Peter Howell interviews director Barry Jenkins,
“I know, I know, I know!” Barry Jenkins says with a laugh.
He’s responding, not for the first time, to an observation that he’s not the most likely of Telluride Film Festival suspects, even if he does rock the spectacles-and-sweater look of a rural hipster.
He’s from a hard-luck neighbourhood of Miami, where the writer/ director, now 36, grew up in multiple homes within a fractured family. It’s a milieu much like the urban and psychic terrain of Moonlight, his celebrated new film of personal and cultural identity. His home turf is not at all like the gentrified enclave of Telluride, a Colorado mountain town where African-Americans make up just 4 per cent of the population.
But Telluride has a program for aspiring filmmakers called the Student Symposium, and in 2002 Jenkins gratefully took up the opportunity to get into it, later staying on to work as a festival volunteer.
When he first arrived there, however, he thought he might be lost.
“It was the first time I felt I came up against the ceiling, and my upbringing, and I didn’t know my way around film,” Jenkins recalled during an interview at TIFF in September, where Moonlight had its international premiere.
“I’d never read this book on dramaturgy or that book on writing and I asked myself, ‘Is it because you’re poor and you’re black that you’re not as good?’ In the same program as me were Wes Ball ( The Maze Runner) and David Robert Mitchell ( It Follows) and those guys were good from the jump. I was like, ‘Oh, is it just because where I’m from that those guys are so much better than me, or have I not done the work?’ ”
Jenkins dived into the program — “Developing my filmmaking voice,” he calls it — and got to meet and be inspired by accomplished directors like David Cronenberg and Werner Herzog.
He’s never looked back, although after his well-received 2008 indie debut feature Medicine for Melancholy — an offbeat romancer made with The Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac on a borrowed budget of $15,000 — he struggled to maintain film as a career.
He paid the rent through carpentry and advertising gigs while working on a screenplay about Stevie Wonder and time travel that ultimately went nowhere.
All of his experiences led to Moonlight, which opens in Toronto on Friday and is the subject of serious Oscar buzz, from Best Picture on down.
“Medicine for Melancholy is personal in one way, and Moonlight is personal in another way, but they’re both personal. Neither one I would say is autobiographical, but there’s biography in there. When I’m working with actors, especially a male black character who’s of a similar age, the most direct way for me to communicate so far has been to literally give myself to the actor, and to answer questions from a personal perspective.”
Having found his filmmaking voice, Jenkins is determined not to lose it, which for him means not yielding to African-American stereotypes so common to movies. There are drug dealers and drug addicts in Moonlight, but this is not another gangsta movie.
He uses the term “code-switching” — which means deliberately shifting cultural traits and vernacular to suit different circumstances — to explain.
“I wanted to make a point that Moonlight is rooted in a place, a place where I’m from, and that it was going to be in the voice of a neighbourhood I grew up in. It features the kind of characters that I knew growing up, people that I saw in the neighbourhood. We were not going to code-switch.”
As an example of the latter, he points out how a previous inter- viewer had commented that the movie hinges on the line “Who are you?”
“No, no, no!” Jenkins told him. “You just code-switched! The character actually says, ‘Who is you?’ because that’s the voice of where I’m from. I feel like, aesthetically, the code doesn’t switch in Moonlight.”
He’s similarly wary about getting caught up in Oscar hype and having Moonlight be seen as the antidote to the #OscarsSoWhite phenomenon of recent years, a backlash against the Academy’s lack of diversity.
“They’re not impulses of mine, I’ll tell you that much,” Jenkins says.
“Our movie was deep in postproduction when #OscarsSoWhite happened, and it takes years to make a movie. When you talk about #OscarsSoWhite, and the awards season in reflection of that, I think it robs the creatives of colour and the creatives of different sexualities of the work they were already doing in the first place.
“But the cool thing is, there are all these films this year that are being seen as a reaction to #OscarsSo- White. Maybe you can say there’s something in the ether that’s sort of contributed to all these very diverse storytellers getting to tell these diverse stories at the same time.”
Jenkins has learned from his own life that he has to make the most of every opportunity, and the ideas keep flowing.
After working with Naomie Harris for Moonlight, he started thinking that they could do another movie together, spinning off her Moneypenny character from the James Bond series.
He’s already pitched it to her; he’s hopeful the green light will shine. And if Moonlight does take him to the Oscars, he’ll happily bask in that glow, too.
“Absolutely! When I made this film, I never thought we’d be having a conversation that had even anything remotely to do with that. I just did the best I could. I’m proud of the film, and if I just keep that pride, you know, whatever happens, I’ll be fine with it.” Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.