Ava DuVernay in 2023. Gioncarlo Valentine/The New York Times/Redux In an early September morning over breakfast on a restaurant patio in her Eastside L.A. neighborhood, Ava DuVernay is remembering a piece of advice Steven Spielberg gave her more than a decade ago.
Around the release of Selma, the fiery 2014 historical drama that received a best picture Oscar nomination, DuVernay attended a dinner at J.J. Abrams’ house and found herself seated next to Spielberg. Her movie was launching her into a new sphere of opportunity — and visibility — in Hollywood, and there, a few inches away, was arguably the most famous filmmaker in the world. She marveled to Spielberg, “Your name is on so many things — even things that you don’t direct,” before asking how he handled the pressure of delivering every time. What if a project left his fans or peers disappointed?
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“He said, ‘You make another one,’ ” DuVernay recalls. ” ‘You just keep going.’ “
DuVernay has held that advice close ever since. This morning, she’s only a few weeks from the New York Film Festival premiere of her latest film, 14th, a documentary about the 14th Amendment and its increasingly fraught place in American political life. It’s a companion piece to her Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary 13th, which examined mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex through the amendment that abolished slavery.
The new film also comes on the heels of Origin, DuVernay’s ambitious 2023 narrative drama, which resonated with critics but — like even a few Spielberg movies — underperformed with audiences. “I’ve talked to a lot of fellow filmmakers about that experience,” she says. “Some really famous, well-known guy friends reminded me that everyone has films that are not as widely seen as they should be.”
And so, on to the next.
The director on the set of her 2023 narrative drama Origin. Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection The idea for 14th came to DuVernay in early 2024, when Donald Trump, campaigning to return to the White House, was promising to challenge birthright citizenship — one of the rights enshrined in the 14th Amendment. At first, that gave her the movie’s frame. Then the frame kept widening.
Once Trump was back in office, the amendment seemed to keep turning up in the news: due process, public debt, even its language around “insurrection or rebellion.” What had begun as a film about one contested constitutional guarantee was becoming something larger — and, for DuVernay, harder to pin down while history was still moving beneath her feet.
“This movie kicked my butt because it was like building a plane midflight — so much stuff was coming in every day, everything was happening,” DuVernay says.
During production, she followed Carla Hayden, the first African American and first woman to serve as librarian of Congress; three weeks later, Hayden was fired. She followed Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the first Black secretary of the Smithsonian Institution who later retired amid speculation of political pressure, which Bunch has denied.
“All my feelings about everything happening in the past three years — creatively, politically, socially, culturally — are being put into this film,” she says. “At least I’ve felt productive and not like I was going crazy with worry and fear and anger.”
For 14th, DuVernay interviewed more than 50 experts, scholars and politicians, interweaving their insights with vérité interludes and brief snippets of relevant stand-up from comedians like Hasan Minhaj. “Comedians are the last frontier of truth-telling,” she says.
The film was made for Netflix, which DuVernay considers her “home studio,” having worked with the Ted Sarandos- and Greg Peters-run streamer on such projects as 13th. But 14th arrives as some of Hollywood’s largest companies have come under scrutiny for their handling of politically sensitive material. Amazon dropped the Sam Altman docudrama Artificial with the statement, “We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio,” after striking a major deal with Altman’s OpenAI. (Neon quickly picked it up.) Apple, meanwhile, pushed the Jessica Chastain political-violence thriller The Savant by more than a year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk; Chastain later said she was “not aligned” with that decision.
DuVernay interviews activist and philosopher Angela Davis for 13th. Courtesy of Netflix 14th ranks among the more overtly political projects Netflix has backed, and DuVernay wondered whether the company would stay out of her way. “I was really hopeful that they would continue to support the filmmakers in the way that they’ve established — and they did,” she says. “I was hoping they would hold their stance under what has felt like a lot of pressure to do otherwise. … In this climate, I would’ve expected a little more ‘helicopter mom.’ ”
The cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late night show, the turmoil around Jimmy Kimmel and Paramount’s settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes all registered with DuVernay as she worked. Most unnerving was the short-lived merger agreement between Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix, which drew attention in Washington.
“I was like, ‘What’s this merger? What’s happening? What’s going on?’ ” DuVernay recalls asking Adam Del Deo, Netflix’s vp docs. “He said, ‘Ava, just keep making the movie you want to make. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen. I really don’t know what’s happening.’ “
She then asked, “Are you guys going to drop this?”
