Jenkins proposed a new structure: Give each his own chapter. In the original pages, the three versions of Chiron - boy, teen, adult - all interacted with one another. He took another look at McCraney’s piece and had what he calls “an aha moment.” But by 2013, Romanski, a friend of his from their film school days at Florida State, began pressing him to get serious about directing another feature. Says Jenkins, “I knew that relationship like the back of my hand because that’s where my life and Tarell’s overlapped.”Īt the time, Jenkins’ first film, Medicine for Melancholy, a low-budget indie about a young couple discussing class and race as they walk the streets of a gentrifying San Francisco, had become a festival hit, and he was moving on to other projects - developing a film at Focus, writing for HBO’s The Leftovers, co-founding the commercial production company Strike Anywhere. Although the two had never met, Jenkins also grew up at the same time as McCraney in Liberty City with a mother who also wrestled with addiction. But mutual friends at Borscht passed it on to Jenkins, who immediately recognized his own life in what McCraney had written. I was really trying to figure out some hard questions about my life with my mom, my life as a grown man, as a gay-identifying man.” The result, which he poetically titled In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, amounted to about 60 pages, “but it wasn’t a theater piece, and it wasn’t necessarily a film.”Īfter showing it to some friends at a Miami nonprofit called Borscht, which supports young filmmakers, he set it aside. What poured out, he says, “was a personal memoir.
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That all the elements coalesced so serendipitously could not have been predicted back in the summer of 2003, when then-aspiring playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, in the wake of the death of his mother, who had struggled with crack addiction, sat down to try to make sense of his early life in the hardscrabble Miami neighborhood of Liberty City. 21 debut, the film has grossed more than $3 million in limited release. Scott’s subsequent review asked, “Is This the Year’s Best Movie?” And though distributor A24 is taking a slow, careful approach to its release, in the three weekends after its Oct. The headline on The New York Times critic A. “What’s a faggot?” the young Chiron asks Juan as he struggles to understand his emerging sexuality, which, later, in his teens, will lead to both a moment of tenderness and an outburst of violence, and, later still, when Chiron has become a muscular but emotionally guarded adult, he finally finds expression in a moment of reconciliation with his past.ĭebuting at the Telluride Film Festival, Moonlight was met with ovations.
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It’s a privileged moment - the sequence has the solemnity of a baptism ceremony - in a film full of such privileged moments. If I had tried to get every line we had scripted, I would have tried to control things in a way where we wouldn’t have had this moment in the film.” Sometimes pressure and duress work in your favor.
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A grown black man teaching a young black kid how to float and how to swim in the Atlantic Ocean as a storm is coming in. Jenkins, however, knew he’d gotten what he needed: “What you’re watching,” he says, “is real life. “It was such a joy, having that moment working with Alex, it just felt special,” remembers Ali, although cinematographer James Laxton, who had to lug a 200-pound camera in an underwater housing into the pounding waves, admits it also was physically draining. Nine takes and one lens swap later, they had the footage and beat a hasty retreat. But, he recalls, “Once we realized the weather wasn’t going to cooperate, I knew I had two things - a kid who didn’t know how to swim and a camera that would be half in, half out of the water.” He took Ali aside and told him not to worry about hitting the dialogue, just teach the boy to swim. The schedule called for a five-hour shoot, but he knew he’d only have 90 minutes to capture the sequence before the cast and crew would have to seek shelter. So director Barry Jenkins, 36, did a quick calculation. Brian Tyree Henry Boards 'Flint Strong' As Boxing Drama Finds New Studio Home, Restarts Shooting (Exclusive)
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