar, Wilkerson was a guest on the show when the book came out in 2020. I want to play a bit of that interview when I asked Wilkerson why understanding Caste was beneficial when discussing American racism.

Isabel Wilkerson: Well, Caste allows us to, first of all, release ourselves from the often emotion-laden language that we're accustomed to using, language that can trigger people upon hearing it. In other words, we almost can hear things so often that we don't even process them in the way that they might've been originally intended. Caste focusing in on the structure, as opposed to the emotions that come forth with language that we're accustomed to, emotions such as guilt, shame, and blame, that get attributed to language that seems more personal.

Alison Stewart: Now, no emotion works well in academic circles and making intellectual arguments, but when it comes to storytelling and film, we want to feel something, have a personal response. This is where my other guest comes in. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson in the film as we experience her traveling the world, exploring alternative frameworks to explain subjugation and dehumanization, all while surviving her own struggles, including the deaths of those closest to her.

Interwoven are depictions of some of the hardest moments in history to fathom but that should not be forgotten, Nazi Camps, the Middle Passage, and a young boy who went out for candy and was murdered for simply walking home. Origin expands to wide release in theaters today. It is a New York Times critic's pick. Joining me in the studio now is Ava DuVernay. Ava, welcome.

Ava DuVernay: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: And on Zoom, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Sorry. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Aunjanue, Nice to meet you.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Nice to meet you, too. Thank you for having us.

Alison Stewart: You read Caste multiple times before looking into it and tackling it so you could get what it meant and get into what it meant. What did you come to understand better, Ava, upon the last reading?

Ava DuVernay: I was hunting for characters. I was hunting for a way in, to take the facts and figures and the anthropological thesis that Isabel Wilkerson sets out in the book so beautifully, and to bring that into an intimate space, a human space with a character that we could follow, and decided that that would be Isabel herself, and so approached her and asked her if she would be interested in this kind of adaptation, this kind of screenplay. She said, "Yes," and off we went.

Alison Stewart: Isabel is a Capital J journalist.

Ava DuVernay: Capital J, big J.

Alison Stewart: Big J journalists, bureau Cheery fit the New York Times. Big J journalists don't like to be the story.

Ava DuVernay: That's right.

Alison Stewart: They really don't. What were those conversations like when you talked to her about, "Hi, I want to talk about your life, your marriage, your family."

Ava DuVernay: I won't speak for her. I'll say, though, that I felt that, for me, she understood that I was a filmmaker with a point of view, and I had an idea about how to tell the story that she cared about, which was Caste, to amplify that, and that in order to tell that story, I needed a character and I wanted her to do it. I think that, certainly, it was nothing that she volunteered for, but that she said yes to very generously. I think she wanted a certain end. She wanted it to be amplified, and so she allowed herself to be used for that.

Alison Stewart: Aunjanue, please, and correct me if I'm wrong, because you know the internet, you didn't meet Isabel Wilkerson before making the film, but you looked at her TED Talks and listened to her interviews. Was that an intentional choice? Was that a matter of timing?

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Yes. Well, in this case, the internet is not lying.

[laughter]

Ava DuVernay: For once, I know.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: The internet is truthful. No, I didn't meet Ms. Wilkerson. Ava and Ms. Wilkerson had set up this operating practice with the process with the film and developing the film. I think Ms. Wilkerson, at that point, had said, "This is yours. You take it." I really followed in line and respected her privacy.

Alison Stewart: What were you able to observe by watching the interviews, by listening to her various appearances? What were you looking for, and then what were you able to use?

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: I was looking for texture. I was looking for something that was unspoken because so much of the work that I do in the film is unspoken. It is not communicated. It's not communicated verbally. I was looking for that. I was looking for the discrepancy between what she was saying and what she might've felt actually. I cross reference group interviews that she did with Michael Eric Dyson and Brian Stevenson.

