The Press Box - Ep. 256: Interview With 'Moonlight' Director Barry Jenkins

Episode Date: February 9, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with writer and director Barry Jenkins to discuss his film ‘Moonlight’ and its eight Oscar nominations, what it’s like working with his old friends (6:30), casting nonactors (12:52), and whether or not he plans to speak out politically onstage if he wins at the Academy Awards (28:13). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my name is Chris Ryan. My name's Andy Greenwald. And we are the co-host of The Watch, a pop culture podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. We are on Mondays and Thursdays. We mostly talk about TV, movies, music, pop culture, Jeremy Renner, House Flipping, The Papacy, Rees-Weatherspoon dancing at wedding videos. We used to talk about Kanye West. He's in the, like, timeout corner right now.

Never ever talk about Christine Baransky. You can listen to The Watch on Mondays and Thursdays on SoundCloud, iTunes. Anywhere you get podcasts, subscribe now. And thanks for listening. It's a good hang. Hello and welcome to a special channel 33 podcast. My name is Sean Fennesse. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Ringer. Quite lucky to be joined by a great filmmaker having an even better 12 months today.

The Oscar-nominated writer-director Barry Jenkins, whose second feature-length film, Moonlight, is up for eight Academy Awards later this month. Barry, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. So this is a very exciting time. Yeah, it's pretty cool, man. It's like you said, we're nominated for eight Academy Awards, and this is basically a movie I made with like,

my oldest, like, film school friends, and we're pretty much all nominated for Academy Awards. So it's wonderful, man. It's absolutely unbelievable. You know, the story of the movie is about an African-American boy growing up in Liberty City, Florida, which is your hometown as well. And, you know, based on a play by Terrell Alvin McCraney, also from Liberty City. But before we talk too much about the movie, I'm actually interested in talking a little bit about the period of your life after your first film, which was 2008's Medicine for Melancholy,

beautiful movie played the festival circuit. And I remember shortly after that movie came out, there was a lot of conversation about, you know, what happens for Barry Jenkins next? What was that period of your life like? It was cool, you know, it wasn't like this. I'll say that. This is like a whole other level.

But it was cool, you know, we made that movie for like 13 grand. It was like me and five friends, both the cinematographer and the editor for Moonlight, actually. And, you know, nobody knew who we were. Nobody knew anything about the film. Even to a larger degree, I mean, I think even now, people go, who the hell is Barry Jenkins? And what did this moonlight come from? So back then with medicine, it was like to the nth power. But, you know, I got signed at CAA. I was working on a movie

at Focus Features. It was similar to this, but not to this degree. So just like everybody else, I thought, oh, man, what am I going to get to do next? And it was just over a period of four and a half, five years where I just couldn't figure out what that next thing was, you know? I wrote three or four screenplays, two of them I wrote for hire with the intention to direct. And and they just didn't work out, you know, and it was one of those things where until you look back on it, I couldn't really, even now, I can't really explain why those things didn't work. I just know they didn't work. Were you frustrated in that time?

I wasn't frustrated in the moment. You know, I enjoy writing as much as I do directing. Well, I think writing is more satisfying. I enjoy directing more, is how I'd say it. Okay. But I was writing all that time, and I was making short films. So I was being fulfilled, and I'm a process person, not a results person. And so I was still in the process of creating things.

It's just that there was no results to show for it. And so after a while, you know, after about that fourth, you know, that fourth year going to that fifth year, then it began to sort of get to me. It was not a midlife crisis, but it was something, man. What changed about the way that you wrote in that time? Was there anything different about your process when you were working on those three or four scripts to when you got to Moonlight? I do think that once I started writing on Moonlight, one, I wrote it very, very fast. The first draft of this was written in 10 days on one block in Brussels, Belgium. And the other things that I had been writing, they were more, it just felt more like not necessarily work,

because there was one project in particular, this memoir called Portrait of an Attic as a young man that I worked on with this producer. You know, that I felt very viscerally as a piece of art. But there was something about Moonlight. The difference was I knew I was going to make this film. And I got to the point where I decided, if I have to make it for $5, I'm going to make the $5 version of Moonlight. Thankfully, we didn't have to make it for $5. But I think the intention of the writing was different.

I'm always curious what a filmmaker watches or reads before he or she starts writing something and starts the production of a movie. Did you prep yourself with anything? Was there a palette of movies or books that you dug into? Yeah, you know, what I try to avoid, actually, are films that I know are direct influences, especially influences that are related to the story. I'm about to tell.

