Ngofeen Mputubwele: The 2016 film Moonlight wasn't a blockbuster like, say, Get Out or Black Panther. In a way, it was every bit as monumental. It's a subtle, intimate portrayal of Chiron, a character we see as a boy and then as a young man struggling to understand his sexuality as he comes of age during the crack epidemic.

Teresa: Where are you from, Chiron? You live with your mom?

Chiron: Yes.

Teresa: What about your dad? You want us to take you home then after you get finished eating your food?

Chiron: No.

Teresa: Okay. You can stay here tonight. Would you like that?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Moonlight won the best picture at the Oscars, of course, and a host of other awards. It also made Barry Jenkins one of the most celebrated young directors out there. Jenkins went on to do an adaptation of James Baldwin's book If Beale Street Could Talk, as well as the Amazon series The Underground Railroad based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead.

In interviews, you've said that projects like Moonlight and Underground Railroad start years and years before they ever come out and film. What was happening in the culture 10 or so years ago so that projects like Moonlight, Underground Railroad, or Respect, King Richard, Black Panther, Get Out would all come to fruition in these past six years? What was happening in terms of the culture and maybe in terms of the business?

Barry Jenkins: It's interesting. 10 years ago would have been 2012, so it would have been at the tail end of the first term of Barack Obama's presidency. I remember my first film came out in the inaugural year of that presidency in 2008. It was just really interesting to be a young Black person, a young Black creative in a time in this country where if you look to the highest office in the land, there was a Black person. There was a lot of things happening in the film industry. I think Ava made her first film or a second film, excuse me, around that time in one.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Ava DuVernay.

Barry Jenkins: Ava DuVernay. Yes, exactly. Sorry, I forget that these people are my friends. They're icons to folks listening. Ava, she won the directing prize at Sundance. Ryan Coogler have Fruitvale. There was just so much going on. Justin Simien at Dear White People, and there was just so much happening.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Are you saying the Obama presidency was a kind of inspiration or permission that hadn't been there before?

Barry Jenkins: I wouldn't say permission. Absolutely not. I wouldn't say that, but I do think it's interesting. The President of United States, the very visible person, to have to see this person every single day because the news coverage was intense. It meant that if you walk into any room, this wasn't going to be the first time someone had to see someone like me walk into that room. They weren't going to be surprised or taken aback by the things that we had to say about the things that we wanted to do. I think so much work had been done in the decade prior. I must say, people like Tendo Nagenda, who's an executive of Netflix, rising up, all these different people, that when the opportunity presented itself, there was just so many folks. It was undeniable, I would say.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: What you're suggesting, in a way, is that it changed the atmosphere in the rooms that we don't see, moviegoers don't see, in other words, offices in downtown LA, at agencies and studios.

Barry Jenkins: I would say that, absolutely. It changed the atmosphere is a wonderful way to say it. I think also too, the energy with which people entered those rooms, was just different now. I wasn't around in the '90s. It wasn't around in the '80s. I can imagine what it was like for Spike to always be the first, the only person stepping into those rooms and not adjusting, not amending who he was when he was in those rooms. Yet he made such great work, despite the atmosphere, as you put it.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: That's Spike Lee you're talking about.

Barry Jenkins: Against certain odds, and maybe going back to talking about Mr. Obama, perhaps, yes, just constantly seeing this image, maybe it reaffirmed the need to be committed, to being ourselves and that adjusted atmosphere.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I think if you were to ask a Black American writer about what canon he or she learned from, it would differ radically from writer to writer, but they would be looking to just as anybody from any identity would, Black writing, whether it's Wright or Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston, or on and on and on, but also available to him or her is Melville and Jane Austen, or whatever it is. As a filmmaker, what's the canon for you, particularly when it comes to Black American film as constricted, as it was by circumstance?

Barry Jenkins: One, I think, for any Black person who grew up the way I did, the original canon are your elders. Sitting at the kitchen table with my grandma and her drinking the Sanka coffee on Sundays, making us sit there and telling stories about her childhood. She grew up in South Carolina, that's one canon.

Then when I think of cinema, it's interesting. I didn't realize this until I was an adult, and I was studying cinema. A lot of the Black cinema canon that I loved, I didn't realize, was directed by white directors. As a kid, you're watching Coming to America, you're watching The Color Purple, these are things that my grandma watched. These are movies that are directed by white people. That was sort of the canon growing up.

Then once I started to interrogate for myself, what's behind those images? What's inside these images? It was Spike then, I can't lie. It was Spike, as far as the Black canon of cinema images. Then Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, when I first saw that it was like, "Okay, cool. This is a lightning rod. I understand where I need to go now."