I looked at her TED Talk, the famous TED talk that she did when Warmth of Other Suns when she was promoting Warmth of Other Suns. The nervousness she had right before she said that speech. Then her book is really a memoir, Caste as a memoir. Every piece of the argument that she builds in that book, she uses her own personal experience. I pulled from all of that source material.

Alison Stewart: Ava, Isabel Wilkerson is such a-- she is such an elegant woman. She's a compact person when you interview her. She's very serious. When you have a protagonist who has those characteristics, who's not just big and loud and flashy, what conversations do you have with your actor about how to play that? She's not small, but she is intense and serious.

Ava DuVernay: I think that's the magnificence of Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and that she's able to interpret this life, interpret this work of this brilliant woman, and personify it in a character that is walking through the world, holding silence, holding grief, but also holding her brilliance and her curiosity about the world to create a more of a fluency in the way that we should be talking about this cultural phenomenon, writ large.

That's a big task to ask an actor, but with an artist like Aunjanue, she was able to find it, to find those quiet places where the dignity and the strength of character come through. As a director, I find it much easier to direct scenes where people are screaming, yelling, running, jumping. Those are active, and they are really clear about what those should be. The interiority of someone, someone thinking, someone contemplating, someone grieving. Those are trickier things to render on screen in a way that it's the heart that's believable. Aunjanue did it in such a way that it was like magic before my eyes every day. I was really honored to work with her.

Alison Stewart: Aunjanue, it's a cliched word, but I'm actually truly interested. What is your process for creating a character who has this deep interiority?

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: It was one of the reasons why I've wanted to work with Ava since we did When They See Us. We see the consequence of her work, Yusef Salaam is going to be a city councilman. I think that her work in When They See Us, it planted the seeds. He's an extraordinary man, but it planted the seeds for his candidacy and his ultimate win, in my mind.

One of the things she said is she wanted to explore the interiority of a woman's-- particularly a Black woman's life. I just found that that was exciting because I'm not, as you said, a big J journalist. I'm also not a big T thinker, but I am a thinker. I do spend a lot of time in that gray matter space. I read a lot, and I dream a lot, and make things in my mind. To me, I was leaning into stuff that I do anyway. Here's the thing, trusting that I was conveying something, even though I was not seeing it.

Alison Stewart: Trust, that's a really-- that's an important word in this conversation, I think.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, she plays Isabel Wilkerson in Origin. Directors make decisions. That's part of the big thing every day, all day. What was a tough decision to make in the making of this film that you're ultimately glad you made, but it was a back and forth.

Ava DuVernay: One of the biggest decisions that we made early on was the decision to not pursue Hollywood studio money for the movie. That was a very, at the time, deliberate decision that we had to make, whether or not we're going to spend a year or two or three or whatever it took to go around to the studios and convince them to make a movie about Caste or if we were going to just take it into our own hands and do it a different way.

We very immediately started to reach out to untraditional funding sources. We raised the money independently through a philanthropist, through philanthropic organizations that were like-minded and that came together around this film, and we were able to raise that money in six months time and expedite the process of the funding and the movie-making so that we could have the film out this year. It was very important to me that we'd be out during the election year.

In order to do that, we had to bypass the Hollywood slog. It's a lengthy thing. It's a process, and just jump straight into the making. That was a key pivotal moment, and I'm so glad we did.

Alison Stewart: What did it provide you creatively?

Ava DuVernay: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. You have a woman who has not been highlighted and amplified and put in a position to be a lead in a major motion picture despite all of her accolades, the magnitude of her talent. The way that Hollywood quantifies who leads movies is not always based on who's best to lead the movie. It's based on a lot of other Q scores and social media and a lot of things beyond this actor, this artist conveys what we want to convey and the story.

That freedom of financing allowed me to be able to choose her and all of the incredible cast members that I wanted without any other math to be done. Also to shoot on film, which is something that, as a woman director, I've been discouraged from doing more times than not, and was able to--

Alison Stewart: Because?

Ava DuVernay: Oh, gosh. I wonder why. It's workflow, not cost-effective, all of the excuses. To discourage and just to go with a more streamlined way of working. Finally, I was able to give that to myself when we greenlit ourselves.

