“Moonlight” turns 10 this year, and A24 is marking the anniversary by bringing Barry Jenkins’ Best Picture winner back to theaters in a new 4K restoration. Jenkins has naturally been looking back at the film as part of the anniversary press tour, but actually sitting down and experiencing the movie again is another matter entirely.
“I have not watched it again recently,” Jenkins told Sam Sanders on “The Sam Sanders Show.” “Just like little bits and pieces. I’ve, you know, 10 years is a long time. And honestly, for me it’s 11 years because, you know, we shot the film the year before and it came out and then went through all this post process. And so I have to be present in the things that I’m doing now. So I kind of, kind of in a way, I don’t want to see it.”
There’s more going on there than a filmmaker simply wanting to leave an old movie behind. Jenkins’ mother died after “Moonlight” was made, and the film was always wrapped up in their relationship, even if he didn’t fully understand how much while making it. After Sanders mentioned losing his own mother, Jenkins acknowledged that grief as another reason he keeps some distance from the movie.
“My mother has passed as well since we made the film,” he said, adding that it’s “maybe another reason why I’m not going to watch.”
And yet Jenkins clearly hasn’t stopped circling the feelings behind “Moonlight.” In fact, he says the projects he’s working on now somehow keep bringing him right back to mothers.
Looking across “Moonlight,” “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and “The Underground Railroad,” Jenkins noticed the same idea repeating itself: children trying to understand their mothers, mothers trying to protect their children, and all the love, hurt, and unfinished business sitting between them.
Jenkins returned to the thought a few moments later. “It’s even the things I’m working on right now. I look at them, and I go, that’s about mothers as well. Like how did that happen? Like, how did it happen?”
“So there’s been so much of this stuff, even the things I’m working on now,” Jenkins said. Sanders jumped in: “It’s about mothers.” Jenkins agreed: “About mothers. And it’s just like, and it’s so, it’s so shocking to me.”
That’s particularly interesting given that Jenkins only recently laid out what he hopes to make next. “Be My Baby,” his A24 Ronnie Spector biopic starring Zendaya, and his long-developing Alvin Ailey film are currently expected to be his next two features. He also teased “a couple little secret things” in development, so it’s impossible to know which of those projects Jenkins means here. Still, whatever he’s actively working on appears to have landed him right back in familiar emotional territory.
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The answer probably goes back to “Moonlight” itself. Jenkins remembered initially thinking that adapting Tarell Alvin McCraney’s work would give him some emotional cover. “I get to hide behind Tarell,” he recalled thinking. “This is about Tarell, his life and his mom, and I get to just stand over here on this.”
That didn’t last. Once Jenkins returned to Miami, spent time with his mother, and started putting the film together, he realized how much of their own history had slipped into it. When Sanders asked him to reduce the one story he might keep telling in different forms to a single sentence, Jenkins didn’t need much time.
“I love my mother despite it all.”
That makes his reluctance to revisit “Moonlight” feel less like a filmmaker who simply doesn’t watch his old work. Ten years later, Jenkins may not want to look back at the movie itself, but judging by what he says he’s making now, he’s hardly finished with what it opened up.
Listen to the full conversation below.
