If there is anything slightly disappointing this awards season so far its the fact critics groups seem to be taking Barry Jenkins’ directorial talents for granted. He’s already won an Oscar for his “Moonlight” screenplay and his sophomore film electrified the world by winning Best Picture, but you’d almost think his critically acclaimed follow-up, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” directed itself. Not that Jenkins seems to care. His priorities always seem to be supporting his cinematic collaborators whether they be in front of or behind the camera. Or publicly supporting other adventurous filmmakers on this year’s awards circuit, for that matter.
READ MORE: Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk” is marvelous [Review]
What Jenkins has done adapting James Baldwin‘s novel isn’t getting enough credit though. Bringing “If Beale Street Could Talk” to the screen while still conveying Baldwin’s eloquent pose was thought to be impossible. And as marvelous as his screenplay is (he’s won two critics awards already and has been nominated for more) the film would simply not soar without Jenkins’ masterful filmmaking skills. And, happily, it’s finally finding its way to theaters this weekend.
Jenkins jumped on the phone last month to discuss how the film came into being, crafting a period film without falling into the traps of a period film, the importance of Regina King to newcomer KiKi Layne, why it was important for him to honor the legacy of James Baldwin and much, much more.
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The Playlist: Had you read this book before tackling this as a movie? When did this become important subject matter for you?
Barry Jenkins: I read it for the first time in like 2010. A friend sent it to me suggesting that I turn it into a film, He was a sound designer. It wasn’t immediately clear to me that I wanted to make a film of it, but I knew I wanted to start writing things. When this opportunity came in 2013 to take a writing trip, I decided that it was important to me to at least attempt to adapt James Baldwin because I loved his work for so long. So I’d say in 2013 was when it all kind of began and then once we had the script, then it was like, “No, I think I really want to try to make this.” That was when we started the journey and working with the script.
What do you think clicked that made you actually wanted to make it into a movie?
It was definitely the relationship between Tish and Fonny. There’s something really evocative about anything that James Baldwin writes, to be honest but, I think in this book because the two characters are so young and so innocent and pure, both in their love but also in their experiences with the world, it just felt like a really fresh perspective to explore that kind of relationship. I hadn’t seen two young black people depicted as soulmates in quite this way and at that point in a pre-“Moonlight” world its like just swing for the fences, I want something that has really big deep emotion and that was the thing originally from the very beginning that hooked me.
I should clarify this, so you were writing this before you even started making “Moonlight”?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wrote the first draft of this and the first draft of “Moonlight” on the same writing trip in 2013 and technically I wrote “Moonlight” first. But, I mean, literally, I finished “Moonlight” and started writing this the next day, so they kind of came into the wall at the same time. But then it was very clear that “Moonlight” was going to happen first and it was going to take time to untangle the rights to the book.
Was it hard to get the rights?
It was hard but not difficult by which I mean there wasn’t like this massive set of obstacles or tasks that I had to pass. It was just about getting to know the James Baldwin estate and them getting to know me. The beauty of adapting the book without having the rights was I showed very clearly I just really care about making this and this is exactly how I plan to do it, as opposed to trying to pitch myself of what I would do if they gave me the rights, which to me shows “I’ll spend time on this if you guys tell me it’s O.K. to spend time.” Instead, I was like, “I’ve already spent time on this and I really just care about doing it.”
So actually, you almost did it as a spec script. You wrote it not even knowing you could get the rights eventually.
I didn’t even have anybody’s contact info obviously when I got the push. All that happened afterward. Like, “O.K., I have the script. Now, I should probably try to figure out how to turn this into a film.”
I wanted to ask about Regina. First of all, how did you get her free with her crazy busy schedule to make this? What did you think she brought to the film overall?
You know Regina’s schedule is the stuff of legends that’s for sure. But I think what’s wonderful about Regina is she’s someone who’s been in the industry for such an extended period of time [and] she now knows how to manifest control over her own schedule. She, Regina King, decides what Regina King is going to do and she’s driven by instinct and intuition. So, the schedule? once we knew she was interested I knew she would take care of that. It was great for me because there’s a dynamic in the book that I also wanted in film where KiKi [Layne] and Stephan’s characters are about the same age that Regina and Colman Domingo‘s characters were when they first met, and they first decided they wanted to build a family. I wanted there to be this thing where Kiki can look at her mother and see a mother but also see a peer at the same time. And I just felt like Regina straddled that line so well and I also thought too if anybody’s mom is going to be this almost just all knowing, getting on planes to fly to international destinations [woman] that Regina King was going to be someone who had the strength to carry that while also remaining extremely vulnerable at the same time. So, she was just amazing and because Kiki’s so new to the experience, it wasn’t just incumbent upon me to help her into the process. I felt like all her scene-mates were helping her as well. You can really see the nurturing Regina is giving her as a performer start to bleed over into the relationship as mother and daughter in the film in a really lovely way.
This is your first real “period film,” at least one that takes place so many decades ago, what was important to you about that aspect to the film? What did you not want to do, what did you want to do?
I knew I couldn’t afford to physically, from the ground up, recreate a Harlem as it was in the early 1970s. So I just disabused myself of that notion right away which was nice because it allowed me to work in the same way that we worked on “Moonlight” [where] the most important thing for me was how the main characters felt and if that would be enough to sort of dictate the aesthetic contract. We hired Mark Friedberg who is an amazing production designer and I said to him that we can’t afford to build the streets from the ground up. However the landscape materials, the landscape faces, that’s where I want to really dig in. For me, the biggest obstacle in making a period piece is I love to have the freedom to turn the camera in any direction I want. And I think when you make a period piece like this, you cannot do that because if you turn the camera two degrees that way, you’re back in 2018.