Alison Stewart: Aunjanue, in a film like this, we're watching Isabel do her work. We're watching her do her research, do her reporting, be in the field, get the first-person accounts, but she's also having personal difficulties and personal traumas. This is happening as you played her. What is her motivation for devoting so much time in her life to the pursuit of this thesis, while so much is happening around her, while her mother has dementia, while she's losing family members? What's her motivation to keep going after this thesis and this story?

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: I've heard Ava say this, and I agree. I only have gone through-- I haven't lost that number of people at one time, but I lost one and it put me down for years. I just feel like it's incredible that she did this. I'm looking at Isabel Wilkerson as the character Isabel, and at least for me, as playing the character, I saw it as a love letter to them. That I feel so much of what is moving to me about the experience of being a part of the film that it all comes down to love. It all comes down to keeping people that we love alive, even when they're not physically there anymore.

What happens in the film is that we see that connectivity that spans not just her relationship with the people in her life, but how that act of love was just a revolutionary act in Nazi Germany, in India, in the scene that we see with the scavengers. That is the binding material; love and loss. I felt that the book was her love letter to the people in her life who were not physically there anymore.

Alison Stewart: There's a scene in the film, Ava, where Isabel is dealing with a flooded basement, and it's an old house and the plumber shows up, and he's wearing a MAGA hat. It's Nick Offerman, the actor Nick Offerman. It reminded me of a moment in my interview with Isabel, which I pulled because I want to talk about how-- I want our listeners to understand how things that she writes and says, how you were able to dramatize them. This is Isabel Wilkerson talking about how an old house, it's her analogy for what happens in our country when we don't talk about important issues. Let's play that clip.

Isabel Wilkerson: Well, I describe our country as an old house, and when you have an old house, the work is never done. There's always something that has to be attended to. Just when you think you've fixed one thing, then something else comes up. Especially when you have an old house after a rain, you may not want to go into the basement to see what the rains have brought, but if you don't go into that basement, that's at your own peril because whatever is there is going to be there no matter you're going and looking at it or not.

Alison Stewart: If we share with our audience how you took that analogy and brought it into the film.

Ava DuVernay: Well, it's a cumulative effect that hopefully you feel at the end of the picture, but you will watch the change, the transition, the seasons around a house that the character Isabel occupies at one point, that she doesn't occupy. At the end of it, the metaphor blossoms. It's just such a powerful metaphor, this idea that we are all here in this place and that you can't really say, "Well, I didn't do that. I didn't break it. I wasn't there when slavery happened. I didn't say that. I didn't do that." Well, we're here now. We're here and we're living here, and we have to fix it or else this is an unlivable place.

That was just a powerful part of the book for me. The movie is really all of my aha moments in reading that almost 500-page book. It's all my highlights, and then research. After you read something or you hear something, you go and Google, and so I just had to google a thought and I wanted to know more. Then I'm researching and I'm interviewing. All of that creative energy, that intellectual curiosity that I felt when I read the book, is poured into the film and sits alongside her personal histories that she was kind enough to share with me.

It creates this bit of a stew of a movie. They're historical sequences, contemporary sequences, surreal sequences. There're sequences where people feel like I'm watching a documentary. Is this a real film? Blurring the lines between that. Trying to do anything narratively to bring people into the hard space that I experienced when I read the book, which was complicated and quite beautiful.

Alison Stewart: Aunjanue, in that moment when the plumber has got the MAGA hat on and Isabel, she's at her wit's end, and there's a leak, and the basement's flooded, and there's a lot exchanged between the two characters without much being said. What is happening to those two people when they first encounter each other? I don't want to give anything away, but what's happening when they first encounter each other?

Aunjanue DuVernay: Well, I think that when Isabel opens the door and she sees that MAGA hat, she is thrust into this situation that, first of all, that could not be safe, potentially not be safe for her. She's inviting this something that could be dangerous in her home, but at the same time, she needs her plumbing fixed. I think Black women have to navigate that all the time on these places of practicality and yet danger.

