Did you feel constricted then or did your team just have to find locations that gave you more freedom?
Both. I felt constricted initially. As you said, it’s my first doing this and it’s not my natural way of working. But then your limitations become your strengths. That scene between Stephan James and Bryan Tyree Henry. I mean, they don’t even get up from the table hardly at all. [They are] three feet basically from one another. How do you make that cinematic? Its possible to do it once you accepted limitations of the space. I think [that] was kind of as a microcosm for the approach of the whole film in a certain way.
One of the things I noticed in “Moonlight” where different decades are also being depicted, you tend to work with your production designer to make sure that there are no posters, no billboards or anything that could be specific to the time even though it is of the time. Are those things you specifically try to avoid?
Yes. You’re absolutely right. That is something that we want to avoid. There was only one set where we potentially would have put up posters and I took them down in the end. You weren’t able to see them anyway. But yeah, I like to think that especially again with these two films, that the ideal time was elusive anyway. So not linear because of all these flashbacks [and then] the voiceover spoken from Lord knows when. It could be five years in the future, it could be 10 years in the future. So it’s like planting a flag of exactly, this is October 12th, 1973. It felt like that was going to work against the feeling of the film, coming from the filming of the character who’s kind of a purgatory in a certain way. She’s bringing this child to term, Fonny’s awaiting his trial, and then every now and then she thinks back to these better times, these better days. Those things are memories and they were ruled by a completely different aesthetic. So yeah, we actually said out loud, that the notion of time is going to be slippery and that we were going to be O.K. with that.
How do you work with your cinematographer James Laxton? You collaborate on such a beautiful aesthetic. How does it come to fruition before you actually hit the set? Do you use mood boards or storyboards?
Yeah, mood boards for sure, whether it’s via Tumblr or Instagram sending private messages [James and I] always have a shared folder. We don’t storyboard but we do shot list the entire film. For us, the biggest thing is always walking the locations together and even though we don’t do a lot of rehearsals, if we can get the actors to the relocation, blocking the location on the actual set with the actress as well. We’ve been working together for so long and some of these things we’ve verbalized to each other externally, but a lot of it would just feel.
Are you also at that point now with Nicholas Brittell as well in terms of the score? Because again, he’s just delivered another stunner and I’m curious how you guys collaborate.
I mean, Nick and I, we sit together in the city of New York and we just like with everyone else in the film, we watch the characters. I’ll say this about Nick, I didn’t realize this, but we went together at a conference in Belgium for composers and after he gave the talk, another composer came up to us and said, “Am I to understand that you had never heard Nick’s music before you hired him to make ‘Moonlight’?” I didn’t occur to me but I had never heard anything Nick had composed prior to hiring him for “Moonlight.” But the vibe was so good [and] that was more important than any past work.
Obviously, the love affair in Baldwin’s story appealed to you while you were adapting the novel. But, who did you make this movie for? Is there anyone specific that you want to see this movie? Is it young people? Is it the African- American community? Is that something that you think about while you’re making the film?
Look, the movies I’m making right now don’t demand storyboards, but when I worked in advertising you would have a board on set. Everybody’s working towards the board, not working towards what’s in front of them. So, I try not to have a goal in my head of approval before as we’re making it. But with this piece, because it’s Baldwin it was really important to me, not that James Baldwin would love this movie, but that it would honor his legacy. That was by far the most important thing for me. Now on the [other side] of it and having shown the film, whether it was Toronto, the Apollo, Paris, there is something about young black people in particular and also black woman who see the film and see Regina, Kiki and Teyonah Paris and Aunjanue Ellis and just all of these very diverse beautiful black women and then the young black couple. It didn’t occur to me how impactful that would be and I’m glad because I think that would have been too much pressure to fulfill that [while making it] which is all praise to James Baldwin.
“If Beales Street Could Talk” is now in limited release.
