“Origin” opens with a dramatic recreation of the shooting of Trayvon Martin and later dips into historical vignettes including Nazi Germany, Jim Crow-era Mississippi and the experience of the Dalits in India. It steps into stories from history while capturing Wilkerson’s life with her husband (Jon Bernthal) and mother (Emily Yancy) – intimate dramas that touchingly counter and clarify some of the social structures Wilkerson traces while seeking the roots of racism.“I wanted something where her intimate personal journey ran alongside, mirrored, challenged and actually complemented this huge universal truth that we don’t really know,” DuVernay says. “And I felt like somewhere in there, there were touch points where they could complement each other. One doesn’t always lead perfectly into other, but that they were in a conversation.”Ellis-Taylor, the Oscar-nominated co-star of “King Arthur,” had acted in DuVernay’s 2019 miniseries “When They See Us,” about the 1989 Central Park jogger case. She signed on to “Origin” without a script. “I had read ‘The Warmth of Other Suns,’” she says, alluding to Wilkerson’s prior book. “So how bad could it be?”DuVernay describes the making of “Origin” as centered on her work with Ellis-Taylor, a collaboration founded on their mutual personal connection to the material.“These things that she speaks about in her pillars of caste, that’s stuff I lived with. They’re not abstract ideas. That’s my reality,” says Ellis-Taylor, who was raised in Mississippi.Seeing race as a caste was, to Ellis-Taylor, a revelatory new paradigm.“That excites me. That sets me on fire,” she says. “And I believe this film is a dangerous film. If it does the work that I want it to do in theaters, it should make people angry. It should make people mad. I felt myself as being a soldier in that battle.”DuVernay, too, describes herself as ready for “ugly feedback” to the film. A prominent proponent of inclusivity in cinema and the first African American woman to direct a $100 million-budgeted live-action film, she’s accustomed to the cultural battles that often accompany frank discussions of race.“I am used to it. But on ‘Selma’ I was unprepared and it hurt me. It hurt me when people came at me about LBJ (on ‘Selma’) and that I’m tearing down people’s legacy and that I’m wrong and how dare I do this and that when I was advancing the perspective of a group of people that usually don’t have a story told from their point of view,” says DuVernay. “It seems whenever I do that, I’m wrong. I’ve felt that vitriol and felt that anger.”“In this, I’m prepared for it in a way I hadn’t been before,” DuVernay adds. “And my preparation involves: Deal with it. I’m not going to fight you. It’s in there. Have at it.”Yet the most common reaction to “Origin” from audiences has been an outpouring of emotion. Moviegoers often come out of the theater drying their eyes. Far from academic, the movie’s power builds through its straightforward humanity – what DuVernay calls “15 little love stories.”In between are some painful historic episodes. Yet even filming those – like the Martin shooting – the director doesn’t find agonizing.“My experience in shooting these kinds of films before has given me a set of muscles and tools where it doesn’t bother me, and I actually feel empowered and bolstered because I get to be the teller of these stories,” says DuVernay.
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