Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.
Barry Jenkins
If you try to create something that everybody can relate to, you're gonna make something that nobody can relate to.
Sometimes, how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference of life and death.
As a writer, a blank page will humble the hell out of you. It always does, and it always will.
'Moonlight' isn't an issue film. It's not about addiction, it's not about sexuality, it's not about identity. It's about all these different layers, because they are all a part of the character.
Making films. It gave me a voice. Legitimately saved me.
I think it's really important to remind, reinforce people that their lives have value, you know? That their lives have worth.
'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.
I really sort of kept to myself. I kind of just watched the world. And I think to keep people from messing with me, yeah, you know, I went out to run track. I went out for the football team. Not because I love track or love football.
'Moonlight' is a story that hasn't been told. Whether placed as queer black cinema or urban male cinema, the lack of coming-of-age films featuring people like Chiron and set in places like inner-city Miami is pronounced and unfortunate.
Growing up, I wasn't the most vocal kid in the world. I feel like I learned through observation, and usually, when you're watching things, you're not speaking. That sort of metastasized in a way that I began to participate less and less in the world.
I didn't really want to be a filmmaker, growing up. Other than Spike Lee's movies, I would think, 'Where is a place for me?' We were so damn poor that it just seemed too far beyond.
I'm so damn boring. I like reading and writing and making coffee. And walking. Barry Jenkins likes long walks.
There's nothing in Hollywood that's inherently detrimental to good art. I think that's a fallacy that we've created because we frame the work that way too overtly. 'This is Hollywood.' 'This isn't Hollywood.' It's like, 'No, this is actually all Hollywood.' People are just framing them differently.
Cinema is a little over 100 years old, and a lot of what we do is built around film emulsion. Those things were calibrated for white skin. We've always placed powder on skin to dull the light. But my memory of growing up in Miami is this moist, beautiful black skin.
How did I feel as a guy who was making a movie about a single mom who's a crackhead? That - I was scared. I mean, it was scary. But part of that's because it was so personal and real to me.
My films are personal-voice-driven films about human characters and the place we live. Technically, I'm an independent filmmaker.
Not all my work features black actors. I mean, it's funny: someone was reading back to me all the languages that have appeared in my films, whether they were shorts or features. They span Arabic, French, Mandarin, Cantonese - all kinds of languages. I think it's really cool.
Whenever I tell people I'm from Miami, they always ask me about the beach. But I can count on one hand the times I went there as a kid.
I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.
As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other.
You graduate from film school and move to Hollywood. Hollywood tells you, 'We're not the place for you to make films,' so you decide you have to make a film yourself.
My first job was cutting grass. In Miami, this grass grows everywhere. You just get the lawn mower out, walk down the neighborhood, cut grass.
Because I'm so in the eye of the hurricane, I don't have a really good perception of what's happening. I'm in a room talking to people, and that's all I know. But sometimes I go out of these rooms - I live in L.A., and every now and then, maybe twice a week, I'll be somewhere, and someone will say, 'Hey, are you the guy that made Moonlight?'
It used to be that watching a film was a very special occasion, the same way flying was. Before, if you took a flight from New York to L.A., most of the windows would be open. Now, we get on planes and we just close them because we're so used to what it feels like. I think the same thing has happened with cinema.
We are carrying these images out into the world, and we can't control how people contextualize those images no matter how virtuous our aspirations and our intentions are.
Until 'Moonlight,' I had never seen one black man cook for another on screen. But I wanted the characters to be free of 'groundbreaking' or 'never before.' We were ascribed those things. They weren't the point.
I think everybody can identify, you know, with this sort of struggle to decide for yourself who you are, you know, and what your place in life is.
I'm always about, 'What is the most productive version of what I'm putting into the world?' Something that can be engaged by all folks. I don't have to change everyone.
I'm very much a person of nurture over nature. When the world is not nurturing, it can really change a man.
As a filmmaker, I really want to utilize the tools to carry the voice - my voice, and the voice of the characters.
I grew up really poor and have always been the type of person who will work earlier or work harder or more than the other person to even the playing field.
Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.
The way I work, things are very nuanced; not everything is explained.
Filmmaking is a very privileged art form. It costs a lot of money to make these things.
I just came back from my hometown, making a movie about a kid who grew up just like me, and it was financed by white people in New York. Personally, I can't be angry. In my personal experience, the support was there.
At school, film-making had been the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. Then I get to L.A., and it's this whole other thing. I checked out.
It's interesting because I think class is a heavy, heavy part of 'Moonlight,' and I think, in a certain way, through the sum of all these parts, it's become a commentary on the black experience in America.
To me, no matter who you're casting for what role, if something's authentic, usually you can mine something good there.
In hip-hop, sometimes that pace is so fast that you miss things. I don't mean literally miss lyrics; I just think there's an emotion in what these cats are saying that gets by you. When you slow things down, there's this emotion, this yearning.
I got into film school. I went and didn't know anything about it. Over the course of two years, I kind of got kind of good at it. You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn't sure if I could do it. I didn't know you needed light to expose film.
I've worked at this film festival in Telluride called the Telluride Film Festival. Been there since 2002. I used to make popcorn. I was an usher. Cleaned toilets, everything. Grew up there as a kid.
I wasn't known as a neighborhood tough or anything like that. But yeah, I was, like, a scrappy kid. You know, I kind of kept to myself, you know?
I was hiding behind athletics and all my jockitude, so I didn't have to deal with being ostracized as the weird art kid.
I'm process-orientated. Awards, by their nature, are results-orientated.
A month alone would make me so happy. Not good for my dating prospects.
I don't choose to make movies as small as the movies I've made. The combined budget of my two films is far under $5 million, but it's just by necessity that it ends up being that way.
There were times when we didn't have hot water or a phone line. But I guarantee you, we always had cable, and it was always on.
I have friends who I consider my peers, who have done amazing work, particularly in the film and television space, who came up as independent artists and who have been - to be brutally honest - much more prolific than I was able to be.
As a filmmaker whose first film was made with the DIY tools of digital cinema, I love how the democratization of the filmmaking process and platforms like YouTube enables people to tell stories that in previous generations simply could not be told.
