*“Selma” director Ava DuVernay has offered some savory advice to Hollywood hopefuls on how to get ahead in an industry dominated by White males, “You gotta follow the white guys. Truly. They’ve got this thing wired,” she advised during her closing keynote at the 2015 BlogHer conference in New York.
“Too often, we live within their games, so why would you not study what works? Take away the bad stuff — because there’s a lot — and use the savvy interesting stuff and figure out how they can apply. It’s a good one for the ladies,” DuVernay added.
Naturally, her meeting with Marvel about directing the “Black Panther” movie came up, and Ava explained why she decided to pass on the project.
“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,” DuVernay said of the intense commitment Marvel films require. “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?”
Photos Courtesy of OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network
In addition to her new OWN series “Queen Sugar” and her CBS civil rights crime drama pilot “For Justice” – Ava says she’s venturing into virtual reality. “It will be the future of storytelling,” she told the founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein, who moderated the conversation. “It’s really exciting and scary, and I want to know how to do it. … I shoot my first one just to experiment with the tools in August.”
DuVernay’s address also offered empowering words to the female bloggers in attendance, “Women have been trained in our culture and society to ask for what we want instead of taking what we want, she said. “We’ve been really indoctrinated with this culture of permission. I think it’s true for women, and I think it’s true for people of color. It’s historic, and it’s unfortunate and has somehow become part of our DNA. But that time has passed.”
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