I try and avoid those things, actually. So, like, Warren Carly's Happy Together. It was a big influence on Moonlight. I haven't watched it in about five or six years. You know, I tried to get myself away from it because it's just so easy when you digest a very potent image for that image to then make its way into your work. So I tried to avoid those things.

I started reading a lot of essays by James Baldwin. I'm a big Baldwin fan. I think Baldwin definitely has his hands all over moonlight in certain ways. And I started looking at a lot of still photography. There's this Dutch photographer. I'm going to butcher her name called Vivian Sussain. She does these beautiful portraits. She just does a lot of work on the continent of Africa.

And she does this great work. I want to say in Central Africa, like in the Congo, of these very dark-skinned men and women, boys and girls, with this just gorgeous color-blocking. It's really interesting what she does. And so stuff like that. I tried to ingest that kind of imagery because I knew the way I wanted to reflect the characters visually. And moonlight was going to be more beholden to that than it was to the things I've been seeing in cinema. Do you ask anybody for advice before doing something like this?

Not advice, but the people I collaborate with, most of them, at this point in my career, people have known for a long time. So I look to them as a barometer, you know, am I working in a way that you think is true to who I am? My producer, Adela Romansky, knows me, you know, as well as anybody. And, you know, she'll call me my bullshit. And so basically I've built these bullshit detectors around me. It's like, hey, am I bullshit right now? And, you know, they will be very clear about, no, you're not bullshit. You know, what you're doing is true.

How do you build that, how did you go about building that team 10 years ago? You know, did you guys meet in film school? How did you get together in the first place, James and Adele? Yeah, you know, James, so is interesting. So Nat Sanders, one of the editors, is a year ahead of me in film school. Adela Romansky, the producer, is a year behind me. James, myself and Joy, the other editor, we are in the same film school class. And James and I live together in film school.

And so I feel like we went through, you know, because film school is, especially undergrad film school, the professors are there and, you know, you're doing all the coursework, but as much of the schooling is working with the other kids, you know, watching movies with the other kids. And so James was just this guy who had very weird taste, and I had weird taste. And so we would just get our weird-ass taste together and go and watch as much of this, like, Warren Carwai, of this Claire DeNean, of this foreign cinema as we could find. And even the more sort of, like, out there, American independent cinema. Like, I remember, George Washington by David Gordon Green was a movie that James and I were just obsessed with in film school

and also the early work of Jack Audiar. So, yeah, I feel like we all just sort of click. It was very clear that the way, especially James, the way he approached cinema was not mainstream. And, you know, did you guys say to yourselves 10, 12 years ago, we're going to do all of this stuff together? We're going to be in this place? No, no, we didn't, man. We didn't. You know, I mean, James and Adela ended up getting married.

So there was that. And then Nat cut my first film, which James shot as well, pretty much because I couldn't find anybody else who was willing to make a movie with me. But then because there was such a long period between that film and this film, those guys all went off and did other work.

James has shot, I don't know, like 12, 15 features between then and now. Nat has cut seasons of girls, seasons of togetherness. You know, he's done all this work with Lynn Shelton. So we all just kind of, or at least me, I've been spinning my wills. well, these guys are all off getting better and better. And so when it was time to come back and make Moonlight,

I assume, because the experience was so wonderful making medicine, they were all just ready to do it. You know, Nat could have made more money cutting another television show. But instead, he set aside his time for basically no pay, you know, to do Moonlight, although he nods at the Academy Award nomination. Yeah, I was going to say, do you guys have you slapped each other in the face and said, how did this happen to us? You know yesterday was the Academy nominee luncheon where you're in this room and everybody's there.

You know, even people who aren't nominated, like, you know, I was at this table and Steven Spielberg was sitting right next to me. And they call every single person nominated individually and you walk up on stage for the big photo. And about halfway through, I think I was up, James de Dela were up and Nat was up already. And Nat was on the other side of the circle. We just looked at each other. And it was like, whoa. Absolutely. It was like one of those moments where if you could rewind time and go back to like film school

when it's like four in the morning and we're trying to get this project done, be like, oh, yeah, and 14 years later, we're going to be standing at this thing, you know, with all these other Academy Award nominees. What did Steven Spielberg have to say to you? You know, he told me to, because I said to him, this is my second film, but it kind of feels like my first because it's been so long. He's like, what should I do? And he said, don't think about it.

