Next Question with Katie CouricAva Duvernay’s New Film Origin Reaches Beyond the Theater
Ava DuVernay’s newest film, Origin, breaks a lot of molds. The book on which it’s based, Caste, grapples with some of the deepest inequalities in our world today, and was famously deemed unadaptable into a film. Not to mention DuVernay came to the adaptation as the industry entered one of its biggest slumps in recent memory.
Not one to be dissuaded, DuVernay found a way to adapt this seminal book and to fund it outside of the typical studio-or-streamer model for making a movie. The result is a sweeping mosaic of personal stories, including Isabelle Wilkerson’s own, that chronicle how lives today are defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. The adaptation speaks for itself: there were many tears in the audience of this Q&A, taped live at Art Basel in Miami, one of the partners in a revolutionary new funding model that made the project possible.
This incredible movie and the innovation that underpins its production have a lot to teach about new ways to approach some of the most intractable problems of our time.
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric and this is next question. Ava Duvernet has a new movie coming out this month. It's called Origin, and it's really something special. It's based on the book Cast by Isabelle Wilkerson, which had famously been deemed unadaptable, but that wasn't going to stop Ava. What was especially fascinating about this conversation was Ava's unusual path to funding this film. Usually the team might go to studios and streamers like Netflix for that, but it wasn't quite working out the way Ava wanted when it came to Origin, so she forged a new path, going to philanthropic organizations and corporations and convincing them to fund the movie. Those conversations also turned into an entire infrastructure of social outreach around Origin, from community screenings to curriculum for educators who might want to discuss the book or movie in classrooms. So in this interview, which we recently taped at Art Basel, Ava broke down how this remarkable film came to be and her hopes for the movie's impact. Then I sat down with some of her partners who helped make her dreams a reality. I hope you enjoy. There's so much I want to talk to Ava about, and I tried not to pepper her with questions backstage so we would be fresh. But I also want to give you all a chance to ask Aba some questions as well. But first, let's kind of start at the beginning. Ava, have you always been a big fan of Isabelle Wilkerson's.
I'd read the first book, first of all, thank you for being here.
Of course, Katie.
It's a big deal, so thank you, Katie. Course I'd read the first book, The Warmth of other Sons, and I was an admired of that work. And so when Cast was published, I actually had gotten it in Galley's before it was it was published, but I was shooting and I didn't have a chance to read it. And when it came out in the summer of twenty twenty, in the middle of the pandemic, at the beginning of the pandemic, I just couldn't read. I was just in a daze. Yeah, So I didn't end up reading it until about three months after it had been out, and Oprah actually kind of convinced you to crack it open, and you were asking me to read it since galleys and several other people. You know, it was the Book of the Summer, and I just I hadn't gotten to it. So I would hear about it here or there. People would suggest it to me or assume that I'd read it, and so I finally, I finally did.
And what did you think when you read the book? Because I know it was declared as unadaptable? What made you determined to prove otherwise?
Eva?
Uh, well, I I think it's just my curiosity and interest in the in the general, I won't even say subject matter, just the the audacity of the argument. At times, I wasn't even sure if I agreed with it, but I was provoked by it, which I think is a fantastic thing to be. Allow yourself to be provoked by new ideas, but by things that jar you, by things that that that that force you to think differently, and so as long as that's a safe environment and environment where there's respect, I think being a provocation of one's imagination is a positive thing. And that's what happened to me with the book. I was, you know, ignited by the ideas, the thought that the primary lens through which I see myself being a black woman, that those are predicated uh, that those identities are predicate on something that's very much animated by cast in our society, and that those ideas of the isms racism, sexism, is laophobia, homophobia, anti semitism, whatever it is, all sit on top of something else called cast, and cast is the skeleton and all of those other isms are the skin. You know, cast is the wound, and everything else is kind of on top of it. And so I just thought, what a vibrant idea to help organize my thoughts. I wanted to talk to folks about it, but I know that from thirteenth and from when they see us that popular culture, that putting these tough ideas in movies and TV shows moves it into the culture faster than anything else. And that's what I really wanted. So that's why I started to think about could this be a movie?
And of course you had to transform and translate these these thoughts from a pretty dense, fairly academic book into a narrative, a story, and you turned it in and to really Isabelle Wilkerson's journey. When did you have that aha moment?
Eva?
You thought, this story is really the story of the woman behind the writing.
Yes, well nothing is impossible, and so I knew I was interested in the ideas in the book. But they weren't a lot of characters in the book. There were some though. There was Augustin Irma, the German couple, right, she ends up in the camps, he doesn't hile there was Alison Elizabeth Davis, the African American anthropologists, right who In the book, Miss Wilkerson says that they were doing their research primarily in Natchez, Mississippi, But she has a couple of lines in there that says that they used to they had studied in Europe. And I was like, wow, they studied in Europe. Where so when I went and did that research, it connected them to Germany. So the characters started to come together. I thought, well, maybe it's just about these historical characters. Then I said, I don't want to make another history movie. I just didn't want to make another one. So I was forcing myself to look in the book and find a contempt very character. And then one day I was reading a chapter in the book and the author was recounting her research and she was using the word I a lot, and I was like, she's a character. She's the contemporary character. So when I went to her and I said, I'd like to adapt your book and there's a main character that I'm really fascinated by, who.
