‘Moonlight, a film that changed me’
Director Barry Jenkins shares his emotional story of acceptance with Glenn Whipp.
On his way to the AMC Loews Lincoln Square on the day Moonlight opened in New York City, writerdirector Barry Jenkins remembered thinking, ‘‘The AMC Lincoln Square? This movie?’’
Moonlight was also showing at the art house bastion Angelika Film Centre, a venue Jenkins figured to be more in line for his drama depicting three periods in the life of a young black man struggling with and ultimately learning to accept his gay identity. Jenkins knew the Angelika crowd from his first movie, the tender love story Medicine for Melancholy, released in 2008.
So a curious Jenkins went to the AMC multiplex in New York’s Upper West Side, wandered into the 780-seat theatre and looked out and saw a lot of faces he didn’t expect to find. It was racially mixed. There was a lot of grey hair. And, afterwards, everyone stuck around for the Q&A, showing an interest in the film’s story and characters that went way beyond being polite. That passion for Moonlight, one of the year’s brightest indie movie success stories, began when it screened at autumn film festivals in Telluride and Toronto. Jenkins immediately realised his expectations might have been a bit modest.
‘‘I was walking around Telluride 45 minutes after the first screening and I noticed this 65-plus-year-old white guy – North Face jacket, gray hair, very masculine-looking dude – and he’s just staring at me as I’m walking by,’’ Jenkins recalls. ‘‘So I ask him, ‘Are you all right?’ And he starts to speak ... and he can’t speak. And the only thing I could do was to give this guy a hug. And he’s just sobbing in my arms.’’
Jenkins stops and shakes his head. ‘‘I think this movie is a test of people’s empathy at this moment in America’s history. And right now, I have to say I’m encouraged by the response.’’
‘‘Encouraged’’ is probably selling short Jenkins’ mood these days. The filmmaker, who recently turned 37, spent eight years trying to follow up his first film, a period marked by a prolific amount of work that didn’t get produced, along with a few short films, shooting branded content for companies like Bloomingdale’s and Facebook, and an unsatisfying stint as a staff writer on the HBO series The Leftovers.
‘‘I look back and yeah, I should have done more,’’ Jenkins says of a time he describes as a ‘‘little bit of a dark patch.’’
The problem, says Adele Romanski, Jenkins’ friend from their days at Florida State University’s film school and a producer on the film, was a combination of bad timing (Medicine, his debut feature, arrived at the same time as the recession) and a self-doubt that crept in through the years. ‘‘Suddenly, you’re not new and exciting any more,’’ she says.
Finally, in January 2013, Romanski told Jenkins that she was going to ‘‘force him to make something’’. The two started video chatting twice monthly, spitballing ideas, narrowing choices, ultimately landing on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, and a James Baldwin novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, a love story set in Harlem. After polling his friends to find ‘‘the most boring city in Europe during the summer’’, Jenkins left for Brussels, where he wrote the screenplays for both in six weeks.
The connections between McCraney’s play and what ended up becoming Moonlight are, as Jenkins puts it, ‘‘nuts’’. Both men grew up in Miami’s impoverished Liberty Square neighbourhood. McCraney’s mother died from an Aids-related illness. Jenkins’ mother is HIV-positive. Both women had been intravenous drug users. Where they diverge: McCraney is gay; Jenkins is straight. And that was a ‘‘hurdle’’, Jenkins says, when contemplating whether he was the right person to tell the coming-of-age story of a young gay man.
‘‘I had some ambivalence because I thought, ‘Oh, this has to come from a first-person perspective’,’’ Jenkins says. ‘‘And I don’t know what it’s like to kiss another man. I don’t know what it’s like to not kiss another man because of what society thinks.’’
But Jenkins felt like he knew so much about Chiron, the movie’s protagonist, from the ‘‘inside out’’ that he could step inside his shoes and use his empathy and passion to advocate for the importance of this character’s journey. He has an openness to finding specific truth and feeling that, Jenkins’ actors say, makes his movies relatable to anyone watching them.
‘‘He always says he’s about making the film that’s in front of him,’’ says Mahershala Ali, who plays Juan, Chiron’s surrogate father in Moonlight. Ali points to one of the movie’s most-cherished scenes, where Juan teaches Chiron to swim. Finding the heart of that interaction, which resonates as a joyful, peaceful moment of empowerment and liberation, took an hour spent in the Pacific Ocean, shifting between Juan’s teaching and Chiron’s discovery until the perfect balance was achieved.
Likewise, the scenes between Chiron and his drug-addicted mother were altered because once Jenkins found himself back in his old neighbourhood, shooting material based on his childhood memories, he felt the words weren’t going far enough. He changed a scene in the movie’s middle section to give the audience a stronger sense that Chiron was seeing his mother in the throes of addiction for the first time and not being able to deny that reality. A third-act scene between mother and son at a rehab centre changed because Naomie Harris, the actress playing, essentially, Jenkins’ own mum, couldn’t light her cigarette.
‘‘That scene is meant to be an apology, but the actual apology is not written into it,’’ Jenkins says. ‘‘When Naomie couldn’t figure out how to light the cigarette, I saw an opportunity. I whispered to Trevante [Rhodes, who plays the adult Chiron] between takes, ‘Reach over and light it for her and give it back to her’. And it just opened everything up. It was like waterfalls.’’
When that scene finished, Jenkins turned from his monitor to find the entire crew in tears. At first, he thought, ‘‘Why are you crying? We’re professionals.’’ Then he realised he was just preventing himself from crying because he had to stay focused, particularly because they were going off script.
Jenkins is set to reteam with Romanski and Plan B Entertainment on a limited TV series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s bestselling novel, The Underground Railroad. But that’s a massive undertaking. And Jenkins would like to find himself back on a film set sooner than later, so he’d like to make the Baldwin adaptation, If Beale Street Could Talk, first.
‘‘To go another eight years again would be awful, totally awful,’’ Jenkins says. ‘‘But that’s not going to happen. Moonlight changed me. To see people so moved by this movie inspires me to find something else to offer. And maybe the next one touches only five people or maybe just one person. To me, you know, that would still be worth it.’’ – Los Angeles Times
Moonlight (M) opens in select New Zealand cinemas on Thursday.