Barry Jenkins Quotes
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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.
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'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.
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I'm process-orientated. Awards, by their nature, are results-orientated.
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Sometimes, how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference of life and death.
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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?'
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To me, no matter who you're casting for what role, if something's authentic, usually you can mine something good there.
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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?
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Making films. It gave me a voice. Legitimately saved me.
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I'm very much a person of nurture over nature. When the world is not nurturing, it can really change a man.
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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.
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I think it's really important to remind, reinforce people that their lives have value, you know? That their lives have worth.
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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.
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Filmmaking is a very privileged art form. It costs a lot of money to make these things.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.