You what did she say?
She she agreed rather quickly. She agreed rather quickly, and she gave me the answers to all the questions that I needed over a course of about two years, you know, about a dozen and a half conversations, multiple hours.
I was going to say, because on Zoom there's so many intimate details Isabelle's life and her losses and these moments, I mean, how much creative license did you take ava? For example, when she and her mom are looking at the cloud at the nursing home or assisted living facility, whatever it was, exactly and some of the conversations. Did she say, you can expand upon our conversations and build these characters as you see fit.
She did. She gave me the freedom, and she was very gracious and telling me the stories about the losses of her mother, her husband, and her cousin Marian and then allowing me to go and interpret them. And so stories like her and the Plumber are pretty much exactly what she recounts in the book, but stories about things that happened with Marian. None of that is in the book. And so so it was a balance between being inspired by the book the history, and the book going beyond the book into her personal history that she told me, and then other research historically that I brought to the pages.
It's such an effective mosaic, and I think, you know, I'm a big fan of all your filmilms, but it struck me that this kind of had elements. It had elements of a documentary, it had elements of a feature film. Can you talk about And it's such a vast, you know, story to cover with so many different components. Talk to us about how you were able to figure out the structure of this and you know, going from the past to the present to vignettes and almost like short films about each of these characters that are placed in history.
The way I was able to do it really points directly back to the financing model because I was free. You know, I was free for the first time since i'd made independent films when I was using my own money and I was just starting out and no one cared since I'd made one hundred million dollar films for Disney and Netflix and all the Yonce videos and Apple commercials and all of the things. But there's always someone looking over your shoulder, you know, and there's always someone saying are you sure about that? And we can't do.
That questions which probably causes you to question yourself.
It changes, you know, what you're making changes, The vision changes, and it's okay, you're taking millions of dollars of these corporations money and they should be involved. But if you have a vision and an idea and you consider the prospect of being able to fully birth that without someone breathing down your neck or changing the vision or doubting or fearful, fear based decisions, wouldn't you choose it? And so, in venturing to finance this film outside of the studio system, I gave myself the freedom to think about this storytelling differently than I would if I was inside the studio system. And that meant I'm going to blur the lines between documentary and narrative, if I'm going to have historical and contemporary and also a surreal element. Are there leaves falling in the scene? Yeah, tell it? I thought, try, just try it, you know, and and and and to throw all of that into the pot and see what came out.
I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask you about sort of where the idea of the falling leaves that you use repeatedly, you know, that is really a motif in the film. Where did that come from?
And was it? I mean, how does that happen?
Yes, well, you know, and interpreting Isabelle Wilkerson the story of the of the passing of her loved ones and trying to interpret that visually, you know, and trying to you know, kind of bring that to the heart of the people who are watching. I went into my own personal experience with loss and when my father passed away quite unexpectedly, that's how I felt. I wanted to I felt was in a black hole and I just wanted to be buried with leaves so that people would look out on the lawn and think, oh, well, maybe she was here and now she's not and didn't matter because he wasn't here. And that's how I felt. And so trying to articulate her loss by connecting it to mine was something that I tried to share. And that's what filmmaking is you know, you can take the script, you can take the book, but the best filmmaking is the filmmaker imbuing themselves, putting their fingerprints on the experience and leaving a bit of themselves behind in the scenes. And so that was based on my own personal feeling.
I thought it was so beautiful and really effective, and you I mean, there were so many the visual vocabulary of the movie is so varied and rich, and some of the scenes obviously were quite difficult to pull off, you know, the scenes with the Nazi rallies for example, and the scenes in India. I mean, talk about sort of the challenges of shooting these stories and so many different places.
Yeah, so most films of this size that look around this size would be I don't know, maybe ninety two, one hundred days something like this. We shot this in thirty seven days. I went to three continents, so we were you know, in Delhi, in Berlin, in our domestic base with Savannah, Georgia, and so, you know, really thinking about the finite amount of money we had, I could never go back to the studio and say we're a little over, we need to pad that, or the crane broke, no problem we'll send over another one. Or you know, we're in India now, in the middle of the street and there's no electricity and we thought there would be a generator here. What should we do? It was Paul Garns and me looking at each other saying, we're going to figure it out. It's just the two of us, the man who was on the stage at the top of the and so you know what an adventure want to ride? It's addictive. I want to do it again and again.
You like to have to be really careful with money.
I like, I like to be able to spend the money in service of the vision and not in service of fear, you know what I mean, and not and not to be thank you, and and I think so much of in my industry, in a different industry than many of you, but it is fear based. So many of the decisions that are being made are being made because a boss's boss or my boss won't like that, or just everyone's doing their little bitty piece. And the idea that we as filmmakers, as artists, as producers, as friends, you know, catalyzed by the great work of Regina Miller who raised the money and just like side by side with me a partner, and in putting this model together, we envisioned a new world, a new way to make this kind of scalable. You know, a film that felt intimate but also had epic pieces to it, that was international, it was global in scope, that was about serious subject matter, subject matter that you know is less attractive to studios to make. Imagine the pitch. I go in and I say, they say, hi, Eva, gosh, we haven't seen you in a while. Miss you. Guys, how are you? And so what are you thinking about? We just want to hear we're going to work with you. Yeah, no, I want to work with you all too. So my next piece, I'm really interested in making a film about cast. Cast. You want to have a cast in it? No, cast, the social phenomenon of the hierarchy of human beings. Like that's not They were like, I didn't, I didn't even do it. That would have been the pitch. And so we saved ourselves a year of going through and doing that and try and we just spent the time instead building something new.
