Ms. Winfrey did. “I grew up in an era where there was absolutely zero, minus, images” of girls like her in pop culture, she said. “So I do imagine, to be a brown-skinned girl of any race throughout the world, looking up on that screen and seeing Storm, I think that is a capital A, capital W, E, some, AWESOME, experience,” she added by phone. “I think this is going to be a wondrous marvel of an experience for girls that in the future they will just take for granted.”

The entertainment press made much of the fact that Ms. DuVernay had never worked with special effects (which is rarely belabored when male directors make the same leap). But neither had Ms. Winfrey. “My first time being hung from the ceiling!” she said. She found getting up and getting down so nerve-racking that she asked the crew to just keep her rigged up. “The crew’s going to lunch, and they’re like, well we can’t leave you hanging! I go, ‘Oh yeah, you can!’” she said. (She stayed up there. Just picture it.)

Ms. DuVernay, though, “was in her element,” Ms. Winfrey said, recalling that when she observed the huge cranes with the camera, “and there’s Ava, in her dreads and her sneakers and her vest and her jeans, surrounded by lots of big guys and lots of big machinery, saying, ‘Cut, stop, let’s take that again,’ it just would make my heart swell, that she had taken on something that was this enormous, and was managing it so well.”

“Wrinkle” is a very girlie movie; at one point, a character is saved from a fall by a field of gossipy flowers. And Ms. DuVernay is warm and girlie, too — at our meeting, we talked about the joys and pitfalls of fake eyelashes; crying, she peeled hers off. “I like clothes, I like makeup, I like looking at pretty dresses,” she said. Onscreen, the Mrs. characters change costumes at every appearance: Ms. Winfrey described her look as “Beyoncé’s aunt from another planet.”

And none of these glitter-tinged fantasies subtract from Ms. DuVernay’s own mission, that cultivation of new perspectives and realities. To her, “Selma” and “A Wrinkle in Time” share a foundational message: “Civil rights work and social justice work take imagination, to imagine a world that isn’t there, and you imagine that it can be there. And that’s the same thing that you do whenever you imagine and insert yourself in a future space, or in a space where you’ve been absent.”

To imagine a world where a girl like Meg can fly was “super-emotional to me,” she said. “And then to be able to make it so, even on camera for a little while, for two hours — to change the world for that small amount of time, it’s very powerful. It’s addictive.”