That was one of the stories that was in the book. Ms. Wilkerson speaks about it, like, "Okay, how do I get done what I need to get done?" She strategizes in that moment. Also, here's that connectivity, you got a mama, I got a mama. We both, we meet in this space, and being able to build that bridge between this man with that connective tissue in that moment.

Alison Stewart: My guests are actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. She plays Isabel Wilkerson in the film Origin. I'm also speaking with its writer and director, Ava DuVernay. We'll have more after a really quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as well as writer and director Ava DuVernay. We're discussing their film Origin, which opens wide today. You begin the film, Ava, with the moments leading up to Trayvon Martin's killing, and we return to the killing and graphic detail later in the film. These opening moments, he's leaving the grocery store, he is on the phone. The audio, that's the real audio of George Zimmerman, correct?

Ava DuVernay: That's the real audio, and I will also say it's not in graphic detail.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Ava DuVernay: I'm not showing [unintelligible 00:19:25]

Alison Stewart: Maybe it feels that bad.

Ava DuVernay: I love the power of suggestion in cinema. It's so tragic. It feels.

Alison Stewart: It's so hard.

Ava DuVernay: It's hard, but you really don't see anything. You just feel it.

Alison Stewart: That's fair. You're right. Good job.

Ava DuVernay: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Good job in a bad--

Ava DuVernay: In a bad--

Alison Stewart: In a bad situation. Why did you want to start the film there?

Ava DuVernay: Well, it starts with a kid walking down the street talking to his friend on the phone.

Alison Stewart: It's so hard.

Ava DuVernay: It's really important that when I-- and I think filmmakers render trauma on screen, render violence on screen, that it moves out of spectacle and moves into a place of real emotion. That only happens when you humanize people. I was watching John Wick the other day, and 47 people died in one scene. I didn't know them, so it didn't matter. A big part of what cast is, is it's easy to let people go. It's easy to subjugate, to divide because we don't know them. We loop them in this category, and so it's okay.

With this, with even talking about Trayvon Martin as described to me, the impetus of Isabel's work, when she was sharing with me what started her on the journey, we wanted to show that, what happened to him, but it was imperative that you get to know him a little bit before it happened. We spent a little bit of time, what's on his mind, his personality, what he's doing, and you know that all of that is in contrast to what you hear on the tape as described by his killer as to who he is and what he's doing. When you listen to the tape in contrast with what you now know because he's been humanized, it really, is one of the ways in which we illustrate how Caste works.

Alison Stewart: I will say though, a kid with a gun to his chest is scary to me.

Ava DuVernay: You never see the gun.

Alison Stewart: You don't?

Ava DuVernay: You don't. You never see the gun.

Alison Stewart: I got to go back and look at that. Man, you really did it. Maybe it's because I have a 15-year-old son.

Ava DuVernay: Yes, I know. That has to be tough.

Alison Stewart: It just feels-- Aunjanue, the film has these historical elements throughout. A German man, a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany, which is mentioned in the book as well. There's another about these anthropologists who study in the Deep South. The book is the Deep South, Black and white couple who are anthropologists. Aunjanue, just practically speaking, how aware are you of these other stories, and does it impact your work, or are you just doing your part on this? You're just in your Isabel mode frame of mind. Are you thinking about the other parts of the film?

Aunjanue DuVernay: Yes, I am thinking about it. What I try to do is make sure that every book, even though I was not able to read every book, wvery book that Isabel, the character Isabel references in the film, I wanted to make sure that I had those books. If I was referencing anyone or speaking about any material that's referenced, I wanted to make sure that before I actually filmed the scene, that I had read, researched what that particular thing that she references. I wanted to make sure. Yes, I was doing that, even though I was not in those scenes necessarily. I was making sure that I was fluent in what was happening even when I wasn't on screen.