Talk about the Trayvon Martin of it all. And you know, as a black woman writing and directing this film, what it was like, and I think you did that so beautifully with the nine to one one tapes, and I know that was choreographed exactly really how it happened with George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. Can you just talk about sort of the importance of that scene, eva, juxtaposed with so many of the historical moments in the film.
Yes, yes, Well, in my conversations with the author, she had shared that I asked, where did this idea of cast count come from? A lot of it, she traced back. Her early thoughts about it were around the Trayvon Martin case. She was she was writing about it, she was thinking about it, and so I was trying to, you know, find a way to interpret that and put it in the in the film. And it took me a while to decide to actually show what happened. But what was important is if I showed it, I had to show from his perspective too, And I wanted you to see him first. It's just a kid talking to a girl on the phone. He went to get some candy. But when you hear the killer's version, he was a sinister guy, looked like he was on drugs, walking around the place. What is he doing here? They always get away? That's what George Zimbers and Zimmerman says on the tape. That was the real tape that you heard on that tape on the second nine one one tape where you hear the woman and she's calling in the real woman, you can hear Trayvon Martin screaming in the background, and so you can hear the gunshot, right, and so you actually have that murder caught on tape. And so to think, how can I honor this Instead of just doing the tape, I wanted to do the kid, the kid that he was just before, so that when you hear the tape, when you see what the reenactment of what had happened, you know him already. You know what he was doing. He was talking about breakfast, he was talking about whatever they were talking about. His mother was kind enough to I called her before I did anything, and I asked her, I was so nervous to talk to her. She was like, girl, are you nervous? You know, just talk to me. She was so lovely, Sabrina Fulton, and she said, do it, you know, do it.
I've interview.
Isn't she wonderful? Yeah, she said do it, and she so you know that was done with her permission and book ended. Now that you've seen it, you know the first image of the film is him, and the last image of the film is him. And there are many parts of the film that are tough to watch and that I've cried over, whether I was writing it, filming it, or editing it. And I'm all cried out on the movie. There's nothing that I cried anymore except his last look. Sometimes when I'm doing a Q and A, if I catch it, I get very emotional. His last look right at her. It's a really shot where he's looking down the barrel. The camera's always looking at you, and he's just something about it that gets me every time. Now I don't look at it because I will start to cry. Unlike Katie, who was crying in the background, like literally came out of our little holding areas in Katie Kirk and she's just very much crying. And like I said, Katie, who I know a little bit what is going on. She's a out right the albright.
I think it's so honestly heartbreaking and upsetting and so beauty. I mean, that little boy is so precious and the man who's recounting the story. I didn't want to ask Ava backstage because I wanted to hear her true response is I wondered, you know this idea of the documentary meets a feature if the man telling Isabelle's character in the movie was actually his teammate. Was he Albright's redheaded teammate or was he an How.
Many people think he was a real guy, okay, the real man, and how many think he was an actor? Okay, more people think he was real. Okay, he's somewhere in the middle. Okay, he's not the real man. He is not the real man. He's also not an actor. Okay, let me tell you who he is. When Regina Miller was talking before an answer to your question, Katie of what are the ways in which you've included your ideas about social justice and social impact into the filmmaking, one of the ways is to try to eliminate as many hierarchies as we could on set. So when I walk through the set, I'm the boss, and the way it usually goes is, no one talks to me unless you're in my inner circle. And when I say me, I mean the director. No one talks to the director unless you're asked a question, or unless you're the DP or the production designer in that top top circle. It's very rare that folks are just coming up to you because you're the director and you must see your unwalking leave her bee, right, It's ridiculous. So one of the things that I like to do, and when you look at the who would be considered the bottom of the hierarchy of a set, it's the extras. Okay, the extras who I call background actors, but the extras they're put off to the site. They have a different place where they eat, they have a different place where they sit.
So there's a cast system, the cast.
System right on every single set. They're kept away from the rest of the set. It's like bring them in and they come in like cat and they're like, you go over there, you go over there. They're not treated well. They're not treated well. And I think the reason why I have such empathy for them is because one day my mother said, I want to try to be an extra, and I was like, I don't think you're going to like it, and she's like, I just want to. I can make one hundred and fifty dollars for the day, and I'm just gonna do it. She came back so devastated. She was just so I was like treated like a subhuman And so I thought, as we started to think about the different ways to break down casts, the idea of really talking to the actors and background actors and really including them in the process became a part of our process. So on this particular day, I'm walking across the set where the pool is and one of the background actors who had been free. I talk to them all the time. I set up the scene with them. They know what they're doing. They can eat regular food, they can be with the regular people. Like we're trying not to segregate the set. He stops me and he says, Miss Duverne, I just want to tell you the scene we're doing today. It really I feel emotional about it because something like that happened to me when I was young, And I stopped and I said, tell me, and he told me a story that add some similarities to the scene that we were shooting. Now, the background actors are so segregated, they don't get a script, so they don't ever know what we're doing. Because you can't give like a thousand people the script end up on LinkedIn. I don't know whatever you yeah, and so we just kind of don't give them pages. But I like to at least describe it to them. So he says, I'm not sure what's going on here, but this reminds me of something. He tells me what it reminds him of, and I said, and he's almost has tears in his eyes as he's telling me. I said, you know, if I give you the pages of this script, you can go over there and read them. Do you think that you could tell the story of the pages with the same emotion that you're telling me your own story? He said, I'll try. So he goes over he's reading the script. I'll go over to Andre Newellis. She's about to go to lunch. I said, just give me one more second, just one more second. She said, oh, did we forget a scene? I said, it's a new scene. It's a new scene.
