The director breaks down a key scene in which she re-created a Nazi book burning from 1933, and explains its urgent connection to book-banning movements today.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Ava DuVernay, and today I'm discussing a scene from my new film, Origin.
00:07 Origin is about a journalist, a woman, who sets out on a worldwide investigation to uncover the mysteries of a problem that affects us all, caste.
00:24 Isabel Wilkerson's thesis is that the interlocking historical arcs of the Holocaust, the African American experience writ large,
00:34 and the contemporary experience of the Dalit people are interlocking, they touch one another and inform one another, and they give context to the idea of caste.
00:44 And so in the film, you see an intersection of two of these historical arcs.
00:50 The African American experience is evidenced through the presence of Alison and Elizabeth Davis,
00:55 two real African American anthropologists who studied in Berlin before the war,
01:00 and the rise of Hitler and the burning of books in what was known as "Piebol Platz."
01:13 Being in the real place matters so much on so many levels to the, I guess, the spiritual aspects of storytelling.
01:23 And then in the middle of it, Isabel Wilkerson pops up in the form of the great ingenue, Ellis Taylor.
01:30 She presents herself in the contemporary moment as she's wrestling with the space as it is now and the space as it was.
01:38 [Music]
01:43 You should run it through, close that tarp, have them come up, have them cheer out loud, and then start, you know, understanding who's going to be first in.
01:51 Let's do practice, okay? So let's go. And action!
01:54 [Music]
02:07 Part of my direction to those background actors was, "Have fun with this. You want this. This is something you've been waiting for.
02:14 It's all happening right now. Get those books in that fire and save your country."
02:20 That is what they thought in their twisted, distorted, violent way.
02:25 [Music]
02:28 Matthew Lloyd, my great cinematographer, and I shot the film on 16mm Kodak.
02:33 And the reason why I wanted to shoot on 16, yes, it looks gorgeous, but the idea that the film would not take on different personalities as we move through different parts of the film was very important to me.
02:46 When we're in the Holocaust, it's not going to turn sepia.
02:50 When we're in, you know, the deep south, it's not going to have less contrast or more contrast.
02:55 When we go to India, it won't be. I was not going to treat the footage differently as we move through cultures and continents, because the goal of the work was to say, and is to say, "This is all the same."
03:05 The same thing animates all of these stories.
03:08 All of our isms are grounded on the idea of caste, that one person is better than someone else based on a random set of traits.
03:17 The reason why I had to go to Berlin, and I had to try to get it right, is because the idea of knowledge disappearing out of books is deeply offensive to me and should be to anyone who believes in justice and dignity for all.
03:34 The idea that we would destroy history, ideas, imagination, is unfathomable.
03:42 One of the characters says, "When you burn books, you end up burning men."
03:47 It was booked burning men, now it's book banning.
03:50 Caste, the book that this film is based upon, is a banned book in some schools.
03:57 You cannot get the book. It's been deemed to be inappropriate and taken off the shelves.
04:02 And in the scene in the film, you see where it leads.
04:05 You see where it leads when you take these books off shelves.
04:08 It's not too long a bridge to cross to see the connection between the two.
04:14 And so my hope is that this film gets us thinking about where we are now and helps us connect it to where we once were as a human race and asks us to stop it before it happens.
04:28 happens.
04:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]