Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” Creates a New Model for Funding Films

With her latest film, Ava DuVernay is modeling a new way of financing impactful films and ensuring creative freedom.

Ava DuVernay’s directorial work often shines a light on the darkest chapters of history in the United States. In the 2014 biopic Selma, DuVernay depicts Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to secure equal voting rights. When They See Us, an Emmy-winning Netflix miniseries, examines the 1989 Central Park jogger case through the lives of the five Black and Latino boys who were wrongly convicted of the crime. The documentary 13th studies the parasitic relationship between mass incarceration in the United States and white supremacy.

Her latest film, Origin, calls on all the storytelling tools in her filmography. Based on Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book , Origin unearths unnerving truths about the connection between power and subjugation. DuVernay casts Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson, the narrative hero inspired to embark on an intensive sociological study after Trayvon Martin’s murder by George Zimmerman.

“This is a film that asks people to center a woman’s interiority and her intellect,” the director told . “We are offered those films with men at the center often.” Origin’s theme—radical intellectual discovery—also applies to DuVernay’s journey to adapt the book.

Independently funded, the making of Origin is a testament to the director’s creative integrity and agility, delivering a multidisciplinary experience that circumvents Hollywood’s traditional hierarchical system.

After , the streamer planned to begin shooting in 2024. DuVernay pushed for an earlier timeline that would enable the film to galvanize audiences with a sense of urgency and spark political and cultural discourse.

“My hope is that it instigates some conversation about things we should be focusing on in this country as we head toward an election—hey, anybody see we’re taking books off shelves? Women can’t control their own bodies? Are we going to do something? I felt an urgency around getting it out there,” she told . “That timeline was a little more escalated than [Netflix] had the appetite for, and they were good enough to let it go.”

When Netflix declined to expedite the film’s production, DuVernay and the company parted ways, prompting the filmmaker and her producing partner, Paul Garnes, to obtain independent financing through philanthropic sources including the Ford Foundation and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.

The pivot allowed DuVernay’s team to embrace an unprecedented filmmaking model—one rooted in sociopolitical reform and untethered from white capitalist interests.

The Risk Pays Off

Investors like the Ford Foundation typically provide funds for documentaries, but DuVernay’s new financial backers were aligned with her vision. The director was given a full budget that granted her the final say on vital decisions, including and the film’s final cut.

For marginalized filmmakers working within the studio system, limited creative autonomy follows a larger pattern of sexist, racist, and ableist industry beliefs about marketability, profitability, and . By taking the indie route, Origin resists the need to meet studio demands historically rooted in discrimination, bigotry, and the white gaze.

This new framework can also help filmmakers—particularly marginalized creatives—survive within an industry that’s increasingly vulnerable to , , and .

“We’re all flailing, trying to figure out what the next steps are for a healthy industry,” DuVernay told . “And I think that is an opportunity for folks to come in with fresh ideas and try to make new systems—not just exist within and act differently within the old system.”

While taking an uncharted route resulted in multiple benefits, the absence of major studio backing brought unforeseen challenges, such as coordinating the talent’s filming schedules (Niecy Nash-Betts, who plays Wilkerson’s cousin, was filming ABC’s The Rookie: Feds in Los Angeles at the same time) and working out the logistics of shooting on location for scenes like a Nazi book burning.

DuVernay filmed on Berlin’s Bebelplatz, where German university students gathered in 1933 with lit torches to by authors such as Albert Einstein and Helen Keller. The public square is now the site of a memorial. For the scene, the flying of Nazis swastikas, a symbol that has been .

There was also the challenge of an expedited timeline; typically, a scene like this, featuring a few thousand extras, takes three days to film, but .

Retaining Authenticity

Switching to an indie-funding method allowed DuVernay to take other risks she may not have been able to. She cast Ellis-Taylor in her first leading role in a major movie and depicts Wilkerson as a scholar and visionary intellectual—a role typically reserved for white men, e.g., Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon (The Da Vinci Code), Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer.

By both casting Ellis-Taylor and centering Wilkerson as the main character, DuVernay defied studio conventions dictated by Hollywood’s version of a caste system: a hierarchy determined by factors like social media popularity, age, gender, and physical appearance.

Other choices, like wardrobe and narrative structure, were rooted in DuVernay’s artistic vision, which aimed to transform historical moments and obscure figures into fully realized people. In the later half of the movie, Wilkerson travels to India to research the country’s caste system, focusing on the group known as the Dalits.

DuVernay shows a Dalit man cleaning human excrement from a public latrine by hand. It was essential for Origin to retain its sense of authenticity, so with the help of an advocacy group, the director . It’s an effectively heart-wrenching manifestation of Wilkerson’s impressive research, personifying the degradation that Caste describes.

This attention to character interiority rings especially true in the on-screen portrayal of Wilkerson, who grappled with the loss of her mother, cousin, and husband while writing Caste. Wilkerson’s grief is captured through understated moments of reflection that connect her to the subjects of her book.