Just come here, and said, I was going to say, what happened to the actor who was supposed to it was never scripted?
Okay? Good felt that for no, No, that guy.
She sits down, he comes over. It was I said, you think you can do it. He said, yeah, I'll try. So he sits down and without a script, he's he's he's interpreting the story of al Bright that he read in the script, and he's saying he's putting himself in the place, and he's saying, I was I was a little boy. And he tells that story one take, Wow, one take. He told that story with such love and memory and just all that you see on the screen. Real heck, tough. Grips on the set were like, I'm not crying. It's fine, it's fine, it's no big deal. Ange New starts to cry in the scene. She starts to interview him. In the scene, they get to the part where she says how old were you? And I'm like, oh gosh, he's not gonna know how old. I didn't put the age in the script. I know that Albright was nine and the man said I was nine, nine years old. Paul Garns is like, what's happening? And that's what's there. A little maze, a little bit of actor, a little bit of magic, a little bit of the unit.
That's such a great story.
We need to take a quick but when we come back some audience, Q and A for Ava, and of course I have some more questions of my own.
We'll be right back.
If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake Up Call by going to Katiecouric dot com. We're back with the one and only Ava DuVernay. I wanted to just have you say a couple of the acting was so superb, So talk about Angeenue Ellis Taylor, who played Isabelle.
She was in King Richard, Right.
She was nominated for the Wasn't she fantastic?
She played the Yeah, unbelievable.
She was nominated for the Oscar Best Supporting Actress for King Richard Y Right, she played the Williams the wife.
Yeah and all right, anything you'd like to say about her other then she was fantastic. I mean, she really carried the whole movie.
Right, he's her movie. You know, it's the first time. She's a woman close to my age, in her early fifties, and she'd been working Love Carecraft Country. She was in my film when they See Us, so many incredible parts and had never been the lead in the film, and so it really speaks to the disparity and opportunity for black women actresses of a certain age, or of any age. And so she took the She she took it, and she ran with it. She was incredible to work with.
She was amazing. John Burnhal, who played.
John Burnhal, who I had only known as the Punisher, and had such a when I met with him, such an intelligence behind his eyes, a real passion for the subject matter. He really cares about this. We could have intelligent, thoughtful conversations about the subject matter, about the world. And so we really connected. And he and I was looking for someone who had enough wagger to play that crossing the street scene of Hey, hey didn't did you? Didn't you hear her? She doesn't want to put the thing in the front yard. I needed that guy and so and who could also say it's my birthday, Yeah, it's my birthday.
You know.
The guy who could do both of those.
He was really He did it. Not as cute as my husband John, but he.
Is really cute. I wanted to A fun fact though, John Bernhal, which is so interesting, is the brother of Ryl Samberg's husband Tom. I think bumper anyway, little trivia for everyone. Niss Nash bets what I mean. Good lord, she was so great, so funny, so movie y.
Yeah.
She always says, when I gave you the script, I said, yeah, read the script, and I want you to bring a little lightness, a little levity to it. She said, with this script, she's like, girl, I'm gonna have to go off book of places here or there. So she's one of one of my dearest, dearest friends. And she actually was shooting a television show that she's the lead on and at the same time that we were shooting the film, and she was able to get them to let her be off every Friday, so she would work all week. On Thursday nights, she'd take a red eye, she'd land in Atlanta and then take a puddle jumper to Savannah. She'd get into Savannah, she'd work all day, late night until like three o'clock in the morning, and then she'd fly back on Saturday and do it all again. She did that for four weeks.
She was amazing.
And I asked David backstage, but she told me she would tell me out here about Nick Offerman, who's one of my favorite actors, because I thought in what was the HBO series that he was in with the rest of us. Yeah, I thought that episode so incredible. It was one of the best piece of pieces of acting. I've ever seen that episode, and if you all haven't watched it, it's just amazing.
I hope they won an Emmy for that.
But anyway, we'll find out in a couple of weeks.
What did what did he think about playing a guy I got plumber with him?
Maga hat.
Yeah, he had to tell this audience they're they're not like us where they know the details of who every actor is. You say, Nick.
Offerman, which Nick's Plumer? And how did he feel about that role? I actually loved that scene.
I know a lot of people love that scene. A lot of people really love that scene. He I'd worked with him on a on a show I did for Netflix called Colin and Black and White about Colin Kaepernick. He played the father. Thank you. The one person who watched it, thank you, thank you, ma'am. It was all for you, mam, thank you. And and I loved him and we got along so well. And the last thing he told me after we left the set on the last day of shooting Colin Black and White. He said, Hey, if you ever need me, call me, and so he's like, I'll be there, And so I called him. I said, I need you, I need you one scene, just one scene. Will you come in and do it for me? So he he came. He did the one scene. He was incredible. He didn't really get that I was going to put the Maga hat on him until he had arrived and he said, do you really want me to wear this? I said, I really. I want to do some takes with it and some takes without it. And he said, does do the letters have to be this big? He's very funny. He's very very funny. That is funny. It's the next thing to say. And he put it on. He got a little bit uncomfortable about it, but he's an actor, so he figured it out.
