THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
ADAPTING A PULITZER-PRIZE-WINNING TALE OF ESCAPED SLAVES INTO A TV SHOW PROVED THE TOUGHEST CHALLENGE BARRY JENKINS HAS EVER FACED. BUT THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD HAD TO BE MADE
Barry Jenkins on his next move: an epic TV show charting a heroic and historic fight against slavery.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” declares Barry Jenkins of his upcoming adaptation of The Underground Railroad. “I’m always saying, ‘I want to do shit that scares me.’ And this show was terrifying. Terrifying. Walking onto set every day was terrifying.” And when Jenkins feels that intimidated, it’s really saying something. The Oscar-winning Moonlight highlighted the filmmaker’s ability to explore universal but complex feelings of romantic desire in unexpected areas. His next project, Disney’s The Lion King 2, will be looking to conquer CG animation and find heart in the family film. It is clear that the director is always looking to push himself.
But The Underground Railroad is another level. Jenkins’ upcoming limited series for Amazon Studios is based on a book set in an alternate version of 19th-century America. Written by acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead, it is a potent blend of magical realism and historical chronicling, in which — instead of a series of safe houses and secret routes for escaped slaves, overseen by abolitionists and sympathisers — Whitehead manifests the underground railroad as a literal set of tracks. But while that element of the story might be a flight of fancy, in every other sense it’s an unflinching look at the relatively recent past. Black people are sold for shells and beads. Traded for crates of rum and gunpowder. Described as merchandise and branded. Troubling, still pertinent questions are raised about the value of life, and the boundaries between good and evil.
As he read it, Jenkins felt a strong emotional connection to the story. “I just felt so moved, and so emboldened by the idea that my ancestors built the secret network of trains underground,” he says. “He’s taken this thing that existed, and he’s personified it in this very grounded way.” Jenkins knew quickly that he wanted to adapt the tale of two slaves, Cora and Caesar, who utilise a secret railroad to escape their plantation in Georgia. Not least as punches are never pulled about the harsh realities of slavery, as traumatic historical events are incorporated within the fictional narrative.
“I wanna talk about some real shit,” Jenkins says. “It’s interesting, because the novel is a work of fiction, but it’s rooted in some very real things, so it felt to me that
I was almost making this biopic.” But his take on The Underground Railroad would not be a feature film, but a long-form TV narrative, retaining all the book’s epic sweep and power. Jenkins would direct all ten episodes.
Material of this gravity needs to draw from deep wells. And Jenkins was inspired by
diverse sources as he figured out how to approach this daunting project. “I’ve been listening to Toni Morrison’s lecture that she gave when she received the Nobel Prize,” he reveals. “She tells this fable about this blind woman visited by these children. She’s like this clairvoyant. The children have come to her. They knock on her door, and they say, ‘We have a bird in our hands. Is it dead? Or is it alive?’ Now the woman can’t see the bird. So they’re trying to test her. It’s a very cruel thing.”
Not to question the great Miss Morrison or an Oscar-winning filmmaker, but why this particular fable? “Miss Morrison tells the story and starts unpacking it,” Jenkins explains. “The old woman is a writer, and the bird is language. And she goes into this whole sort of dense, amazing treaty about the power of language, about who controls language. Then, in her case, it’s writing. In my case, language is writing with images. I think for too long the language has not been controlled or spoken by people who look like me.”
He thought long and hard about how to write this particular story with images, aware of the strong significance of being a Black filmmaker in the position to craft such a heavy show. “The first episode has some very honest images, the kind of images that we don’t see,” Jenkin remarks. “There’s one voice that is quite loud and quite prominent, you know, and [now] it’s time for this other voice to be just as loud.” To amplify that voice, he drew from a surprising source: the existential work of late Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. “I was sitting in my apartment and Criterion Channel comes up — I don’t know if it was a trailer or just a snippet of Stalker,” the director remembers. “And I just forgot how much it is about these men on this train. They even go underground for a little bit. But they’re journeying into this alternate reality.”
