Certainly a candidate for one of the best films of 2016, director Barry Jenkins’ MOONLIGHT is a film that impresses with both its form and its function. The movie follows the same character through three life-changing moments in his young life—the first chapter takes places when he is nine years old, the second at about 16, and the third about 10 years later. In each segment, the character is played by a different actor, none of whom were allowed to meet or watch the other actors’ work. MOONLIGHT deals with sexuality, masculinity, race, and the people in our lives that help us to understand in the importance of all of the ingredients of our lives. It’s a beautiful work, an important achievement, and a work that finds moments to be both emotionally devastating and spiritually uplifting.
I had the chance last week to talk to director Jenkins, who adapted the film from an unproduced play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by Tarell McCraney, who was also with us for the conversation that day in Chicago. Please enjoy our enlightening conversation about the extraordinary MOONLIGHT, out in select cities now, and likely to open in one near you very soon…
Capone: I know this started out as a play, but was it actually performed?
Tarell McCraney: No.
Barry Jenkins: It wasn’t like a play, play.
TM: [long pause] Sorry, that was my cue to talk. Clearly, I’m a bad actor. He’s like, “Go!” I didn’t write it in the form and function that I normally write plays. It included some visual cues in it and it was written in a form and fashion that I would never even try to produce on stage. So I think that’s one of the reasons why we call it “story,” [McCraney gets a story credit for the film] because it was written in a way that was so overlapping. The stories that you see ironed out, if you took them and did like this with them [overlaps his hands], that’s how the story was written. The next scene might be a scene from Little rather than a whole other chapter ahead. Back and forth, back and forth, in and out, yeah, all over the place. So it was one of those.
BJ: It was trippy.
TM: It was trippy, and again, I wish I were clever, but I wasn’t. I was just really trying to match things up with emotional feelings. I was piecing things out emotionally. These events go together, not in order of time, but in order of emotion. The time that I got punched in the face also is the time I also experienced my most intimate sexual experience. They were matched together by the emotional rigor. So that when we charted it through. One of the things Barry saw in that is like, “Look, I understand what you’re doing,” but I don't know if he understood why I was doing it, and it doesn’t really matter. But what he was keen enough to understand is “Let me help guide the audience through that.” So he helped guide the audience through this story and matched it up to some things that he found important to his own life, but mostly what he found was important to Chiron’s life.
Capone: How did you discover this material then, and what did you latch on to?
BJ: These mutual friends of ours who went to the same high school as Tarell — this group called the Borscht Corp[oration]. It’s these guys and gals whose mission is to get people who maybe have moved to L.A., New York, or even Chicago as Miami expats and come back and tell Miami stories. I made a movie that was very personal about San Fransisco, and yet I was this kid who was born and raised in Miami. So when they read Tarell’s piece, they thought of me, because Tarell and I had this overlap. We’re from the same neighborhood, we grew up blocks from each other, went to a couple of the same schools, and both of our moms went though this addiction with crack cocaine. I hadn’t told many people about that about my life. Tarell was much more open about it. So these two guys were maybe the only people who would know that Tarell and I have the same piece in our biography. And I had never met Tarell at that point. He gave it to them, and they passed it to me, and that was how we connected.
Capone: It must have been a bizarre experience reading this and seeing a piece of your personal history represented so accurately.
BJ: My line was “How does he know the things he knows?” Particularly that rehab scene in the third story. “How the fuck does he know this stuff?” And that was when they started telling me more about who Tarell was and where he was from, and I was like “Oh, okay. That’s how he knows these things.” On the first read, I didn’t see myself as viscerally as I should have, and I think maybe it was structure—I don’t know what it was—but then when I came back to it, I was like “There’s a one-to-one thing going on here, or at least there’s a place I can put myself fully into this.”
Capone: So you just said I’m going to make this about me?
[Everybody laughs]
BJ: No, no, no. It was the opposite. I thought “This is great: I can make this, and it’s not about me. I can hide behind Tarell. This isn’t personal for me at all. It’s just work.” Then that went out the window very quickly, as it should have.
Capone: Is it in any way therapeutic to write it or make a film about these events, to get these things out?
BJ: You know, it depends. When you think of therapy, I think of something that solves or fixes, and this was not that. This was almost something that I thought was fixed, then in the process of making this realized “Oh, no. You’re not done with that.”
Capone: That’s part of therapy—dredging up things you thought you were done with.
BJ: This was beyond dredging.
TM: Yeah. You’re in it.
BJ: Exactly. Naomie Harris [who plays Chiron’s mother] is in the middle of a neighborhood you grew up in fully committed to being this person who more or less is your mom, that goes way past dredging up. At that point, you’re living in it again.
TM: And then seeing it. Barry will tell you more about the shooting process, but one of the things they kept doing—him and Adele [Romanski, producer] would be like, “You should come by the set.”
BJ: That’s right! You would never come by. [laughs]
TM: I’m like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Excuse my language, but are you crazy? And then because when I see it, I still feel it. I can’t imagine being in the place and around those things, especially that scene in the rehab. He tells a story and talks about when they were shooting it, he gave the actors room to make the “mistakes” and figure out what that scene was about. They had only met five minutes before, but in that, their re-introduction as mother and child is so palpable, I gasp almost ever time, because the tenderness, the awkwardness, the familiarity and yet the strangeness is so the relationship in which I spent with my mother.
He could not have known that from the original text, no matter how closely he read it, right? And only could know that either through experience, or the actors actually doing it in the space, and that’s the thing about collaboration. You’re smart enough to get out of people’s way by making things real, and they made it real. I wish it were therapeutic. It’s one of those moments when I walk away and go “Now you have to sit and figure out why that shit hurts so bad.”
Capone: With Naomie basically playing both of your mothers, that the key to this whole film. There’s a very powerful story running through this about her changes. And her being the only actor who is in all three segments, that makes the filim about influence. That’s about how someone can positively or very negatively impact you.
BJ: Or both.
Capone: Or both. She is playing three very different people in this one character. Finding the right actor to play that part had to be so important.
BJ: Yeah, and I’ll say, I didn’t find her. Jeremy Kleiner [producer] at Plan B was the first person to suggest Naomie, and I’m glad he did because the one thing that I did know was we needed somebody strong and somebody who was gifted. This is the one place where I wanted somebody who was technically gifted, yet who could bring this emotionality to the part. The beautiful thing about Naomie is she is nothing like this character, and she said so out right. She had this hesitance to take the part, and she did this work to see the character as a human being and to find the space where, despite the fact they are completely different people, she could see herself in this character, and I think in doing that work, you get to the point where it’s like “I’m a very technical person, but I’m also a human, and this character’s a human and now these things are all fused together.”
Capone: Now it’s funny you said you wanted someone who has some experience for that role, but you have these other actors that have no experience.
BJ: It’s the Lynne Ramsay method.
Capone: What are the strengths of having people that don’t know the tricks of the trade yet, and don’t know what their good side is?
BJ: Well I think with those people, you can place them in a position, and that raw thing you get, it becomes the character. Instead of building the character, people actually bring the character to you. Particularly with the character Little, I knew that was going to be essential. What I didn’t anticipate is we’d also have Janelle [Monáe] doing the same thing, or then Patrick Decile, who plays Tarell in the second story. Jharrel Jerome, that kid’s 18. He’s only in high school with his high school drama classes. He has a little more experience, and Trevante [Rhodes, who plays the oldest incarnation of Chiron] has a little more experience but not much. What you get from that is just this rawness.
An example is the rehab scene in the third story between Naomie and Trevante, they’re doing the scene, it’s all scripted, and Naomie doesn’t smoke. She doesn’t know how to smoke. So she can’t light the damn cigarette. And instead of explaining to Trevante “This is your mom; she’s having a really hard time, she’s nervous,” I go, “When she can’t light the cigarette, just take it from her and light it for her and give it back to her.” And he does. And Naomie’s so good, I didn’t tell her he was going to do it. She rolls with it, and now you have this trained actor and this untrained actor. He’s doing something raw, he’s doing the physical gesture, and now she’s taking it and ingesting it as a sign of love, and because he shows a sign of love, she goes, “I have to apologize.” The apology isn’t in the script. The scene is an apology, but the words “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” are not in the script. I didn’t write it, he didn’t write it, and yet you put these actors in a powder keg—and I’m scared because I don’t like explosions—this space where pyrotechnics can’t be controlled, and they just continue to create.
TM: And you are smart enough and gifted enough to get out of the way and shape that. No seriously, I’ve not worked with a lot of TV film directors. I’ve worked with a few and I’ve worked with a score of theater directors, and the amount of times people get in the way of organic creation of what we’re after is staggering, and they get in their own way, and I think one of the things Barry won’t say about himself is he gets out of the way. He lets the light shine. “There’s light, and my job is to shape it,” and it’s just beautiful to watch.
Capone: A lot has been said about the use of silence, especially in the beginning sequences, and not having a lot of dialogue. If ever there’s an example of getting out of the way, you’re literally getting the words out of the way of having these raw, emotional moments.
TM: Can I also ask you this question on top of that? Because you would know more than me. All of my favorite movies, that have mostly white people in them, have those very silent, introspective characters. Then of course my favorite movies that have black people in them are very loquacious. It’s always funny to me that people keep talking about the silences in this movie, which I get. There are. But no more than the first part of THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, where all we here is an aria being sung and a person packing up their bag in a basement. Is that something that is just foreign? Why are we being asked that question so often?
BJ: I think it’s two parts. I think that 1), in a coming-of-age story, it’s unorthodox to have this kind of silent protagonist. So I think that’s part of it. It just doesn’t fit the form of the story if the coming-of-age form is what we fall under, and I think it is in some ways. I think 2), yeah, I think in black cinema, or at least black American cinema, you don’t find films where the characters have this much space. To me, silence wasn’t a thing. It was about space. I think a coming-of-age story, instead of doing 80 beats in 100 minutes, we’re doing like six beats in 100 minutes, but because of that, we allow space.
When you weren’t in here, in between set ups, Tarell and I sit here, we lay back, look out at Lake Michigan, and we’re processing what the previous interview had, or what we’ve got to do tomorrow, or what we did last week, and I wanted to allow the characters the space to do that, because the world is projecting so much on to Chiron that I thought he should have space to processHe’s making choices. When we see Alex Hibbert become Ashton Sanders [the two actors who play younger version of Chiron], that’s a choice. When we see Ashton Sanders become Trevante Rhodes, that’s a choice. But I think that choice is played out as we’re watching this kid with his shoulders drooping, and he’s coming up out of that sink, and he’s walking not speaking, but there’s a lot going on.
TM: It’s like the choice to push away from the table because it doesn’t require a whole lot of talking. He asked his questions.
BJ: Exactly. And he gets the answer and he’s like, “I’m out.”
Capone: It is a coming-of-age story, but it’s not until the third part of this that we also realize it’s a love story. I was telling Andre this before, all the feelings are there in us when we get to the third chapter, but we don't know that’s what it is until that scene. It’s not all pain. It’s all led to something positive, I guess.
TM: I think the loves that move me most are born out of struggle and strife and complication and drama. Love at first sight is really awesome, and I do think the way Jharrel [Jerome, who plays Chiron’s best friend Kevin] and Ashton look at each other in that first scene in the stairwell, it is love at first sight.
BJ: The way they run around on the field is love at first sight.
TM: Exactly, exactly. But I think that all that stuff needs to be built. He’s got to go through all these things to get to that point where the doorbell rings, and now this is what it is. But without the things pre-doorbell, that scene wouldn’t have the same impact. Somebody described it to me: “I just feel my breath get caught in my chest once you get to that diner.” And I’m like “Yes. Yes.”
Capone: There’s tension in that diner scene, because we don’t know how exactly it’s going to go down.
BJ: No. And neither do they.
TM: Yeah, but I think the reason why it’s a Pinter scene and the reason people keep calling it a one-act play…
BJ: Which is interesting. [laughs] When that happens, I love it.
TM: The only reason that happens is if the audience has been inked up, if they’ve been inoculated enough with the previous world, then everybody understands where everybody is standing in that room, and so what you’re now watching is the unknown, the present unknown. See what I’m saying? And that’s what you do in a play. The Greek chorus would tell you everything you need to know about Oedipus before, and then you watch.
BJ: Then scene.
TM: Yep, exactly. And that’s why it’s so thrilling to watch.
BJ: And it’s why that doorbell is like “Ring, ring, ring.” And we’re like, “Here we go. Time to start, bro.”
Capone: Well, best of luck with this. Tarell, it was great meet you. Nice to beet you, Barry.
