Ava DuVernay says that Black Panther wouldn't have been her own movie because she would have had to make too many compromises.
Ava DuVernay
DuVernay was the favourite to take the reigns of the Black Panther movie earlier this year, but talks broke down after she and the studio had two different ideas about the character and the film itself.
While DuVernary reveals that she was excited about the possibility of getting on board, she had to be true to herself and too many compromises meant that it wouldn't be an 'Ava DuVernay film.'
Speaking at the 2015 BlogHer conference, the director said: "For me, it was a process of trying to figure out, are these people I want to go to bed with?" she explained. "Because it's really a marriage, and for this it would be three years. It'd be three years of not doing other things that are important to me.
"So it was a question of, is this important enough for me to do? At one point, the answer was yes because I thought there was value in putting that kind of imagery into the culture in a worldwide, huge way, in a certain way: excitement, action, fun, all those things, and yet still be focused on a black man as a hero - that would be pretty revolutionary.
"What my name is on means something to me - these are my children," she said. "This is my art. This is what will live on after I'm gone. So it's important to me that that 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."
DuVernay would have become the first woman to direct a Marvel film had she got on board the project, which is due to hit the big screen in the summer of 2018.
Black Panther is one of the big new franchises that are heading out way over the next few years and will see Chadwick Boseman in the title role. We are set to see Boseman for the first time next year when he makes an appearance in Captain America: Civil War.
As for DuVernay, she grabbed everyone's attention earlier this year with film Selma, which chronicled Martin Luther King's fight to secure equal voting rights and the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
Selma was only the third live action feature of DuVernay's career and came after I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere. Sadly, it seems that Marvel have allowed an exciting and talented filmmaker to get away.
Tagged in Ava DuVernay