just keep making movies. And he said for his career, what's been the most beneficial is he's made so many different kinds of movies. He doesn't get stuck in one mode. So he told me, stay hungry and just make as much shit as I possibly can. I want to ask you about that soon. But let's just go back to Moonlight. I'm specifically curious about how you took a story that was, you know, at the outset,

someone else's story and made it your story. So how much of yourself are you able to put into something like that when you have a raw text? You know, I think in this particular case, quite a bit. You know, Tirol and I grew up in very similar ways. We lived very similar lives. And both our moms went through this addiction depicted by Naomi Harris in the film as the character Paula. And so, you know, I'm obsessed with flying because it terrifies me. And so I've done a lot of research onto it, like how it functions, you know, why in the hell the plane stays up in the air and flight paths.

And I like this idea of waypoint. Like a plane has to get from A to D, you know, and it can deviate a little bit at points B and C. And so I felt like the adaptation kind of functioned that way, not thinking in terms of plot or linearity, but of the character's development. And there were all these places where, you know, between Terrell's A and D, I felt like my B and C were very appropriate. And there was always this place where they merged to become not biography for me, not biography for Terrell, but the story of the character of Charon. And so it was a really beautiful process. And I'm pretty sure it was a very privileged process because I'm not going to be able to relate. to every character I deal with the way I can relate to this one.

But it was very fluid, man, to the point that there were certain scenes where I go, wait, that happened to you, that happened to me. And pretty much we do know what happened to him and what happened to me. But there's a few things where we go, oh, I don't remember writing that. I'm like, no, I don't either, you know, because it became the character. Do you ever put up any personal boundaries and say, this happened to me in my life, but I could never put it on film? You know, that was how this whole project kind of originated. So back when, before I wrote the script, Adela Romanski and I, I'm trying to figure out what it was I would do.

Because the only thing we knew was we were going to make a film. She was going to produce it. I was going to write and direct it. James was going to shoot it. That was just like, that was it. We didn't know what the hell it was. And I'd had this idea telling the story of my own mother. So very, like, now a memoir as film of my own life.

And I thought, that's too much. That's too personal. I don't want to go there. And so I thought that I would just sort of hide behind Terrell and use his life as this thing I could place myself into without placing myself fully into it. Of course, over the process of making the film, as I was just saying, things start to merge. And now here I am, you know, front and center. So it wasn't a car. It was an airplane.

Exactly. Exactly. So I tried to avoid it entirely. But thankfully, I think the movie resonates the way it does because we allowed ourselves. to be so honest and what we put into it. Every single person that I work with has asked me to ask you about the cast. They love every single person in the cast. It's obviously an interesting combination of professionals, people we've seen before and people

we've never seen before. You know, I know you've talked a bit about the first person that we see on camera is not a professional actor or something from Liberty City. How do you go about finding the people that are not Marishal Ali or Janelle Monet? You know, for the main character, for sure, you know, I'll talk about those guys first. You know, I didn't want the audience to walk into the auditorium, you know, like you watch Fight Club and Brad Pitt is Tyler Dirton, you know, but Tyler Dirton is Brad Pitt, you know. You can have the suspension of disbelief, but it only goes so far, you know, at the end of the day, you're watching Brad Pitt. I wanted, when people saw this character, I wanted them to legitimately walk a mile in his shoes.

And I thought the best way to do that was to have seen his face for the first time, especially because we have these different iterations of our main character. I want it every time you see this guy for it to feel like the first time. You're seeing him, you're meeting him. So we knew we were going to cast not non-actors, but less known actors for those main parts. And sometimes a trained actor, they have this muscle memory. If I respond to this actor in a certain way, I can anticipate he's going to respond this way.

When you pair an actor and a non-actor, that muscle memory goes out of the window. You can't rely on those tricks. And so, I don't know, I thought it would be, because, I mean, look, I've gone eight years. without making a film. I didn't want to play it safe, you know. I wanted to necessarily have fun, but I wanted to actually push myself. And I thought there's a version of blending actors and non-actors that does not work and does not work in a

very bad way. But there's a version that works when you get this thing that you can't anticipate or create otherwise. And so you're right, the opening of the film, the first face you see is Mahersla Ali, but then you're watching two non-actors basically carry the whole scene. You know what you need? Help me out, man. No, I can't do it, bro. You gotta keep it moving, bro.

Come on, man. You're talking about, man. You're not handling business as usual. Look, man, I don't mean no disrespect and nothing, gee. I'm just trying to see if I get a little, bro. You can't get nothing, man. You know what time it is, bro? I keep looking out for you, man.