But I did love the interplay between, you know, between and Nick and they had a fun something really beautiful that and how it brought everybody down to a level just talking about parents and.
Talking about loss. Yeah, one thing we're all going to have in common.
Right, How about any questions from the audience. I have a few more, but I've gone way too long. But here's one right up there. Do you see it?
You all?
Can you raise your hands so that people with the mic can see you?
Thank you? My question.
I don't know how involved you are with the fundraising process. I know we've talked a lot about the virtues and how it allows you to do some of the great work that you just displayed for us today. But to the degree that you were involved, I wondered if you can maybe tell us a little bit about the lessons that you learned, maybe for others that might be considering going down a similar path, and anything that you might have done differently.
Thank you well. Like I say, I have to make sure that I mentioned Regina Miller, who's the executive director of Ray Alliance, who's really you know, the architect, along with with our colleague Erica of of bringing it in. You know. The idea for this came very simply. I always watch PBS documentaries and I see at the end of the documentaries with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Da Da Da Da Da, and I always thought, since I was in college, I wonder if they would ever fund something else, a narrative film, and so, in wanting to veer away from the studio system. We just asked. The first place we went was a Ford Foundation and we asked Darren Walker, who was one of our funders at ARRAY, and he said, yes, we would consider that. And that gave Regina and I the courage to continue and to ask other funders and other like minded individuals, and the process began very personal. It was very one to one. It wasn't a submission of grants. So that was a privilege that I enjoyed that a lot of people wouldn't and that I was able to reach in and speak with the women. Maverene, pal Jobs and Melinda could speak with these people directly. But the paperwork and the ninety thousand calls in ninety thousand meetings and it was actually ninety thousand I counted that Regina Miller and her team did to bring that to a bank account that Paul Gardens could then write checks to make a movie was an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting. I think as we look back, we think it could have actually been about half of that in the future. We just didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know because it hadn't been done, and the entities that we were dealing with had never done it, So everything had to be thought of anew, how does this work? What is the structure? Who do we even ask? Can we say yes to this? Did you say yes?
No?
I said yeah, no, he said yes, No. Run it through again, you know. I mean it was just a lot throughout the companies, and so I think now we have much more of a handle on it. We can probably cut down to forty five thousand calls. But it was a lot of back and forth. I would just say it was personal relationships, you know, and it was cultivating those. And one of the things that I say is you have to be prepared, you know, you have to prepare the soil for when the moment comes that you can ask and be so fully formed that the ask feels logical. Like I had a non profit making films and distributing films for the last decade. I mean, we had the muscles. We were ready to do it. If anyone was going to do it, it was going to be us. And so when we asked or when we offered the opportunity, it was too a company that was strong, and so I wouldn't suggest that anyone just jumps into what we did, but prepare the soil, and you know, maybe folks come up with another model that I can use, but I think this is a model that eventually will get easier, and I think some of the companies are even looking at ways to streamline it and offer more of the star artists.
Do you all mind if I asked two more quick questions? Is everybody okay? Because I just have? Well three?
Really?
So.
One of the things that struck me, especially the second time watching this, is how relevant so many of the scenes were and how they kind of how much they resonate. I was thinking about the book burning, and I was thinking about book banning.
You know.
Also when they were in the library in Berlin, I was thinking about the anti semitism that was so you know, heartbreakingly portrayed with the couple in Germany. I was thinking about the Indian scholar. I'm sorry I forgot his name, but Raj who was talking about sort of cast systems nationwide, he mentioned or worldwide, He mentioned the Palestinians, and I was just thinking, did that strike you Ava as well? As these historical references had so much relevance today, all.
Of them done before before our current times. I mean, we wrapped this film in till August, and so yes, I think it really you know, people say, oh, this this film is coming out the perfect time. You know, it's meeting this moment. There's really not a moment. And there's no moment. There's no time when we're not not treating each other well, you know what I mean, there's no moment. There's not been a time traced in the last one hundred years where there hasn't been a war happening somewhere in the world. Where there hasn't been there haven't been people who are being treated unfairly, people who are dying at the hands of terrible events and regimes. So this work was going to meet I thought it was going to be about the books, you know what I mean. I thought, oh, this is about education and withholding of education. I really thought that was going to be the moment that it met, having no idea that references or things that were in a film about cast would meet another moment. And so I just feel, you know, we had a similar thing with Selma. We made Sema. It was about a small black town that was fighting for their rights and at the same time Ferguson was happening a small black town fighting for the rights. But there's always a small black town fighting for the rights, you know what I mean. And so it's just the work is speaking to the culture, and the culture is speaking to the work.
Do you hope that this you know, I noticed both times that Isabelle Wilkerson are on news character talked about how subjugation really isn't about race, which I have to think about some more because to me, I think in many ways race probably exacerbates or amplifies that kind of need for the fact that some groups try to dominate others. But I'm going to have to actually readcasts which I haven't read. But do you think this will open up a different conversation about race in America? And how do you think it will will do that? Because this, to me is about dominance and superiority, And how do you think it will reframe these conversations?
