“I’d only be able to make this film now, having done everything I’ve done before,” says Ava DuVernay on an unseasonably warm afternoon in Manhattan. The acclaimed film-maker is answering questions at a ritzy, climate-controlled midtown hotel, one that’s in ironic proximity to Central Park, where, exactly 30 years ago, the event that inspired her latest project took place.

In the ambitious, expansive four-part Netflix miniseries When They See Us, DuVernay tells a difficult, prescient tale of racial profiling, injustice, lost innocence and media misinformation over a 25-year timespan. The result is an inspired and often troubling confluence of the themes that have motivated her throughout her career, from best picture Oscar nominee Selma to the mass incarceration documentary 13th. “It was very much in my mind that this will be some people’s first interaction not just with this case, but with all of the different layers of the criminal justice system,” she says.

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It was 19 April 1989 when a 28-year-old investment banker named Trisha Meili was beaten and raped while jogging in Central Park. The assault led to the arrest and eventual conviction of a group of black and Latino boys – Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, and Kevin Richardson – who came to be known as the Central Park Five. Or, as the tabloids called them while they were held in the station and violently coerced into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit, and for which they’d be exonerated 13 years later, a “wolfpack” or “roving gang”.

DuVernay was 16 at the time, the same age as the eldest of the five boys. She was living in Compton, on the opposite coast, and remembers calling her cousins in New York to ask them what “wilding” meant. That was the word used in a New York Daily News headline three days after the assault to describe the boys, who were said to be “randomly attacking anyone they found”. DuVernay’s cousins told her the phrase was actually “wilding out”, not “wilding”, and that it simply meant hanging out. But the term stuck and became pernicious shorthand for black mischief: then mayor, Ed Koch, referred to the assault as the “crime of the century”, while a haughty young real estate scion named Donald Trump spent $85,000 on full-page advertisements calling for the boys to be put to death.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ava DuVernay on the set of When They See Us. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix

“I wanted to be a lawyer and, because I thought I was a few short steps from the courtroom, I’d be following cases,” remembers DuVernay. As a teenager, she had received a briefcase for Christmas the year before; she listened to social-justice themed music by U2 and kept her Amnesty International membership card close. But the Central Park case left her disenchanted with the press and what seemed to be the skewed and extrajudicial workings of the criminal justice system.

“I saw a direct relationship between the kids in my neighborhood and those boys on the news. The fact that wilding out became wilding, became wolfpack, became animals. I remember clocking it and thinking, ‘Wow, they’re saying something on the news that isn’t true.’”

DuVernay, 46, has come to see the case as a parable of rhetoric, how mindlessly we absorb and regurgitate the narratives we’re told from on high. Without sacrificing the sense of visceral, often upsetting intimacy for which DuVernay’s films are known, When They See Us is both a narrative deconstruction of the case – its impact on the boys, their families, and the city writ large – and a timely call to collective action and suspicion.

“The case was built on a story of emotion that was completely manufactured by heightened language, a biased presentation of the facts,” she says. “That’s what we’re back in. People call me a conspiracy theorist, since I’m always taking the opposite opinion. But really it comes from: ‘I don’t know for sure what this is. I’m going to ask more questions and interrogate it myself.’ That’s what I’m asking people to do.”

When They See Us is the logical extension of DuVernay’s work so far, which grapples with race, incarceration and institutional oppression. Her second feature, Middle of Nowhere, told the story of a woman waiting for her husband to complete his prison sentence with an aching attention to the complexities of spousal devotion and selfhood. It paved the way for Selma, which chronicled Martin Luther King’s efforts to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965and announced the arrival, in DuVernay, of an unflinching new voice in mainstream American cinema.

Next came 13th, a surgical examination of mass incarceration and the amendment of the same name – and her second Oscar nomination. And last year, with the kaleidoscopic, Oprah-assisted sci-fi extravaganza A Wrinkle in Time, DuVernay became the first African American woman to direct a film with a budget of over $100m.

“I was uniquely prepared to tell this story in a way I wouldn’t have been even two years ago,” says DuVernay, pausing occasionally to gaze out the window as she discusses her work with a refreshing lack of self-effacement. “I needed the scale of Wrinkle to tell a story this candidly; I needed to understand the criminal justice system from the work I did on 13th; I needed Middle of Nowhere to know what I knew about the families, the mothers and wives. It’s me imbibing and ingesting it and presenting it in another way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kristen Stewart, Ava DuVernay, Cate Blanchett, Lea Seydoux and Khadja Nin at Cannes last year. Photograph: Abaca/Barcroft Images

The five years since Selma have been kind to DuVernay. Last fall she signed a deal with Netflix worth a reported $100m; last summer, she sat on the Cannes jury beside Cate Blanchett and Denis Villenueve. She is slated to direct a film adaptation of DC comics’ The New Gods and a documentary about Prince, for which she has the blessing of the singer’s estate. She is also the most followed film director on Twitter, where she routinely pulls off that high-wire act of promoting her work and creating a personality aligned with and independent of it – a brand, if you will.

There, to her 2.1 million followers, she champions the work of other artists and chimes in on hot-button topics like Game of Thrones, and the show’s treatment of its few characters of color, and Liam Neeson, whose recent comments about seeking revenge against black men for his friend’s rape DuVernay called an example of “white privilege”.

