Inclusion riders have been a hot topic ever since Best Actress winner Frances McDormand gave them a shout-out at this year’s Oscars ceremony, but one Hollywood director says she’s fostering diversity without them.
On Monday morning, a Twitter user asked Ava DuVernay, the director of the just-released blockbuster A Wrinkle in Time, whether inclusion riders—contractual clauses that call for certain hiring targets—were behind the diverse group of people who worked on the movie. DuVernay, who’s been sharing Instagram photos of the film’s premieres, responded: “Nope.” Instead, she said, she had simply hired “great people of all kinds and colors.”
https://twitter.com/ShaneM_Anderson/status/973141474396160000
https://twitter.com/ava/status/973168950136762368
A Wrinkle in Time, starring Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, Reese Witherspoon, and Storm Reid, helped make box-office history this weekend when it brought in $33 million, second only to Black Panther‘s $41 million for the weekend. This marks the first time that two movies with black directors and budgets of $100 million or more have held the top two box-office spots.
Ms @ava ‘s brain is an Inclusion Rider 🙌🏾
— Sareeta Domingo (@SareetaDomingo) March 12, 2018
In addition to A Wrinkle in Time’s diversity, DuVernay told to The New Yorker‘s Jelani Cobb in 2017 that every episode of her television show Queen Sugar is directed by a woman. She said it was “in the DNA” of the show and explained, “In my view it’s righting a wrong. Someone came up to me and said ‘you know, you may want to be careful with this because, you know, people could see it as discrimination,’ and I took a deep breath and said ‘I would welcome that conversation, I would welcome that lawsuit.’… there are some shows that are using this platform as a corrective measure to highlight and to incubate and to bring more women into the industry, an industry that has shut us out.”