In one powerful scene, Wilkerson interviews a white man who recalls a painful childhood memory. In 1951, the man was on a Little League baseball team in Youngstown, Ohio. His teammate, Al Bright, was the only Black child on the team. After winning the city championship, the team is treated to a pool party, but Bright is ordered to sit on the grass behind a chain-link fence while the other children enjoy the water.

Bright’s coach eventually convinces the pool attendants to let him swim, but the workers force everyone out of the pool before Bright can join.

As Bright is pulled around on an inflatable pool float, the white lifeguard warns him that if he touches the water, the entire pool will have to be drained. It’s an emotionally harrowing moment that depicts a loss of childhood innocence—Bright and his teammates may not have had the elevated language to describe this injustice, but they’re all impacted by the dehumanizing sanctions imposed by the U.S. version of caste.

The man’s story resonates with Wilkerson; she imagines herself lying next to Bright on the ground, attempting to provide reassurance that this trauma will not define his identity.

The scene was originally structured around a voice-over by Wilkerson, but when DuVernay discovered the actor playing Bright’s teammate had a personal connection to the scene, she allowed him to improvise the narration. These sorts of creative redirections wouldn’t have been as warmly encouraged by studio executives, though these tweaks are ultimately pivotal to the film’s visceral storytelling and characterization.

A New Way to Humanize History

Origin also rejects strictly chronological storytelling to weave biographical narrative and nonfiction research together. The film introduces the photograph of a German man, believed to be , refusing to perform the Nazi salute in a crowd of people in 1936. Wilkerson travels to Germany to further explore how chattel slavery and segregation in the U.S. influenced the ideologies of Hitler’s Nazi regime.

While pouring through German historical archives, Wilkerson learns about the groundbreaking research of Allison and Elizabeth Davis, two married Black anthropologists whose landmark work in Depression-era Mississippi, Deep South, detailed how race and class inform the concept of caste in the U.S. In 1933, the couple travels to Berlin, where they witness a frenzied crowd burn piles of books.

Then, in the present, Wilkerson attends a dinner with friends, and they discuss the similarities and differences between Nazi Germany and the cultural and political history of white supremacy in the U.S. One of the women argues the Holocaust was “worse” than the enslavement of Black people in the U.S., which further motivates Wilkerson to excavate and document the pieces of “collective tissue” that form the concept of the caste system.

Moving fluidly through the past and present, Wilkerson’s research follows a line of pioneering scholars before her, who sought to understand how caste perpetuates individual and collective trauma. DuVernay’s directorial choices support Wilkerson’s thesis: Oppression in the past provides the blueprint for the brutality of the present, and these forces feed off one another.

In a striking sequence near the end of the film, enslaved Africans are trapped on a ship during the Middle Passage while a voice-over by Wilkerson laments how slavery caused the erasure of entire communities. Then, we flash to a concentration camp, where a Jewish mother is tearfully separated from her son.

There are also images of Trayvon Martin in his final moments, further underscoring the connection between anti-Black racism in the present and the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust. Both moments in time are stitched together by violence: The Jewish mother is shot in the head by a Nazi guard, while Martin is fatally shot by Zimmerman.

Wilkerson ties together the seemingly disconnected topics of white supremacy in America, the rise of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, and the “untouchables” of the caste system in India. In the film, Wilkerson’s international trips allow her to better understand the caste system and how it fuels global oppression.

DuVernay’s decision to prioritize narrative authenticity and shoot on location further emphasized the lack of hierarchy during the creative process. Matthew J. Lloyd, who worked as the film’s director of photography, labeled completed footage by their geographical location rather than the traditional method of letters and numbers.

This contributed to the idea of filmmaking as a collective endeavor that gives creatives equal rank and respect, as opposed to the standard protocol of clear-cut title rankings.

“When the playing field is open, everybody’s contribution elevates,” Lloyd told The Hollywood Reporter. “You feel the freedom to contribute.” DuVernay’s on-set environment offers a sharp contrast to how Hollywood typically operates, continuously leaving marginalized people from directing and acting to writing and producing.

While Barbie, , , and other box-office successes proved audiences desire on-screen , women and minority groups still lack the their white male counterparts are routinely given. This is particularly true behind the camera: According to by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, only four directors (3.4%) of the top 100 films in 2023 were women of color.

Origin’s unconventional approach to filmmaking proves Black creatives can still reach creative heights without major studio backing. DuVernay’s film prioritizes the power of lived experiences and the spirit of Wilkerson’s research; the final product wouldn’t exist if left to the demands of white executives who obey algorithms and buy into social media hype. Though DuVernay didn’t intend to follow the indie route, Origin excels because it’s a true labor of egalitarian artistry.

Vanessa Willoughby is a writer and editor. She was a frequent contributor to Bitch �鶹��¼�, and her bylines include Teen Vogue, The New York Times, Allure, and Shondaland. She was recently featured in The Weird Sister Collection, an anthology published by The Feminist Press in 2024.

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