Ava, I think you're exactly right. It's about dominance, It's about power. It's about the hierarchy of human beings, so that some are dominant have power and some are subordinate and don't. And that is goes far beyond race, you know, it goes far beyond race. You can apply that to gender. You can apply that to sexual you can apply that to physical ability, You can apply that to so many ways that we create hierarchies for human beings based on a random set of traits that we have no control over. If you have no control over the circumstances of your birth, none, but our society says, because you were born that way, you go in this box and I label that, and I know what you are and who you are inside. You would look at me as a black woman from Compton and wouldn't possibly think that I'm the world's biggest you two fan. I mean, no one's bigger than me. There is no one who loves Bono in the Edge and Larry Moans Junior more than me. But you think you might know me because of who I am and where I'm from based on a random set of circumstances.
That's cash and what you look up and what you look like.
And what I'm looking like. I don't look like a YouTube fan. This is what it looks like. You look good, yes, but you know so. I hope to your question, I hope that it opens up people's thoughts about way more than race. Yes, absolutely, thinking about race and new ways and thinking about the things that race is built upon. Why haven't we been able to solve the race question? Are we asking the right question?
And the social constructs that maintain a cast.
Stem absolutely across the board.
Before we go, tell me about Seat sixteen, which is the impact campaign that's happening alongside the film.
Yeah, Seat sixteen is what that is up there, And basically it is, there's four million, four and a half million sixteen year olds in the country right now, I think, and I believe, and there's a lot of data that suggests that sixteen is the sweet spot. That's the age where you start to organize your thoughts about who you are in the world and what your place in the world is, what the world means to you. You start to open up and it starts to become a little less about only individual thoughts and more about, you know, the way that society is organized. And so I feel like, if we can get that fifteen sixteen year old to see the film and we can plant some of the seeds about cast and get this terminology, the language into their thinking, now the earth might tilt a little bit towards justice. If you have a whole generation of people who can speak about our ills in a different way. So set up with things called seat sixteen, not sweet sixteen, isn't it cute? Seat sixteen? Because they're not going to pay for it on their own. So you can buy a ticket for a sixteen year old and we'll give a free ticket to the kid and they can go see the movie. It's really really simple. So it's sixteen dollars. They get the ticket, they get a learning companion, and hopefully they have a new vocabulary to think about the things that we're leaving them with. You know, our generation is leaving quite a mess. They're stepping into a lot, and so I hope that this film can give some organizing principles to young people as to how to think about proceeding Set sixteen, Bye kids, sixteen dollar ticket.
That's a great idea.
Hey, simple, David DuVernay, thank you so so much.
Thank you so much.
Congratulation, appreciate it.
After this quick break, more from the amazing team that helped bring Origin to the big screen. That's right after this. We're back with more from the amazing team that helped bring Origin to the big screen. Please welcome to the stage, Paul Garnes. He's President of Array film Works, Tom Hall, Global head of Social Impact in Philanthropy for UBS, and Regina Miller, executive director of the Array Alliance, the nonprofit arm of Array film Works.
So here they are welcome. Hi.
All right, So Paul, let's start with you. I know that you have been working with Ava Dubernet since twenty eleven, and over the last twelve years you've witnessed some pretty significant shifts in the way Hollywood does business and the way films are financed. So can you set the stage and explain to everyone sort of the position that filmmakers are finding themselves in in the current streaming environment or the entertainment environment rit large.
Sure, I mean, I'm sure many people here have heard about the recently resolved labor contract that crippled the entertainment industry for the last eight months. It's indicative of an overall trend as we've tried to figure out new ways and new business models to produce content deliver it to an audience for a price, and streaming has really challenged it. It's really rode it away what has historically been the independent film model, where in the past we would go out raise money, make a movie and then you end up in this marketplace where you're just kind of dealing with bidders and people try to get your product. Streaming really has changed that because they don't buy just a bit of the rights. If you go to a streamer, they take all the rights forever. And so it makes it very difficult for an independent film, which is usually make on pure speculation, to really make its money back and or give it an opportunity to move forward into another production right after that. And so a lot of times we end up in the studio system, which is, you know, the normal way to make movies. The challenge is when you want to make a movie that has a particular statement and you want to do it in a particular way. The strings that come along with that process is that there's a lot of input on what you show, who you hire to show it, who the person that should be the one to say it. It's all about the cooks in the kitchen, the cooks in the kitchen.
And also streamers currently are contracting, right they were buying, buying, buying suddenly, yeah, and.
The industry is shrinking right right now. Yeah.
And I know initially this film was with Netflix, but you all decided you wanted to take it back at full control, and you noticed that Netflix were kind of that the folks at Netflix were slow moving. So what was the rationale and how much courage did it take for you all to say, wait a second, we're going to take this project back and we're going to run run with it.
Yeah, when we first started, we thought it was going to be a traditional like it's going to Netflix, and we had done projects with Netflix before and so as a partner, we thought this would be a good place for it. But as you mentioned, the industry started to slow down last year to a point where shows that would have been greenlit, which means that they were given to go to move forward, we're getting now the flashing yellow And from our standpoint, and what Avera really wanted for this film was for it to be out now, to be in the marketplace, to be in theaters for people to see and talk about, far before the election cycles and all those things.
