o hear Peter Roth tell it, friends, including J.J. Abrams, had been insisting he needed to know Ava DuVernay long before their first meeting.
So when the longtime Warner Bros. TV executive found himself across from the filmmaker at the Los Angeles offices of Oprah Winfrey’s cable network, OWN, to discuss collaborating on DuVernay’s Louisiana-set television drama “Queen Sugar,” the creative connection, as they say, was instant.
“I’ve never had the experience of being so closely connected with someone who’s probably, just on paper, the polar opposite of me — not a woman, not Black, not my age and certainly not anyone with as much power as Peter has,” says DuVernay. “It serves as a model for the kinds of relationship[s] that we can be in, in our industry.”
