Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Ava DuVernay on the Emotional Journey of ‘Origin’

Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor were in the middle of shooting their new drama, “Origin,” when Ellis-Taylor gave the writer-director some last-minute homework.

The two were hours away from filming a scene in which the actress’s character, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” gets into an argument with her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), after a party. Ellis-Taylor felt the scene required a few extra beats of dialogue and asked DuVernay to write some.

“She said, ‘I think we need something here,’” recalled DuVernay, who agreed to write the new material during her lunch break. “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about.”

That level of trust, amid the daily high wire act of a modestly budgeted production — filmed at a brisk pace across three continents — was typical of a collaboration that DuVernay called her deepest with an actor since working with David Oyelowo on “Selma,” her breakout film released nearly 10 years ago.

In Ellis-Taylor, DuVernay saw an actor of “outsized power,” capable of giving her imaginative take on the making of Wilkerson’s book a vital emotional anchor. Ellis-Taylor, nominated for an Oscar in 2022 for “King Richard,” saw in DuVernay a “director of consequence,” perhaps the only person who could successfully adapt “Caste” — a best-selling, Big Idea book that links systems of oppression in the United States, Nazi Germany and India.