Inside Ava DuVernay’s ‘Origin’, a Global Investigation With a Personal Touch

Caste was a literary phenomenon in 2020, spending 55 weeks on the US bestseller lists and reportedly selling more than 1.5 million copies. Wilkerson, the Pulitzer –winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns, presents a bold and convincing premise, that racism in America is a caste system similar to those in India and Nazi Germany.

When DuVernay first reached out to Wilkerson, the author thought DuVernay wanted to make a documentary like she had with 13th, or perhaps a film focused on the history in the book, as she did in Selma. But DuVernay pitched her on the idea of centering the film on her own journey in actually writing the book, which would require that her personal life become a part of the story. “I explained that it would be important for folks to feel emotionally connected to someone in order to take us through the explanation of what Caste is,” she says. “It has to be personal.”

DuVernay says Wilkerson was quick to agree, and they would talk on the phone as DuVernay worked on the script. “I want the film to be a salute to the reverence that she has for life, the rigor that she has for her work, and to try to put that in this motion picture that would tell the story as I interpreted it through her sharing with me,” says DuVernay.

Shortly before she began work on the book, Wilkerson lost both her husband and her mother; DuVernay captures her grief onscreen in symbolic and tactile ways that make the film feel deeply personal. “Well, I could only tap into my own experiences with grief,” says DuVernay. “What I rendered was what it felt like to me, just using my own personal experiences.”

Jon Bernthal plays her husband, Brett Kelly Hamilton; the actor and DuVernay first met for a long dinner in Savannah, Georgia. She remembers after they closed down the restaurant that night, Bernthal suggested they walk back to their hotels. “It got us into a really interesting conversation about what it’s like to walk down the street in a city you don’t know as a white man, and what it’s like to walk down the street in a city you don’t know as a Black woman,” says DuVernay. She describes him as “a whole vibe. But he’s also insanely talented, and can do a lot more than I think the things that he’s usually thought up for.”