Leaving no doubt that she’s prepared to defend her movie against attacks on grounds of historical accuracy, Selma director Ava DuVernay told a gathering of media and AMPAS elite in New York this afternoon that her vision of the events leading up to Alabama’s Bloody Sunday in March 1965 were as valid as any. DuVernay, who joked that her $ 20 million historical drama cost half as much as The Interview, had sound backing from no less an authority than Gay Talese, who as a young reporter for the New York Times covered Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery and the bloody events on Edmund Pettus Bridge .
“I was there, you weren’t,” Talese told the gathering as he looked at the 42-year-old publicist-turned-indie-director. He had gone into the screening with a reporter’s natural skepticism, he admitted. “I was there, I saw it.” After a few minuites, he continued, he saw that his doubts were misplaced. “She wasn’t there, but she got it…I was seeing what I truly remembered.”
The all-star event was a luncheon at the Metropolitan Club at which Paramount Pictures pulled out all the stops for an audience that included Harry Belafonte, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Tina Brown, 60 Minutes chief Jeff Fager and most of the cast members from the movie. It launched with a laudatory introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the pre-eminent scholar of African-American history and host of PBS’ Finding Your Roots. Selma, he suggested, “has to receive multiple award nominations…and awards—anything less will be a travesty.” He also suggested that generations of moviegoers may come to regard David Oyelowo’s performance as “the living image of Martin Luther King,” which, to take nothing away from the actor’s achievement, is at least arguable.
Professor Gates brought up DuVernay, who introduced the cast members and then a riveting appearance by the rapper Common (who also appears in the film) and singer John Legend, performing the closer for the movie, their song “Glory,” accompanied by back-up singers and a small orchestra. A brilliant melding of rap and soul, it draws a powerful, hypnotic connection between the events of 1965 and the racial strife that persists today, and it brought the audience to its feet.
Then it was DuVernay’s turn to shine. She was joined by Talese and the Nigerian-born, U.K.-reared Oyelowo and Gayle King, the CBS This Morning co-anchor and BFF of Oprah Winfrey (who appears in the film and helped finance it). King lead a Q&A and got right down to business, asking the director about the controversy that has erupted concerning the film’s depiction of Johnson: “It’s been said that you were less than kind, or less than accurate, about President Johnson,” she said. “How do you respond to that?”
“I think everyone sees history through their own lens,” DuVernay replied, “and I don’t begrudge anyone from wanting to see what they want to see. This is what I see…That should be valid. I’m not going to argue history,” she said, taking a dramatic pause. “I could, but I won’t.” She went on to call the criticism a diversion from what was most important: “This film is a celebration of people who gathered to lift their voices—black, white, otherwise, all classes, nationalities, faiths—to do something amazing.”
The remarks amplified what DuVernay told Rolling Stone last week: “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma,” she said. “What’s important for me as a student of this time in history is to not deify what the president did. Johnson has been hailed as a hero of that time, and he was, but we’re talking about a reluctant hero.”
Jeremy Gerard