That 163-minute Soviet sci-fi drama from the late 1970s became a guiding light for Jenkins — as the shoot loomed, by far the longest he’d ever faced, Stalker became “the only thing I allowed myself to watch”. Striking blue-hour images in the early episodes of The Underground Railroad are particularly reminiscent of Tarkovsky shots, as well as incorporating the beautiful richness of Jenkins’ last feature, If Beale Street Could Talk. It’s a dramatic change of inspiration for a filmmaker well-known for his love of Wong Kar-wai, and whose previous projects have, like those of that Hong Kong director, been small, intimate affairs. The Underground Railroad is much grander in scale. A sprawling canvas in which Cora and Caesar journey through an ever-changing landscape, that at one point includes skyscrapers, despite no skyscrapers being in existence before the American Civil War. That magical-realism thing again.
“It would be comfortable to go and make another two-hander,” Jenkins says. “I think I could tell interesting stories in that way. But I have a responsibility to chart more of whatever there is to be charted.”
The man behind Moonlight has gone epic.
To make it through the lengthy shoot, which began in August 2019 and wrapped in late September 2020, Jenkins needed the right collaborators. Cinematographer James Laxton, a long-time collaborator who worked on Jenkins’ short films even before his 2008 feature debut Medicine For Melancholy, came on board to shoot the visuals. Then there was the matter of finding the cast — what Jenkins
refers to as “this diaspora of Black people”. And most importantly, two actors who could take on the complex lead roles. From the first moments we see them, inner conflict has to be written on both faces: Cora dealing with the turmoil of being abandoned by her mother; Caesar, a field slave, hiding his formidable intellect from those around him.
Jenkins found his Caesar at the theatre, during a performance of a Shakespeare play (no, not Julius Caesar). “I believe he had initially come to the play to see his dear friend André [Moonlight’s André Holland] play Othello,” says Aaron Pierre. “It just so happened that I was in that play as well, playing Cassio [Othello’s lieutenant].” After leaving the theatre that night, Pierre was exiting Earl’s Court tube station when his phone suddenly pinged. It was Barry Jenkins, sliding into his Twitter DMS. “At first I thought it was somebody messing around with me,” the actor laughs. “I thought, ‘Surely I’ve had a conversation with someone and they thought it would be funny to do this, because they know how much I want to work with this guy.’ Turns out, he had the blue tick. And it was Barry Jenkins.”
For Cora, Jenkins cast Thuso Mbedu, a 29-year-old South African who was Emmynominated for her performance in that country’s Is’thunzi, about four female friends who call themselves “ninjas”. She decided to make The Underground Railroad her first American project. “I choose the work that
I do very carefully; choosing projects that will make an impact,” she says. “[Barry and I] had a conversation about anything and everything. He was just trying to get a feel of who I am. As a person. It was an amazing experience.” The two also spent time discussing the history of the American slave trade. “We got into some really moving conversations,” Jenkins recalls. “I was like, ‘So is this history taught in South Africa?’ She goes, ‘No, Barry, it’s not taught very much. We knew about it, and we talked about it ourselves, but it’s not very well taught.’
I was like, ‘Oh, I did not expect that.’”
Mbedu quickly developed an acute understanding of the character and her plight. “For Cora, she was born into this situation, but she knows that it’s not right,” she says. “Freedom seems absurd. The thought of freedom feels like a death sentence. Because if you even think of running, it is a guarantee that you will die.” She considers Cora’s journey as one that ebbs and flows. “With each new episode, she finds herself in a different location. She comes across different people. We see people who are dead set against the Black body in the story, but then you also see people who are willing to help people.”
Despite the production being so much larger than he was used to, Jenkins did not loosen up his work ethic one iota. “When you make Medicine For Melancholy, you’ve got to make every second count,” he says. “Theoretically, when you want to make The Underground Railroad, you have so many resources, you can waste seconds. We don’t waste shit.”