So, Regina, I know that you all raised thirty eight million dollars from philanthropists and various foundations to get this film made, And why did you think approaching these stakeholders, if you will, would be your solution? To getting this movie made.
First of all, philanthropy is changing, and the philanthropists of today are looking for innovative ways to invest, both through program mission related investments PRIs or MRIs through their endowments, and then they're also looking to put their philanthropic dollars to work in meaningful ways. And we have a visionary and Ava DuVernay is extraordinary, and she had a clear vision. And fundraising is easy when you can go to funders with confidence and clarity of what you want to achieve, and she was clear. And it was impact from the beginning to the end, not just a marketing campaign for two weeks. It was infusing that into everything we do, how we treat communities when we go in there, how we leave them better than we found them, and also how to put philanthropic dollars into action to really have change immediately, because we can't wait.
And the film is really just the beginning. You know, it's community screenings, it's education conversations. Is this really that new a business model or is this similar to what PBS, for example, has been doing for decades.
Certainly, I think philanthropic relationships in creating documentaries has been a very known model, but when you cross it over into the narrative feature world, it is unique, and so it's exciting to see kind of what the take is from that experience.
And also, when everybody comes out to see this movie and the box office does well, not only WOUL the social impact investors make their money back and then some but philanthropy will be reinvested in through our grants that we put into the movie. And now those grants can keep generating more and more towards impacting our mission. So the way that the synergy between social impact investing and philanthropy is going to keep feeding the mission is beautiful and it's continuous.
It's like a virtual circle, right, And Tom, can you break down this concept of catalytic capital and what that means exactly?
Yeah, maybe, just before I do that, I think just to kind of fried context to why UBS is sitting here. And you know, we have a million oworth clients around the world, and that's also a million philanthropists. We know that ninety percent of our clients are already involved in philanthropy, and in fact they say that they want to try and solve the pressing social and environmental problems the world's facing. But the reality is that philanthropy on its own can't do that. Forbes estimated that philanthropy are about ten trillion dollars by the mid twenty thirties.
That's a really big number. That's five times what it is today.
But if we take the sustainable development goals as a proxy for solving these big social environmental issues, we need thirty trillion. So if we try and give people free healthcare or free education, the money is just going to run out. So we have to use it catalytically, which is why I fully agree with you.
Philanthropy is changing. It's innovating.
People want to see their capital innovating first and foremost, but then those innovations going to scale, and there's really only two pathways to scale.
You can use your philanthropic dollars.
For example, many people might not know we're all sitting back here in this theater because the rn D for the vaccine development the COVID vaccines was done with philanthropic capital. It was a risk that the market would never have taken on its own, but that was then scaled through investment capital at the right time for all of us. So that's one pathway that you can be truly catalytic. The other is that you can also you know, idea new business models around maybe early child development or children learning more efficiently, more effectively, and then you can get governments to adopt that. In fact, just earlier this week we I was at cop and we had several global governments agreeing to fund some treatments around neglected tropical diseases that have been ideated with philanthropic dollars. Then we raised just under a billion dollars as announced last week. So you can really move huge amounts of capital into things that work by thinking catalytically, thinking with scale in mind, and that's what it's all about. And that's obviously very exciting for philanthropists to be part of really solving issues at scale.
So you sort of start micro and then expand it to on a much scale. Paul, how do you measure success? You know, when it comes to the impact of this film. I mean Regina mentioned box office, but is that really how you're going to measure success? I mean, how much of it is returning capital and how much of it is changing hearts and minds and just having a huge impact on attitudes.
Sure, yeah, I think impact and success really go hand in hand in this case. Obviously, the traditional successful conversation after a movie comes out is how much money it makes. That's what everyone you know, focuses on. But at its core, one thing that we are really excited about with this particular movie is this is a movie based on a book called Cast that is banned in many states. And so the idea that you also now can introduce a movie that won't be banned, and kids in high school who go to a school whe they can't read the book Cast to understand the complexities of this conversation could go to the movie and see it and still have that conversation. And so I think when you look at success, it is really for us based on the impact the film can have. And you either walk away thinking, you know, wow, this really means something to it, or you walk away and say, you know, not even realize that you've planted a seed there. And when someone gets into a situation where the idea of Cast comes up in their regular life, it's there. It's planted, and it can come out and hopefully grow into something useful to society.
But how important is it, Paul that this film makes money?
It's very important that it makes money, you know, not because I mean the good news is we've made the movie, not because the return helps us make the movie, but making money means that people are seeing it, and so for us really pushing it out there, it helps recoup the investment for our investors, but it really does fulfill the other side of it. They go hand in hand, the impact.
Tom, I'm curious.
You know, my husband and I started a media company about five years ago, and we work with global purpose driven brands. So it's not just sort of the philanthropists who are or the you know, the private wealth folks in a bank like UBS or a financial institution like UBS. Companies are now getting much more involved in putting their sort of mark on big, thorny social issues because consumers are demanding it, their employees are demanding it. So do you think that this model where corporations get more involved in things like a film that has such an important social message will continue and even grow in the marketplace.
I mean, I think it's essential that that's what corporations do. And ultimately, you know, when we think about impact, you know, it can sound like we're trying to talk about doing the right thing because it's the right thing do.
