Ava DuVernay is busy putting together "Queen Sugar," a drama series for Oprah Winfrey‘s OWN network, but the "Selma" director is highly sought after. And nothing speaks to that more than the news today of two projects which are crossing her desk, with producers and studios eager to get the filmmaker to sign on. The info comes from Deadline, who made their reveal in a weekly conversation between Mike Fleming Jr. and Peter Bart.
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"’Selma’ director Ava DuVernay is right now being courted simultaneously to direct two major features. Disney has offered her ‘A Wrinkle In Time,’ an adaptation of the 1963 Newbery Medal-winning Madeleine L’Engle fantasy classic novel that has a script by Oscar-winning ‘Frozen‘ writer and co-director Jennifer Lee. At the same time, she’s in the conversation at Amblin to direct ‘Intelligent Life,’ a sci-fi thriller scripted by Colin Trevorrow and his ‘Jurassic World‘ collaborator Derek Connolly," Fleming said. "’A Wrinkle In Time’ revolves around a young girl whose father, a government scientist, has gone missing after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract, which involves being transported to a fifth dimension with mysterious inhabited planets. Amblin and Trevorrow have lobbied DuVernay for ‘Intelligent Life.’ It’s a fable about a U.N. worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be an alien."
Both are very exciting prospects, and DuVernay getting to dabble in sci-fi and fantasy is certainly compelling. "Intelligent Life" in particular sounds like the rare kind of grown up, Steven Spielberg-ian sci-fi we don’t get very often, and that it’s housed at Amblin makes perfect sense.
All that said, DuVernay may want to pursue her own passion projects, so we’ll see what happens, but there are big opportunities at every turn for the filmmaker at the moment.