“Selma” director DuVernay (R). Courtesy Paramount Pictures
We learned last year that Disney would be making a movie of the 1963 Newberry Medal-winning fantasy classic novel “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle and that “Frozen” scribe and co-director Jennifer Lee was set to write the script. It had also been rumored that Disney has spent the last 6 months courting “Selma” director Ava DuVernay to direct. Whatever happened to seal the deal, a talented director like DuVernay probably had many choices of where to go next, it’s now official that DuVernay will helm the movie for Disney.
For those who haven’t read the novel (or last read it in school like me), “A Wrinkle In Time” follows a young girl whose father, a government scientist, went missing while working on a mysterious project called a tesseract. She searches for her father and along the way you visit the fifth dimension, travel to far away planets, and meet some incredible creatures. Sounds like a modern Disney classic to me.
For her work on “Selma” DuVernay was the first African American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Golden Globe and the first black woman director to have her film nominated for best picture by the Academy Awards.
DuVernay’s first films were documentaries and she has worked with ESPN to produce and direct “Venus Vs.” for their Title IX documentary project. Her first narrative feature film was “I Will Follow” about the death of a loved one, which received critical acclaim. “Selma” was released in 2014 and depicted the 1963 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by southern civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr.