He met new students in the program who became his collaborators, and he paid attention to the world around him-like his roommate who was a Napolean buff, or a post-9/11 sign from an Arab-American couple running a Laundromat that read, “American Flags. When Jenkins came back after a year of preparing to be a film student, he was ready to make a film. Not biographical, but personal."īe a sponge & make your first short film (then bring it to your job interview) When I come back, I'm going to show 'em! It should have been to show myself, but I wanted to show everybody.” I read Sight and Sound I couldn’t translate Cahiers du Cinema. I read all the books in the basement of this building at FSU. I went to Blockbuster and I watched every foreign film on the shelf. But he was dedicated, and he was specific about what he would do in the program: When he saw a sign for “Film School” that was held at the football stadium on the Florida State University campus where he was studying English, his first thought was, “They must make Die Hard there!” He decided that he would go to the film school, not knowing how many other people were also trying to get in to the program. As a kid, all he knew about movies was that he really liked Die Hard. In the beginning, Jenkins thought maybe what he wanted was to become an English teacher. Hibbert in Barry Jenkins' Oscar-winning 'Moonlight' Credit: A24 Here is a breakdown from his talk of what Jenkins had to say about his career, and recommend to you.Īlex R. You just don’t think you’re special.” Jenkins overcame that feeling, allowed himself to dream, and in doing so, paved the way to become one of the boldest new filmmaking voices in this generation. “You don’t assume that is going to give rise to someone who creates art. Jenkins struggled as a kid who was born in the projects to a mother who was addicted to crack cocaine. How did he get there? On the ground at SXSW 2018, No Film School sat in on Jenkins' Film Keynote. “And you sell drugs?” Juan is both Chiron’s saviour and the agent of his family’s decline.With fifteen days and $12,000, Barry Jenkins made his first feature film ten years later, he made history at the 89th Academy Awards. “My mama does drugs?” Chiron says to Juan. There is a poisonous irony in the relationship. Juan and his equally concerned partner (Janelle Monáe) give the boy a meal and urge him towards the straight and narrow. In the first, “Little” (Alex Hibbert) encounters Juan (Mahershala Ali), a kindly drug dealer, when hiding from bullies. That character, who goes by three names, is played by three different actors in three discrete acts. As meticulous in his shots, clean in his colours and precise in his rhythms as Wong Kar Wai, Jenkins gives us a complex American hero to compare with Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield. (Contrast that with this week's proudly stagey Fences). No traces of the film's origins in an unperformed play remain. As if that doesn’t sound sufficiently overworked, it is about the particular challenges that hard men encounter when they walk down mean streets.Ĭinema has been in and around this area time and time again, but Moonlight still feels abundantly fresh and endlessly imaginative. Barry Jenkins’s transcendent second feature is about the challenges boys encounter as they become men.
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