Barry Jenkins is back on the street
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK I Barry Jenkins follows Moonlight with another winner…
For a director riding an Oscar high, making your next movie can be a fraught process, with studios desperate to reel you in. Fortunately, following up 2016’s Moonlight was “an easy decision”, says writer-director Barry Jenkins. He’d already adapted James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk long before Moonlight collected its Best Picture Oscar on that crazy night when Damien Chazelle’s La La Land was mistakenly first announced as the winner.
“I’ve got to be honest, it was nice to know what the next thing was,” Jenkins confides to Teasers over coffee in London. “It’s like I had a contract with myself: this was the best thing to do.” An aching love story set in ’70s Harlem between a young African-American man falsely imprisoned for rape and his pregnant partner, Beale Street hooked Jenkins immediately when a friend sent him the book. “I thought if we pulled it off, it would be very potent,” he says.
In his eyes, Baldwin’s book deals with the African-American experience in the Civil Rights era, just as Moonlight did by telling the coming-of-age story of gay Miami teenager Chiron. “Any place where you find black people loving, surviving, living – literally living – you will find a Beale Street,” he says.
“For me, there’s a Beale Street in Miami. You could take Moonlight and title it: ‘If Beale Street Could Talk, It Would Tell Chiron’s Story.’”
Curiously, Baldwin – recently the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro – has rarely been brought to film, except for Robert Guédiguian’s 1998 film Where The Heart Is, which relocated Beale Street to Marseille. Jenkins calls Baldwin’s nuanced prose “challenging” to adapt, in a way that many great writers don’t quite translate to cinema. “I’m still a little bit shocked that this film happened,” he admits.
That may partly be to do with casting relative unknowns – newcomer KiKi Lane as Tish and Race star Stephan James as the imprisoned Fonny (albeit surrounding them with the likes of Dave Franco, Diego Luna and Regina King in supporting roles). Or it may be to do with Baldwin’s downbeat prose. “The book and the movie acknowledge that there were things about the world and society that are unfair and brutal.”
While Jenkins is all about looking forward – he’s now working on an Amazon series of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad – it’s hard not to ask him about that night in Hollywood when Warren Beatty opened the wrong envelope and chaos descended. “It was such a strange experience,” he sighs. “I heard Damien [Chazelle] describe it as very bittersweet and I think I would co-sign that.” He pauses. “But it’s more sweet than bitter now.”