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I want to ask you a particular aesthetic question. Throughout your work, you prioritize lighting, something that not everybody thinks about. What's the role of light in your films? What's the process you go through with your collaborator and cinematographer, James Laxton, and your colorist, Alex Bickel, to light actors in scenes in a way that's become so iconic in your work?

Barry Jenkins: Part of it, I'm working from memory. I think one of the things that's really beautiful about cinema and about filmmaking is you're using all these earthbound tools to capture the feeling of consciousness and to capture this wave of memories in the way I remember Black folks' skin, the way I remember Black folks standing in certain kinds of light. That's what Bickel and myself and James Laxton, that's what we strive for always. This is a very privileged art form, to which I mean, it's very damn expensive, and it always has been, it's less expensive now.

I think these tools, in addition to one, it's almost like jazz, it's like jazz. I tell the story of being in Argentina, since you mentioned Mr. Obama's first election, I literally flew to Argentina the morning after he won that race. I get there to screen my first film. I ended up in this group of Argentine intellectuals, and they're talking about what has America ever given to the world. Everybody's trying not to be back down. I'm so proud that we have a Black president. They're like, "Nothing's actually created in America." Then he said, "Oh, but there is jazz." America created jazz. I was like, "Yes we did."

Then to me, because again, this was a bunch of white Argentines, who said, "You know what, and your people did that," and they explained to me, the instruments existed, but they were used to play classical standards and things like that. As the instruments made their way into the hands of Black folks, the sound that came out of them stretched and mutated. I think with these digital tools of cinema, I think something very similar is happening in the film that we work in. Again, 40 years ago, someone from my background, it would be a much longer journey to get to the point where I could take control of these tools.

You mentioned, my colorist Alex Bickel and the cinematographer James Laxton, we use these German cameras. When it comes to you, it's just a brain, and you program how it reads light. You program what color tones it prioritizes. You program how it's going to reflect the curve, the highlights, and the shadows, and things like that. When we approach these images that are telling the stories of my ancestors and the people I grew up with, we program it to see them, to prioritize how they look in the light.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Barry, another thing that seems very important to you, in addition to light, is naturally enough sound. A film teacher once told you that images are only 50% of the experiences of watching a film and the score is the other 50%, which seems like a lot. You and your composer Nicholas Patel, obviously, take that greatly to heart. Can you tell me about the scores for Moonlight and The Underground Railroad? What worlds did you want to build into those projects in terms of sound?

Barry Jenkins: I'll start by just paying respect to Richard Portman, who was the film professor you're referring to. He was the first person I ever met who won an Oscar, and he had his Oscar, he won an Oscar for-- he worked with Altman in the '70s, and they created this process of multi-tracking all these dialogue tracks. He was the one who said that. He's like, "Barry, you guys come in here all day and you focus on the image 99%, and then you just bullshit the last 1% of sound." He said, "Films have image and have sound." Shout out to him. [crosstalk]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Did he get the percentages right? Is it half really?

Barry Jenkins: Sometimes depending on the scene, it can be 99. There's a scene in my first film where the screen goes nearly completely Black. You just see a silhouette and you hear the voice of this narrative spoken. It depends, but I'd say Mr. Portman passed away right before Moonlight was nominated at the Academy Awards, but it was beautiful. He was in the honorarium at the ceremony, and we ended up winning best pictures. Shout out to Richard Portman.

It's so important. When you're in a cinema, the screen is in front of you. The speakers are everywhere, everywhere, and sound, just like when you're eating food or you're drinking a wine, the taste is important, but the smell is just as important. I think in cinema, the sound is just as important. It's that sniff of wine before you taste it. That's what the speakers are to me, and especially with Moonlight in particular, that character doesn't express himself verbally quite a bit, but the audience is hearing everything he hears. Both myself and Nick, and then our sound folks Analie Blank and Matt Waters, we go into it going, "How can we help the audience understand what this person is feeling right now," basically at all moments.

[music]

Juan: Give me your hand. Let your hand rest on my hand. Relax. I got you. I promise. I'm not going to let you go. Hey, man. I got you. There you go. 10 seconds. That right there in the middle of the world. More athletic. There you go. I think you're ready. Hope we got a swimmer. You want to try? You ready to swim? Go. Yes, man.

Barry Jenkins: For myself, in particular, as a Black storyteller, I'm always just trying to get closer to myself, close to the truth of who I am and the creation of these images, which can sometimes be very difficult. I look to the work of others. Every time I get a chance to, I want to speak someone else's name who is working in a way that inspires me, who is telling Black stories that either I am not of telling or I can't tell because I think collectively, as we all tell our individual stories, we're just building out this tapestry of hopefully getting at the ineffable process of understanding or expressing what it is to be Black in the world today.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Barry Jenkins, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Barry Jenkins: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Barry Jenkins, Director of the 2016 film Moonlight, and the Amazon series The Underground Railroad.

[music]

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