EXCLUSIVE: “This is a beautiful piece of art that I had no idea was going to resonate so deeply with me,” Regina King declared at last night’s overflowing tastemaker screening of Ava DuVernay’s Origin. “It’s a film about connectivity,” the Oscar winner added to the heavy hitter crowd. “I believe this is a film that will be studied in Anthropology classes for years and years to come.”
“Stunning, thank you,” King even more bluntly said of Origin to When They See Us vets DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and wide applause from influential onlookers.
In a rare public appearance, the acclaimed actor and director took center stage with DuVernay and Ellis-Taylor Thursday to praise and delve into the film based on Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 bestseller Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. The screening at West Hollywood’s London hotel was just the latest in a multi-prong effort DuVernay and her ARRAY team have instigated to raise the Venice debuting Origin’s profile in the awards conversation the past couple of months – efforts that have featured screenings with Ben Affleck and Sean Penn, among others.
In that vein, JJ Abrams, James Bond franchise executive producer Barbara Broccoli, and Guillermo del Toro are hosting an Origin screening tonight at Phoenix Pictures CEO Mike Medavoy and wife Irena’s Westside home.
Broccoli was in the crowd at the London last night.
Patriot Games director Phillip Noyce, Catherine Keener, Frances Fisher and Rise director Akin Omotoso were also among the attendees for the film, which premieres wide on January 19 via Neon. Multiple Emmy and Tony winner Debbie Allen, playwright and filmmaker David Talbert, Rosanna Arquette, multiple Emmy nominated production designer Devorah Herbert, Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, Academy Award nominee Andrea Riseborough and Regina King’s Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof were in the audience that packed the London Hotel’s screening room and a suite upstairs for the overflow crowd.
007 boss Broccoli, who also was sone of the EPs on last year’s Till, paid for the London’s penthouse for the night when it became clear that the hotel’s screening room was never going to accommodate all the people who had shown up. Origin EP Tilane Jones and others connected the suite’s TV to a laptop as viewers snagged sofas, chairs and whatever else they could sit on in the soon near totally dark room.
In what was a wide-ranging and craft enriched discussion among DuVernay, Ellis-Taylor and moderator King after the screening, the If Beale Street Could Talk actor returned again and again to the deep themes of “grief” and “connectivity” in the film.
Deftly structured and disarmingly poignant, the movie journeys with Ellis-Taylor’s Wilkerson over personal tragedies, the evolution of her notion of the endemic nature of severe social stratification, as well as the often-concealed links between America’s slavery past and succeeding Jim Crow laws and Nazi Germany’s systematic dehumanization and subsequent decimation of Jews.
For Ellis-Taylor, it was a very personal journey in her professional reunion with DuVernay – as you can see in this clip from last night’s panel:
Produced by DuVernay and longtime professional partner Paul Garnes via her Array Filmworks, the Niecy Nash-Betts, Jon Bernthal, Audra McDonald, Vera Farmiga, , Blair Underwood, and Connie Nielsen co-starring Origin has proven to be the most highly tested film ever for distributor Neon and the director.
Writing as well as directing the adaptation of Wilkerson’s Caste, DuVernay on the chilly LA Thursday. laid out to King and the crowd, the pathway that allowed her to crack the code of Origin’s big screen story. ‘The way in was the scene in the book, that is also in the movie, where she speaks the plumber,” the filmmaker said of the tension between Ellis-Taylor’s Wilkerson, who had at that point lost her husband and mother in less than a year, and a red MAGA cap wearing plumber, played by DuVernay regular Nick Offerman. Emphasizing the commonality of grief in that situation, which the filmmaker says she struggled with, as Wilkerson and the initially stone-faced plumber shared their respective pain, DuVernay said “that became my guide and my anchor to all the writing.”
“It’s the key,” she said of the connection that we all share through grief and the loss of those we love, one of the most human of traits.
“So, if I can have everyone go into the film through that sense of loss, what it feels like to lose,” DuVernay added. “Then you’re on a feeling level, and you can understand the Holocaust, the manual scavengers (of India’s Dalit caste), all of the pieces of collective loss as humanity that we lose when we treat each other the way that we do.”
Earlier in the evening, DuVernay spoke about how much it meant to her to have King at the screening:
The first female African American director to compete for the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award with Origin, DuVernay helmed the Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary 13th, the Oscar-nominated Selma, Sundance winner Middle of Nowhere and Disney’s 2018 A Wrinkle in Time, which made her the highest-grossing Black female director in American history. On the small screen, DuVernay’s work includes double Emmy winner When They See Us, Queen Sugar, Cherish the Day, Naomi, and Netflix’s Colin in Black & White. The Casting Society of America announce earlier this week that DuVernay will receive the 2024 Lynn Stalmaster Award for Career Achievement at the 39th annual Artios Awards gala on March 7.