Ava DuVernay Explains Why She Passed on Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Flick

During the 2015 Blogher Conference held in New York from July 16-18, filmmaker Ava DuVernay talked the ins and outs of the film industry. The director also dished on why she passed up Black Panther.  

“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. It’d be three years of not doing other things that are important to me,” she explained. “So it was a question of, is this important enough for me to do?”

In Blerds continuing coverage of DuVernay’s journey into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there had been news about the director possibly directing the Black Panther film since the last week of June. The blogosphere went bonkers with anticipation and some websites were reporting that she took the job.

However, in the first week of July it was revealed in an interview with the Huffington Post that DuVernay turned down the job over creative differences.

“This is my art,” DuVernay told the crowd of bloggers. “This is what will live on after I’m gone. So it’s important to me [to] be true to who I was in this moment. And if there’s too much compromise, it really wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film.”