That awareness came in college, at UCLA, where DuVernay majored in African American studies and English literature, and briefly considered a career in journalism. While still a student, she secured a prestigious internship at CBS News and, by a cinematic twist of fate, found herself engulfed in the whirlwind that was the O. J. Simpson trial. Before she knew it, she was sitting outside a juror’s house, reporting on who came in and out. “At one point, it was suggested to me that, if I had interest, I should feel free to look through their trash,” she says, grimacing. “I decided I did not have that interest and that if this is news it’s not for me. Of course, that’s not what news is—it was a heightened, frenzied moment—but it definitely sent me in another direction.”
After graduation, she pivoted to film publicity, hoping that instead of chasing the discourse she could have a hand in shaping it. In typical DuVernay fashion, she excelled and left her agency at 27 to open her own PR firm. She worked out of her own house for six months before getting an office and hiring staff, establishing a company, The DuVernay Agency, that would operate for a decade. Now, she marvels at her own scrappiness. “That girl? She was fearless.”
It was on the set of someone else’s movie—Michael Mann’s Collateral—that she first considered making her own, and swiftly did: a 12-minute short filmed over a Christmas break, which led to documentaries, her first film, and, after years of trawling through the independent festival circuit trying to gain traction, eventually her breakthrough historical drama, Selma.
Since then, DuVernay’s rise has been unstoppable, though in an industry in which coveted new directors quickly find themselves mired in big-budget IP-driven blockbusters, she credits her stint in PR with helping her to stay focused on the projects she wanted to work on. “As a publicist, I sold all kinds of stories—not just those with big stars or superheroes. Studios are afraid to gamble on things that won’t connect with the widest swathes of people, and that starts to water down the options, but as a publicist I saw the value in smaller stories that reach a smaller, but still dynamic, audience.”