In fact, he and Laxton threw themselves into every difficult day with unprecedented vigour, finding small but powerful moments on the fly; over 25 months, the buzz of creation never dissipated. “For James and I, this was probably the most electrified we’ve ever been on a set,” Jenkins says. “We were chasing [shots].” This led to them creating large volumes of his now trademark close-ups, what he affectionately calls “portraits”. “We would knock out 40 of them in a day, while we’re shooting the main story of the script,” he says. “It was wonderful.” One day, shooting in a train station swarming with extras, Jenkins spotted a striking-looking person in a ticket booth, and ran across to her, asking her to get into the shot he was framing. “She goes, ‘You’re sure it’s okay? I can leave here?’ I’m like, ‘Yes!’ I walk her over, explained what we’re doing, and placed her right in the front. If you watch the shot, when it pushes in at the end, she’s the somewhat taller, older woman and she has a tear running down her face. Because I think she had never been placed in front of the camera.”
The rigours of putting together such an epic piece of work hasn’t changed a thing: this is another chance for Jenkins to explore African-americana, with his unique and tender style of direction. Finding little moments of humanity and lightness in whatever was in front of him. “It’s nice to talk about it and smile,” he says. “Because there were all these really heavy things going on.”
Despite the touches of whimsy — the trains, the skyscrapers — The Underground Railroad is a heavy story. “This was very personal and ties into feelings I may have day-today as a Black man,” says Pierre. “So you need to look after yourself... I tried to support my mental health and my emotional health during the project.”
Jenkins himself had difficulty keeping his emotions in check at points. “I did cry on the day of the toughest sequence for me in the show,” he says, referring to a sequence in the first episode in which a runaway slave is brutally tortured and killed amid a crowd of white spectators. “It was hard trying to keep it in. But you just know that these things happened.”
Crafting the series, he felt even more pressure because of what was going on around them in the real America. Jenkins twice notes how the former US President was walking around pronouncing that he wanted to make America great again, yet it was an environment that not even a few months ago had a Confederate flag and a hangman’s noose present in America’s capital. If the country was more honest with its history, he says, “We wouldn’t be creating these images in the first place.”
But, as what he calls the “falcon” of the project, he realised that he could not flinch. Forced to focus on the show’s more harrowing sequences again and again, to get through it he framed it in his mind as honouring what the real people the characters were based on went through, as a way of allowing him the privilege of talking about it with people here in the present. “Maybe it’s kind of a bit of a Jedi mind-trick. But I was able to just — intellectually, emotionally — not protect myself, but understand that what I was doing, it was honouring the legacy of these people.”
Even so, there were moments when everything needed to stop. A guidance counsellor, one of the only people on set with more power than Jenkins, at one point requested the director stop shooting, so he could be given a brief session of counselling due to the day’s weighty nature. “She came to me, man! And stopped me from directing my own show. For a second the Jedi mind-trick did not work.”
His sensitivity and support for his cast and crew is, it seems, what makes Jenkins so sought-after to work with. “He’s truly, in my opinion, a leader,” says Pierre. “[Working with Barry] made me feel like he had just completely opened up even more space for us to be expressive in the ways that we want to be and not to feel shy about. That sort of energy can only be conducive to people giving their everything.”
One day, actor Benjamin Walker was preparing to switch into character, to play the villainous Terrance Randall, a sadistic plantation-owner who is obsessed with Cora. But moments before the cameras rolled, Walker took out his phone to call his children back home in the UK. A nearby crew member requested he put it away. But Jenkins stepped in, saying, “He wants to call his kids in London, to tuck them in before he becomes this horrible person. Let him do that.” A small but substantial moment. Reminding everyone to retain their empathy. “I think everybody was committed when they were in it,” Jenkins says now. “But they knew that if they needed a moment to step out of it, they could.”
The Underground Railroad may be the hardest thing the director has ever done, but he and his cast and crew got through it, one small gesture at a time.
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IS ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO FROM 14 MAY