But actually there's another way to frame it.
If we meet the sustainable animal goals again, which I use as a proxy for really addressing these issues around social and economic inequality and making sure people can achieve their potential. We're talking about adding three hundred and eighty million new jobs the global economy and twelve trillion of global value.
Right.
The growth is going to come from us actually finding ways to finance and really enable people to get something like education. I mean, actually just really interested in the audience. Maybe raise your hand if you went to college or university. Yeah, probably most of us would think that that was contingent on our success. And then again, maybe raise your hand if you had to take some kind of student loan. Did anyone pay more than twenty percent on their loan?
Anyone here? Just one person?
So today globally, right, there's about five one hundred million people who can't.
Get access to basic student credit.
Their only option is to if they're not lucky enough to be one on a million to get a scholarshi, the only option is to take a loan that's priced at forty percent APR. Young women from Rwanda maybe you know, and we know that if she can get into not even college, like a six month coding course, she's going to ten exer income.
This can be fixed by companies like UBS.
Our purpose is to reimagine the power of investing and connect people for a better world. Connecting philanthropists like you guys are doing with investors in these blended finance instruments, you can solve this. We just did a fund recently of small fund twenty two million dollars. Instead of doing sixty scholarships, which is the traditional model, it's going to do ten thousand students in the next ten years. And that capital will be repaid and recycled again and again. And models like that are scalable. That would only require about half a trillion dollars to give finance, fair price financing for education to every child in the world who needs it. And these are the kinds of big ideas that not just we as corporates need to have, but as communities need to come together and build together.
Why has this film, Why does this film align so well with UBS's values? You know, why was this you know a good exam sample of this kind of partnership.
Well, I think, ultimately, if you really want to solve issues, you're always going to end up in pockets of inequality and inequity, and in the US in particular, that has this kind of dimension around conversations around racial inequality and being able to and obviously I don't want to give it away. I've seen the film. It was a paradigm shifting experience for me. Gives us a new language to be able to talk about things perhaps we haven't been able to talk about, and dialogue is essential, right, I was a cop earlier this week. We're not going to address the issues of global climate change without working with local communities well, helping them feed their families and really understand what they're doing. We're not going to address issues around inequality without working with local communities, entrepreneurs, and this is something you know, Jamie, who was applauded earlier, which she should be, has been working on this topic along with our social impact team for a decade because we've identified this as a key area that's critical to see both the economic and the social benefits. And we've been working with Black Innovation Alliance, for example, who we recommend to our clients. Of our clients give we do a ten percent match and it's not just about capital for black entrepreneurs. It's also about mentorship and about actually just trying to address some of the historic issues in this area.
So this film will have a long tail, hopefully, and it's going to reverberate as you continue to show it. Hopefully it'll be on a stream or at some point so that even more people can have access to it. But Regina, can you just tell us briefly about some of the programs and Paul you too, that you hope to implement that. Will you know it will have a ripple effect all across the land.
Well, I already think it has because thousands of people and in different communities worked on this film. Literally, it feels like and it has changed hearts and minds. When people walk out of this movie, they're change agents. They want to even made the movie? Now, what are you going to do with it? And I hear that all the time, And I think I win the award at Array for seeing the movie the most. I think I've seen it ten times, and every single time I walk out, I just love hearing the conversations. And this wonderful gentleman that's in the audience today came up to me and said, how do I do this in my community? I want to bring this to San Francisco. I want to people want to gather, I think, especially around important issues, and they want to heal, and they want to have smart conversations and they want to be educated. And I think that with the work that we do our wonderful team at Array. Mercedes Cooper, who's here tonight, is our senior vice president of Programming. We host public, free programs around the movie that will be incorporated by the large release. Tammy Garnes, our director of A senior director of Education and Understanding, is launching a beautiful digital learning guide that is a masterpiece that I actually think schools can use this learning guide for a year. It's a coursework. It's not just a couple of prompts. They're extraordinary. Go to Array one oh one and look at some of our other learning guides, but there's nothing like it out there in the education market. And then, of course, we have a podcast that's coming out that Paul is going to be moderating and leading, and we're constantly innovating creative partnerships with Expedia. How do we create travel experiences around this content and around the movie, how do we gather in small groups and have meaningful conversations with each other. So there's so many layers to array of how we approach impact. But the other thing that we're so proud of is you'll see it at the end of the movie. We got the highest seal for environmental justice on a movie that we also the way that the movie was made and the way we cared about the world and the community and the environment when we made it, So there's impact on every level. And I just also want to thank ubs because as a fundraiser, it's really really hard to raise money and it's so beautiful when someone comes to you and says, I have five donors that I want to introduce you to and you didn't have to ask, and that really shows the collaboration and leadership when you don't have to ask, but somebody gets your vision and Mark is like, we're going to get out there and do it.
We're going to help you.
So I just really want to thank you because not a lot of companies do that proactively, and it means the world to every single one of us that are trying to make and fuel dreams. Because a lot of people have dreams, but you have to fuel them, so thank you for that.
I think that's a great way to end the conversation. So ladies and gentlemen, Regina, Tom and Paul, thank you.
Thanks for listening. Everyone.
If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world reach out. You can leave a short message at six h nine five P one two five five five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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