Del Deo responded, “I don’t know. Just keep making it.”
“I feel like everyone’s afraid, and I’m no exception — I’ve been cautioned about this material and about my points of view on all kinds of things,” DuVernay says. “We’ve seen a total recession in films by certain kinds of people and movies made for certain amounts of money — I think artists and executives feel a lot less free.”
A former film publicist, DuVernay broke out behind the camera in the 2010s with the emotional, character-driven indies I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere. Since then, she has moved across documentaries, limited series and big studio movies. Her 2018 Disney tentpole A Wrinkle in Time disappointed at the box office; a year later came the massively popular and Emmy-winning When They See Us.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars in the film, based on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection Over time, she has grown less interested in being one of the industry’s designated spokespeople on representation. “Is Alex Gibney going to get that question? Is Nathan Fielder going to get that question? What are those directors doing from their position for women?” she asks, referencing the men behind other high-profile documentaries this fall, Musk and You Can See Everything. “Until it’s a priority for everyone who says that they care about other people and are interested in a just world, then there won’t be one.
“You’re making a choice for the types of films that you make to look a certain way — you’re making all those choices — and so people will make their choices, and I’ll make mine. My choice is just to try to be self-sustaining,” she continues. “I used to be the poster child of talking about this because I felt like it could make a difference — but what I’ve come to realize is it’s too difficult to do if enough people aren’t on board, and there just aren’t enough people on board. It doesn’t mean give up — it means just do it in other ways.” Her work still continues, for instance, with Array, her sprawling distribution and advocacy company for underrepresented filmmakers.
One way 14th differs from 13th is in the audience DuVernay imagined watching it — particularly its attention span and knowledge base. Early in the process, she ran an informal poll of people at the Grove in Los Angeles, asking what they knew about the Civil War, who fought it and what it was about.
DuVernay with sitting Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden while making 14th. Paul Garnes/Netflix “The answers were startling, shocking, in terms of people not even having an idea,” she says. “But I don’t want people to feel bad about what they don’t know. I don’t want people to feel overwhelmed.”
The film features historians, current and former senators and members of Congress, and political operatives, but DuVernay widened the mix to include commentators with big online followings, among them Ringer podcaster Van Lathan Jr. and Hasan Piker, the left-wing Twitch flamethrower who has become one of the right’s favorite media bogeymen.
“I would like people to feel like you can enter into this — that this is not going to feel like medicine,” DuVernay says.
Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and one of the film’s most prominent legal voices, says DuVernay was unusually good at keeping all that expertise from swallowing the movie.
“I was routinely stunned by how quickly she seemed to absorb detailed information,” she says. “Ava never loses sight of her audience. I had to trust her to bring me back from the minutiae and to remember the ordinary people she hopes to reach with the film.”
As DuVernay puts it, “I wanted different people to be able to see themselves.” Which at times proved to be difficult.
U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel in the Oscar-nominated 2016 doc, which explores the amendment that abolished slavery and its connection to the present-day prison system. Courtesy of Netflix Getting Republicans into the film, for instance, proved a considerable challenge. DuVernay says her team approached nearly 300 GOP officeholders, but only a little more than a dozen engaged with them at all. That group included conservative Trump critics like strategist Steve Schmidt and former Sen. Jeff Flake.
Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna did agree to participate and defends Trump administration policies in the documentary. “Although I am diametrically opposed to almost everything she believes, I had a lot of appreciation for Anna Paulina flying into New York and sitting there with me,” DuVernay says. “No one else would. We asked. I have the receipts.”
DuVernay insists 14th is not a Trump takedown. “He’s a small cog in a wheel that’s been rolling for a very, very long time,” she says. “The current administration is embracing tactics that are tried-and-true and have been tested and weaponized in new ways.”
She thinks of the movie instead as a record — of the history it recounts and the period in which she made it. “COVID, wars, Gaza — it’s been quite a decade, and I don’t think we, as people who experience it, appreciate what we’re living through. They’re going to study this time,” DuVernay says. “My question is, how are we getting our arms around that artistically? This film is like an essay. We were writing through it, about what we discovered, how we felt and what it means.”
This story first appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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