Barry Jenkins, one of the United States’ greatest film-makers, is philosophical about his place in Oscar history. Moonlight, a moving 2016 triptych about love and loss, is among the best films this century to win the top prize at the Academy Awards. Its victory over La La Land is close to the biggest upset ever in that race. Yet many will remember that night for Faye Dunaway wrongly announcing Damien Chazelle’s dazzling musical as victor.
When, nearly six years ago, I last met Jenkins he was still processing that weirdness. He is over it now.
“Sometimes when you enter a country the person at border control asks, ‘What do you do?’” he says. “They’ll then say, ‘Have you done anything I would have seen?’ I’ll say, ‘Maybe. I was at the Oscars when they read out the wrong name.’ They’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re that guy!’ Always, always, always! Ha ha!”
Moonlight, Jenkins’s second film, suggested the presence of a singular cinematic voice: studied, calm, dream-aware. If Beale Street Could Talk, his next feature, confirmed that voice could be maintained. Back then we speculated about what might come next. I wouldn’t have bet he’d spend the next few years working on the follow-up to Disney’s world-conquering photorealistic remake of The Lion King, its own 1994 hit. Yet here we are. Mufasa: The Lion King, an enormous prequel, is about to occupy Christmas. The premiere was in a wee space at the junction of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue called the Dolby Theatre. You know? Where the Oscars take place.
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“When I walked out on stage to give the speech to intro the movie I immediately was taken back there,” Jenkins says. “Because you look out and it feels the same. It’s the same chairs. I realised it was the only time I had been back on that stage since the night – since that moment I walked off the stage. It was a very cool experience.”
One can understand why Jenkins would take the job. It’s a buzz to work on something so huge. He and his partner, the film-maker Lulu Wang, got to be together in Los Angeles as he knuckled down to a monumental challenge. If I read this right they celebrated the eventual launch of the film in grand fashion. A few days before we speak, Jenkins confirmed that he and Wang, director of the delightful The Farewell, got married after six years together. Why now?
“You know what it was?” he says. “For the premiere of Mufasa both our families came to town, so that just made sense.”
I’m glad everything worked out. This complex, digitally animated epic is trundling towards cinemas. He survived the months peering at monitors. But did he worry about the other, smaller Barry Jenkins projects that didn’t get made in those years? He’s only 45. There are decades of good work to come. But still.
“I could also have just been at home, taking a nap,” he says, smiling. “But over the course of this film’s life we produced Aftersun by Charlotte Wells, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt by Raven Jackson and a season of True Detective starring Jodie Foster. So there were other things happening while this massive behemoth was being completed.”
Fair point. I remember, at the Cannes screening of Wells’s film, seeing Jenkins’s name come up us producer and thinking, Yes, that makes perfect sense. The young Scottish director had, on that evidence, a sensibility that meshed with the Jenkins of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk. And he and his team did well by casting Paul Mescal in Aftersun.
“Yeah, and he got an Oscar nomination. A really great guy.”
Jenkins truly has been on an extraordinary journey. He was born in Florida and raised in the humblest of conditions. His mother was an addict. In 2021 he told the Guardian newspaper that he had “no idea who my ‘real’ father is”. After being largely raised by a woman from outside his family, he eventually made his way to Florida State University’s college of motion-picture arts. It sounds like a cheap question, but he can’t have imagined, as a teenager, that he would be sitting where he is today. Not enough black film-makers had then made it so far.
“I couldn’t have, but I also couldn’t have seen Moonlight doing what it did,” Jenkins says. “I’m usually pretty good about just looking at the very near future and not projecting to what will or could be. But, even more than that, I remember, as a young person, watching the original Lion King while babysitting my nephews. I didn’t have aspirations of becoming an artist. If I could go back in time and tell that person, ‘You are going to make a Lion King film in the 30th year of the Lion King’s existence,’ I would not have believed myself.”
So what did he hope to become? He is dauntingly bright. He must have had ambitions.
“Oh, I went to university to become an English professor,” he says. “I wanted to go back home and teach young people the value of storytelling and the impact that can have. Instead I’ve become a storyteller myself.”
His first big step came with the no-budget feature Medicine for Melancholy, in 2008. Following a black couple on an amble about San Francisco, the picture garnered great reviews but prepared nobody (including Jenkins himself) for the response to Moonlight. Is it really true that Medicine cost only $15,000? That presents more of a logistical challenge than the enormous Mufasa: The Lion King.
“It was actually just $13,000,” he says. Right now that’s less than €12,500. “I think, as a young person, you should just be making things. You should not be fearful of how those things are going to turn out. Because I wouldn’t be talking to you about Mufasa right now if it wasn’t for Medicine for Melancholy.”
He explains that Jeremy Kleiner, who runs Plan B Entertainment with Brad Pitt, saw enough promise in that early film to get on board.
“And the very next film we made, which we made together, won best picture.”
I wonder if he can take some responsibility for the Oscars opening up to more challenging films airing more diverse talents. Three years later Parasite became the first title not in the English language to win best picture. It is hard to imagine a film such as The Zone of Interest getting a best-picture nomination – and winning two Oscars elsewhere – in any earlier decade.
“I think they saw fit to expand the breadth of what a best-picture candidate could and should be – and we were very fortunate to arrive in the moment that we did,” Jenkins says, modestly. “I think of someone like Spike Lee and all the really, really wonderful films he made through the 1990s and the early 2000s. Those films, just because of the time they were made in, didn’t really have the same opportunity that a film like Moonlight did.”
Jenkins is a bit of a social evangelist. He stresses the importance of getting work made – any work – early on in a career, but when I naively suggest that you need talent as well as dedication he raises a figurative eyebrow and, in his endlessly polite manner, offers qualification.
“Do we have talent or do we develop it?” he says. “I’m really keen on this, because someone who grew up the way I grew up doesn’t have any talent that can be exhibited until he learns the tools of film-making.”
Another fair point. At any rate, now he faces up to a fresh challenge. Jenkins, as producer and director, is richly experienced. But the financial pressures that come with launching a Hollywood blockbuster are on a level all their own. The last Lion King film took $1.7 billion in 2019. I make that more than 100,000 times the budget of his first feature. Is he nervous about the opening weekend?
“I divorce myself from feeling pressure over something I have no control over,” he says, mildly. “I just try to make the best film I can.”
Mufasa: The Lion King is in cinemas from Friday, December 20th