Just a little something, man. All my something cost a little something, man. You ain't gotta get the step of it, nigg, you know what time it is, bro. I ain't gonna repeat myself, bro. And what we tried to do was, we just went to Miami over and over again for about, I want to say, 12, 16 months. We would go to this community center, that community center, and say, hey, come on in.

You know, talk to us, you know. And to me, the casting process was as much just like I'm talking to you and we're talking to these people. And then we, you know, give them the scene and see how they did. But I was much more looking for this feeling, you know, that they could be truthful in front of the camera. Is the pretense of that conversation, do you want to be in a movie? No, you know, what you usually started with was, so what are you doing with your life? And then we would build this idea of being in a movie because. I didn't want them to feel like they were going to be in a movie.

I wanted them to feel like we were there to capture their life. Because, you know, if I take them out of their world and place them in the movie, then I'm getting something false. Whereas if I bring the movie into their world, now I'm getting something real. And that opening scene is a perfect example. There's like maybe four or five lines that are in the script. And then the guy, because I had to transcribe it for the European release, because they're doing the subtitles and nobody can understand what the hell he's saying.

because 80% of it is him just like behaving as he would on the corner because he has spent time, you know, on the corner. And things like that, again, if I'm trying to write these things that follow a certain arc and all that, maybe that would be cool, but it's not going to be as that flesh and blood lived in as allowing somebody to walk into the film and be themselves. When you're working with actors, do you do line readings? Do you guys rehearse? Do you do a lot of that work? Is it a much more open environment? On this film, it had to be a much more open environment.

I mean, look, you know, the script is the script. You know, and so everybody, you know, ran their lines and prepared, but we literally could not afford to have rehearsals, and we couldn't afford to pay the actors to come out early for rehearsals. So this is a very present tense film. Everything happened in the moment. But then I think the way the audience experiences, the movie also was in the present tense.

There's no flashbacks or flash forward. If things happen off screen, we don't tell the audience. audience, those happened off screen. You have to feel in the present tense performance of the actor that something happened off screen. So it was a very method process of working with the actors. And we tried to whenever we could, you know, bend those things to our will. You know, if you've seen the film, there's a scene very late in the movie where Naomi Harrison-Therfonte Rhodes have their only scene together. You know, Naomi plays his mom character who's been through to hell and back. And then we have this scene where she's kind of come out the other side.

And Tramante Rhodes and Naomi Harris has never met. But I have this character who hasn't seen his mom in what feels like quite a long time. I messed up. I mean, I fucked it all the way up. I know that. But your heart ain't got to be black like mine, baby. I love you, Sharon. I love you, baby.

I mean, you ain't got to love me. Lord knows I did not have love for you. you need it. I know that. But you're going to know that I love you. You hear me? Sharon. I hate you, Mama. They're doing this scene, and Naomi Harris doesn't smoke, but the actor, I mean, the character she's playing does. She's trying to light this cigarette. She can't get it lit. It's like maybe her hands are shaking. It's windy. And I tell Tramante, I'll scream without her hearing, hey, well, she can't like the cigarette. I want you to reach over, take it from her, light it, and give it back. And it's the first time he touches her.

First time Trevonty touches Naomi Harris. And it's with this gesture, one, he's trying to take care of her, and he gives her this thing that she needs to calm her nerves. And when he did it, she just started shaking. These tears came, and the scenes mentioned to fit to function as an apology, but the apology's not written to the screenplay. And so she just opened up, but she said, I'm sorry. And so the whole process of making the film was about trying to get these actors

to know where they're, where they're, the flash points where the raw sort of openness was and then use their unfamiliarity with each other to sort of tap into that vulnerability. It goes back to the idea of blending actors and non-actors. You can't anticipate what the response is going to be because we haven't rehearsed it. So let's use that shit, you know, let's surprise people.

One thing that I'm really interested in is Shiron is a very taciturn character. Not many words of dialogue, probably in the script, even relative to most, you know, 100 and however many minutes. the film is 110 minutes. But so how do you create tension without words when you're making a movie like this?

