Ava DuVernay On What Drew Her to ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and the Cast
With the D23 Expo just one day away, one of the most-anticipated reveals is for A Wrinkle in Time.
Directed by Ava DuVernay, the Disney live-action film is based on a novel of the same name where a young girl named Meg (Storm Reid) goes on cosmic journey to find her missing father (Chris Pine).
DuVernay also had nothing but praise for her film’s young lead. She told EW, “She’s got the sweetest, warmest heart, and all that I saw every day was just a further blossoming of the good that is Storm Reid. She’s appropriately named. She’s a force.”
Ava DuVernay on set with Storm Reid for A Wrinkle in Time. (Photo by ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA/DISNEY)
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, DuVernay explained what interested her so much about working on this film. She told EW:
“The first image [I had in my head] was to place a brown girl in that role of Meg, a girl traveling to different planets and encountering beings and situations that I’d never seen a girl of color in,. All of those scenes struck my fancy, and then it was also something that [Disney VP of production] Tendo Nagenda said to me, which I’ll never forget. One of the things that really made me want to read it was when he said, ‘Ava, imagine what you would do with the worlds.’ Worlds! ‘Planets no one’s ever seen or heard of,’ he said. There aren’t any other black women who have been invited to imagine what other planets in the universe might look and feel like. I was interested in that and in a heroine that looked like the girls I grew up with.”
Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah Winfrey in A Wrinkle in TIme (Photo by ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA/DISNEY)
Along the way, Meg gets help from Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey).
In regards to the casting of Winfrey, Kaling and Witherspoon, Duvernay explained that she wanted the trio to depict a broad range of women. She said, ““My whole process with this film was, what if? With these women, I wondered, could we make them women of different ages, body types, races? Could we bring in culture, bring in history in their costumes? And in the women themselves, could we just reflect a fuller breadth of femininity?”
The cast and premise for this movie is unreal and I cannot wait to see it in theaters next year. But I’ll settle for a trailer at the moment though, so here’s hoping one might be shared after the D23 Expo!
A Wrinkle in Time soars into theaters on March 9, 2018.
Source: Entertainment Weekly
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