Barry Jenkins Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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I'm process-orientated. Awards, by their nature, are results-orientated.
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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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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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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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Filmmaking is a very privileged art form. It costs a lot of money to make these things.
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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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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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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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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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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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'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.
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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.
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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.