Originally, Selma focused on President Lyndon B. Johnson, until director Ava DuVernay stepped in. “I wasn’t interested in telling the story of a white savior,” she told BuzzFeed News.
Left to right: Tessa Thompson (Diane Nash), Omar Dorsey (James Orange), Colman Domingo (Ralph Abernathy), David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King Jr.), Andre Holland (Andrew Young), Corey Reynolds (Rev. C.T. Vivian), and Lorraine Toussaint (Amelia Boynton) in Selma.
Atsushi Nishijima/Paramount Pictures
NEW YORK— In mid-December, thousands of men, women, and children marched all over New York City, protesting a grand jury's decision not to indict the officer who put unarmed, asthmatic Staten Island civilian Eric Garner in the chokehold that led to his death. The demonstrating ran all weekend long, from the large scale assembling of 25,000 people (some in business suits, others in "I Can't Breathe" T-shirts) on the West Side, to impromptu jogs throughout the city by college fraternity members, raising their hands in mock surrender.
On this Sunday afternoon, the crowd's chants, including "Hands up, don't shoot!" — referring to another grand jury's decision not to indict the officer who shot unarmed teenager Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, at least six times, resulting in his death — could be heard more than 40 stories above street level. As the protesters — black, white, and otherwise — joined forces to make the statement that "Black lives matter," Selma director Ava DuVernay sat in the echoes of the protesters' cries in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Columbus Circle.
But that only made talking about her film — which is set 50 years ago during the three marches from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 that led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act — feel contemporary.
"This," DuVernay told BuzzFeed News, after contemplating the uncanny parallel between her Martin Luther King Jr. biopic and the weekend protests for Eric Garner and Mike Brown, "is a present-day movie."
Selma was filmed over the course of a summer on a budget of about $20 million, a bargain in Hollywood. The timing of its release has nearly everyone who worked behind the camera on Selma and in front it taking pause, understanding that the film that chronicles a significant time in the Civil Rights Movement, one that helped to enable the right to vote for black Americans, feels very much like a film America needs right now. It's a chance to do more than entertain — it's a chance to inspire discussions about how much has changed, how much work needs to be done, and how black Americans still feel that they're being treated as second-class citizens.
"I'm in the editing room, cutting a scene on the day that was the first night of Ferguson. We were cutting the night march scene in Selma when Jimmie Lee Jackson is marching with his grandfather and his mother at night," DuVernay said, referring to the civil rights protester (portrayed by Keith Stanfield in Selma) who was shot and killed by an Alabama State Trooper, inspiring the Selma marches to Montgomery. "Literally, we cut that scene until maybe eleven o'clock at night and I went home and I'm watching newsfeeds and it was the same thing. Those parallels continue to keep happening, you know? Eric Garner, his death was caught on tape. [It's] so similar … the world could see the racism."
In designing Selma, the director was meticulous over understanding the role that images play in mass media. "They affect the way we see ourselves, the way that we are seen. The only black folk they know is what they see on TV. Whether you pull the trigger a bit faster, it's because of what you think that black man's going to do because of what you might have seen on TV," she said. "This stuff is serious."
Oyelowo discusses a scene with DuVernay on the set of Selma.
Atsushi Nishijima/Paramount Pictures
DuVernay realized the weight of Selma from the beginning of her involvement. Originally, in the hands of screenwriter Paul Webb, the movie told the story of President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose hand was forced into pushing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (because of the aforementioned protests and marches). But the project wasn't coming together. After the fourth director failed to work out, actor David Oyelowo, who had been cast as King and was attached to the project for nearly seven years before it officially got the green light, had an idea as to who could make Selma happen. First, he consulted with Oprah Winfrey, who played his mother in 2013's The Butler, about joining the project as a producer. Then, he suggested they bring in DuVernay, whom he worked with in her first, highly lauded 2012 indie film, Middle of Nowhere.
Essentially, he built a dream team. "I have realized a deep-seated, very real dream within my own lifetime, and not everyone gets that," Oyelowo told BuzzFeed News. "When Ava came onto the project, she rewrote the script. The original script … was about how LBJ, having passed the Civil Rights Act, went on to pass the Voting Rights Act. It didn't fully explore was how he was cajoled and shamed into having to do that."
"I wasn't interested in telling the story of a white savior," DuVernay said. "This story is not about Johnson. This story is about the people of Selma who rose up and who fought. They're freedom fighters. They were led by King and a bunch of other great brothers and sisters. It was important that Coretta Scott King not be relegated to the margins of the story, because she was not. And it was important that a lot of the women were amplified and put in their rightful place. It was important for me that you start the movie and you know what it feels like to live in a terrorist state in the deep south in the '60s. And I thought that if I was going to get the opportunity, and for whatever reason, I was in the position to make this film, then shit, I was going to go for it. I thought I might end up in director's jail. They may never let me make another thing, but I'd just go back to making indies. I didn't care. I can make something for nothing. But if I was going to get the opportunity, then I was just going to make it my way. Oprah made it so that I could make it my way."
The significance of two black women being the muscle behind getting this particular story told certainly was not lost Oyelowo. It was awe-inspiring, he said, to see them monitoring the retelling of the Selma marches behind the cameras, Winfrey as producer and DuVernay as director. "By having these two incredible women come on board of the project and see it through to the finishing line, we could now have a better and more truthful conceptualization of what that story was, and is," he said. "You know, black women were marginalized even within the Civil Rights Movement. There were things around the images that I was seeing that were so beautiful, and then to see them so brilliantly realized … I was happy with what I was seeing. It was also a little surreal, to be perfectly frank."
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