Alison Stewart: Ava, your editor in the film, Spencer--

Ava DuVernay: Averick.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for saying his last name. How did you work with him when you have so many different elements, as you mentioned, documentary elements, there's the narrative elements there's the surreal elements? Tell us about--

Ava DuVernay: He's my primary collaborator. We've worked together on every single thing I've ever directed, it's been edited by Spencer. He's a wonderful example of the breaking of caste. He is a man who's about 10 years younger than me, white. On paper, we look like we would be exact opposites, but we have the same mind and we think the same way. Our task was to take four and a half hours of material that we had shot. My first cut was four and a half hours, and to basically cut that down by half, and to try to find the treasures, the moments that communicated in the most dynamic and muscular way, what we were trying to get across, but that partnership is so crucial to me.

Alison Stewart: Your cinematographer Matthew Lloyd.

Ava DuVernay: Oh, my goodness. Thank you for asking about my people. These are people that are surround you. Matthew Lloyd is a dream of a cinematographer. Cinematographer--

Alison Stewart: He seems interesting.

Ava DuVernay: He seems interesting?

Alison Stewart: I went on his page, on his website [unintelligible 00:23:59] [crosstalk]

Ava DuVernay: Look at you researching all kinds of different projects. People had said, "Oh, he's an interesting choice for this. He doesn't seem like he would fit in line with this," but just a dynamic artist who is so, so passionate about this material, and very kind. Cinematographers have a bit of a reputation on set. They're hot shots.

Alison Stewart: Cowboys and cowgirls.

Ava DuVernay: Yes, a little. Cowgirls and cowboys. You know what I mean? They can slow down the space of a set. They can speed it up. They really are important to the overall environment. He is just a joy to be around, but was also someone who is with me very early in the process. Usually, a cinematographer is not around during the writing, but I was sharing pages with him, and he was just so inside of my mind and the vision of what I wanted to do that those two collaborators, as well as my producing partner, Paul Garnes, were just instrumental in getting us here.

Alison Stewart: Aunjanue, what is something that Director DuVernay does on set that's unique, or in prep that's unique?

Ava DuVernay: Oh, good. Oh goodness.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: I think that it's the people that she assembles to as a part of the team, of making the film. You mentioned the editor and Matt, our cinematographer. She also created this team, crack team of women artisans in the women who did my hair and makeup, Ashunta Sheriff-Kendricks, LaLette LittleJohn, Kim Kimble, Dominic Dawson, who did my costumes. She made sure that all of them were at the top of their game so that when I walked on set, all I had to do was open my mouth because visually, I was presenting as Isabel. I think it's the team that she assembles.

Alison Stewart: Ava, the positive reviews have all used the word audacious. They used it a lot.

Ava DuVernay: I don't like it.

Alison Stewart: That's why I asked you.

Ava DuVernay: How did you know I didn't like it? First of all, I have to say, Ina Mayhew, who's our Black woman production designer who was an incredible New Yorker. Shout out to Ina. I don't know. Why did you pick out that word?

Alison Stewart: Because I knew you'd wrinkle your nose.

Ava DuVernay: I don't like it.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Why don't you like it, Ava?

Ava DuVernay: Is Oppenheimer audacious? Is he audacious?

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Come on now.

Ava DuVernay: What does it mean? I'm not quite sure what it means. I think I'm an artist who wanted to tell a story about this subject matter. Yes, it is from a book that is a 496-page anthropological exploration. Yes, I made it into a narrative piece, but I don't think it's audacious, and not in a bad way. I'm just saying there's something underneath that term that assumes that this was hard, unbelievable, out of bounds for me in some way. That's the part of it that makes me tilt my head a little bit and ask, "What do you mean by that?"

Alison Stewart: We're going to leave that there.

Ava DuVernay: Okay.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is Origin. It opens wide today. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, thank you so much for your time today, and for your work.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: My pleasure. Happy opening day, Ava.

Ava DuVernay: Happy opening day, Aunjanue. Thank you for everything.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for being here, Ava.

Ava DuVernay: Thank you.

 

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