It was in her Twitter mentions that the idea of a project about the Central Park Five was floated, by none other than Raymond Santana, who was only 14 when he was sentenced to five to 10 years in a youth correctional facility. “What’s your next film gonna be on?? #thecentralparkfive #cp5 #centralpark5 maybe???? #wishfulthinking #fingerscrossed,” he wrote to her in 2015. DuVernay direct-messaged him in response. The rest is history.

There has always been an element of serendipity to DuVernay’s ascent. In college at UCLA, where she majored in English and African American studies, she was assigned to the OJ Simpson unit as an intern at CBS News. Coverage there, she noticed, looked like it belonged on MTV, and the celebrification of broadcast journalism wasn’t what she bargained for. At the age of 32, when DuVernay picked up a camera for the first time and tried her hand at film-making in the form of a $6,000 short called Saturday Night Life, she was resolute about operating beyond the purview of industry gatekeepers. In the years prior she’d run her own PR firm, the DuVernay Agency, and first-hand knowledge of the industry and its scarcity of black female film-makers compelled her to make art unencumbered by the Hollywood apparatus.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ava DuVernay on the set of Selma. Photograph: Alamy

“I feel less at the mercy of what the industry thought of my work because I knew what it was going to be, so I created my own work, marketed my own work, distributed my first three films on my own,” she says. “I wasn’t really seeking inclusion in that space, before inclusion was the word. I just didn’t expect a lot.”

DuVernay’s aversion to compromise is a product of her enterprising nature, and her understanding of her own uniqueness in a system, she says, which “prevents parity”. But it also comes from a lifelong connection to the power of representation in pop culture. “I’ve always fiercely held on to my blackness, felt very connected to black people and black culture, I think because I went to high school with no black people,” says DuVernay, who attended an all-girls Catholic school a bus ride away from her native Compton. In college, she edited the black student newspaper. “It’s the 1990s, the golden era of hip-hop, it’s Public Enemy, black is beautiful. It manifests itself in different ways for different people, but I identified with the dominant culture.”

Since her debut feature, 2010’s I Will Follow, the landscape has changed considerably, not only in the recent profusion of film and television by women and people of color but in DuVernay and her peers’ ability to retain total authorship over their vision.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest DuVernay with Oprah Winfrey in 2015. Photograph: Araya Diaz/WireImage

“There was no precedent for it,” she says. “There were a few black women who made films, but I wasn’t seeing the integration of personality that we see now with women like Lena Waithe, Issa Rae, Shonda [Rhimes]. They didn’t know how to handle us and we didn’t know how to handle them. It’s only been recently that I’ve had to grapple with industry expectation because, five or six years ago, there was none.”

One expectation is that DuVernay, and other film-makers of color, ought to leave the tentpole genre fare to the men. “I don’t get offered a lot, and what I do get offered is usually historical or something to do with women and black people,” DuVernay says. “Like, I’m not getting John Wick 3, even though I’d love to make it. I have a good friend who directed second unit on Star Wars and is kicking ass. I have a friend who’s on Westworld right now. Are there enough of us? No. Certainly not for a lack of women being interested in or capable.”

Another is that these artists, historically barred from those institutional monuments to clout, should seek enshrinement in them. “Every film-maker is told they should care about these things,” says DuVernay, referring to Oscars, Emmys and the Palme d’Or. “But the primary inventors of that point of view are white, cis men. When I went to Cannes I was really thinking about my dress, even though I love watching films with other film-makers and can even say I’d like to show my work there sometime. But I know people who’d cut off their left arm to play at certain festivals and be in certain rooms. I’ve tried to care about it, but it has no relationship to the things I make and why I make them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest DuVernay at the Met Gala this month. Photograph: Dia Dipasupil/FilmMagic

Not long ago, DuVernay tells me, she said as much to a friend of hers who was disappointed his TV show hadn’t been nominated for an Emmy. You’ve got your Oscar nomination, he told her, so you can say all that. “No, no, it’s not that!” DuVernay remembers telling him, cheekily extending both her arms in a neck-strangling motion. “It’s been a learning process to get to the point where I can reconcile that.” The camp-themed Met Gala earlier this month, DuVernay’s first time attending, was an exercise in such reconciliation. “I can’t say I had fun, but I can say I was fascinated. I appreciated it as an expression of art, but there was so much judgment.”

Though her work forces us to face indelible stains on American history, DuVernay understands herself to be a storyteller, not a historian. But she’s also aware some viewers will learn about the Central Park Five case through When They See Us. “I don’t mind any more that people use my work as an entry point to history,” she explains. “With Selma, I felt some type of way about it, like, ‘This is how you’re going to learn about civil rights, through this movie?’” These days, though, the boundaries between politics and pop have collapsed, a kind of cultural osmosis the series taps into with its inclusion of archived news footage of a bloviating Trump. “His 15 minutes are almost up,” says one character.

“Politics and pop culture are one and the same,” says DuVernay. “I mean, AOC is a rockstar, Stacey Abrams, Michelle Obama. Right now it seems to prioritize women and people of color, but I’m sure white men were like, ‘JFK’s a rockstar,’ or Reagan, the way they went crazy over him.”

These days, they go crazy for DuVernay, as evidenced by the swarms of folks, Oprah and Al Sharpton among them, who showed up to Harlem’s historic Apollo Theatre later that evening for the world premiere of When They See Us. There, at stage right, was DuVernay, introducing a quintessentially New York story, an American story, to a crowd of admiring New Yorkers. And in the center were Kevin, Raymond, Yusef, Antron, and Korey, their arms linked, their fists raised in defiance and redemption.