Barry Jenkins
Driving down Hollywood Boulevard in the days leading up to the 2017 Oscars, billboard after billboard for “Moonlight” lit up every important ad space from the border of Beverly Hills up to the doors of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. They shone like prophetic beacons signaling an urgent and much-needed shift in the dialogue surrounding representation. That dialogue was becoming a reality. Barry Jenkins’s stunningly fragile and deeply moving depiction of the African-American experience officially cemented a change in the discourse of contemporary cinema. Having carved out a space for more meaningful – and at times starkly spacious but innately elegant – narratives surrounding black identity in cinema, and even fashion (Jenkins’s entire leading cast from “Moonlight” starred in the subsequent Raf Simons for Calvin Klein Underwear ad for the S/S 2017 collection), it can really feel like a tangible change is underway.
“It’s been a mad, mad ride. Personally it was very strange. I’m probably still processing it to be honest,” says Jenkins, who will turn 40 in November, referring to the moment when he stepped forward as a still unknown director and arduously shook up the movie industry with eight Academy Award nominations that led to three wins (for Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture, the first Lgbt movie to win the award) and a Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Film. “You live your whole life trying to convince people to say yes, and then you come out of the other side of this thing that was basically a passion project that no one knew about, and now my whole career is upside down, so it’s been good times. It’s given me more confidence to believe in my work.”
Jenkins’s latest film “If Beale Street Could Talk” – an adaptation of the 1974 James Baldwin novel of the same name – follows the lives of a young black couple living in 1970s Harlem. When her fiancé, Fonny, is wrongly imprisoned, Tish fights to prove his innocence. As the first film adaptation of the late American novelist’s work, the word “pressure” comes to mind. “The film is going to serve in some ways as an introduction to James Baldwin to some people, and my primary focus was to capture the energy of what it feels like to encounter his work and translate that to sound and images. It’s a lovely pressure to have to deal with because his legacy is so important.”
Having first discovered Baldwin’s work as an undergrad, Jenkins became enamored with the Harlem-born writer after reading his seminal work “Giovanni’s Room” (1956). “I remember being shocked and blown away by how honest and clear he was with his thoughts and his feelings, and his life and love, passion and American culture, and the lives and homes of black folks. I also realized I had never knowingly read the work of a queer author, and it was eye-opening to me to realize just how big the world was and just how limited my perception of the world was at that time.”
Over the course of four years and innumerable letters back and forth between Jenkins and the Baldwin Estate, he acquired the rights to the work and chose two unknown actors to star in the film: 27-year-old Kiki Layne and 25-year-old Stephan James. As an Oscar-winning director, Jenkins could have fallen prey to the hype machine and assembled an entirely A-list cast if he’d wanted, but he chose to follow his instincts instead. “Going through that process gave us the courage to make some of these more drastic choices.” He continues, “On ‘Moonlight’, we made those choices with fear, but with Beale Street, we made them with confidence.”
With an Amazon Prime Video series in the pipeline, based on the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, Jenkins will once again use his cinematic eye to transform literature with a nineteenth-century setting into a contemporary context. “We’re living in a really interesting time,” Jenkins says. “There has been so much more representation, now there are so many different stories told by women and people of color, and those stories are diverse even within the prism of ethnicity or gender.” But despite this timely shift falling around the release of “Moonlight”, the director is hesitant to take the credit. “The audience was primed and the world was ready,” he says. “I think we just arrived at a very fortunate time and place. So many people’s eyes are open right now. So many people have taken hold of the bullhorns to make sure we’re aware of so many things that are happening both in front of, and behind the camera.”
But even as an agenda-setting director who broke the conventions and confines of mass cinema by pushing a queer, African-American coming-of-age story to the forefront of the movie industry, Jenkins is hesitant to call himself anything more than an artist. “The art always has to come first,” he says. “I would be remiss to not acknowledge it, but I try not to let it dictate the choices that I’m making. I’m an artist first, not an activist. Somehow the film thankfully has ended up being very activating for the audience, if I can really try to finesse the words to my will here. We’re in a really great place both on and off screen. The public debates, the public conversations that are happening – it feels like this change is a direction and not a destination. There’s always progress to be made, and I feel like often we’ve gotten to a point where we feel like ‘oh we’ve arrived at change,’ then we realize ‘nope, that was just a blip.”