Oh, I mean, have you ever been at a restaurant on like a fourth or a fifth date or in the fifth or sixth year of a relationship and you're sitting there and nobody's talking? That's tension, bro. I think that this movie to me was about the interior of the character, the interior life of Sharon, especially because he's a character who's retreating

as the movie goes on. you know, cinema is not the best tool to convey interiority. Literature is much better at that because you can actually write the words that are transpiring inside the character's head. But we wanted the movie to be immersive for the audience. And so I felt like in casting these actors who could emote without speaking, who had this emotion behind their eyes, you know, beneath their skin, that if we let these sort of silences play out,

which I described as just being patient, I told the actors, be patient with one another. If something happens and you feel something, take a moment to process that feeling. I felt like the audience and the act of watching that processing on behalf of the characters, you know, performed by the actors, that that would let them in.

You know, because I oftentimes feel like these expository words that we're speaking, those things are designed to keep us out, you know, because I'm speaking so much, you're listening to what I'm saying, but you're not watching me. And what I'm saying could be full of shit, you know? but if you're looking at me and you're trying to hide things from me,

I'm going to see those things. You know, well, with this character, I'm going to see those things. That's what I love about Tramante Rhodes in the film, you know, as the character Black, he's got all these muscles, he's got this grill. But he is like the softest little dude in the world when you look in his eyes. You know what I mean? Because he's trying so hard to project this sort of heart and this exterior that when he's not speaking, you're seeing all these things,

this undercurrent beneath the surface. So I had faith that the audience. would be an active audience that in the silence they would be looking into the characters rather than a passive audience Which was in the silence they're waiting for the next word to drop because that wasn't how the character functioned to me Was there anything during the making of the film that you thought would turn out a certain way and turned out in the exact opposite direction? I wouldn't say that you know I do think that I didn't expect the movie to be as quiet as it is This was a movie that I think asserted the pace at which it wanted to be told the volume at which it wanted to be told.

And I wouldn't say surprising because I always felt the film was going to be, you know, usually one script page equals one minute of screen time. I had a feeling in this film, one script page would be like 90 seconds of screen time or something to that effect. But it was still surprising

and I think a process of figuring out what the appropriate balance of that was. I was really, really pleased with the work Alex Hibbert did in the movie. who is, he's the only non-actor. He plays little. He plays little. He's the only non-actor who plays a main character, I would say.

You know, most of the non-actors are just secondary characters. You know, they appear for a scene. They disappear. But Alex Hibbert is a non-actor who essentially carries the film. You know, without him, the movie doesn't work. When you see Tramante Rose in the third story, what you're really seeing, hopefully, is Alex Hibbert. And I wouldn't say I was surprised at how well he did,

but you just never know. and every time I saw him what he was capable of every time I worked with him every day the ceiling kept going higher and higher and higher he just took to it like a fish to water I guess they say

Is Alex an actor now Is he gonna this what he's gonna do He just booked a role on a series So yes he is an actor now And he's damn good at it What's it like to see people like that Transform because of the project you guys worked on You know there's two different versions of it

One was I flew to Miami To show the movie to the of the smallest kids in the film. And it didn't occur to me until I was there. But I saw Alex Hibbert watching himself on screen. I saw his mom watching him on screen. And I realized that what he saw himself as being capable of love was expanding. Over the course of those, like, 105 minutes,

literally his idea of himself was expanding. That's a life-changing thing. That's something I never got until I was 22 years old. This guy is like 11. And now on the other side, the fact that he has necessarily a career, you know, because, perfect example, I made medicine. I got signed a CIA. I thought I have a career.

And I did not. You know, hopefully now I'll have a career. But he's definitely got a leg up. And just about every actor on this film has gone on to book work, you know, in the four or five months as we've been out and released. So that's the thing I'm proud of stuff, to be honest, because a lot of people put a lot of hard work in this before there were eight Academy Award nominations, before there was film festivals and all these amazing reviews.

You know, they were in it because they believed in the project. And I love to see them get work out of that. That's a real gift. My favorite thing about your films, or at least one of my favorite things, is the way that you use music. And that's true for medicine as well as this movie. And you use a lot of diagetic music, you know, really use it to tell your story. How do you go about choosing songs and figuring out when you should be using music in

your movies? Yeah, you know, like most filmmakers, I keep an iTunes playlist of things I think would be great. in a film, usually as I'm writing, some of those things make their way into the script. And so the majority of the source cues in this film were songs that I either wrote the script to, that I wrote into the screenplay, or that I just had ideas for doing the edit. So it's always, to me, a very important aspect. You know, I go back to Lynn Ramsey. You know, Lynn Ramsey does not allow music in her films that's not diagetic.

And so I kind of came up with that principle. but then I fell in love with Claire DeNeine. And Claudeau use a score liberally in her work, and yet she's considered this very austere, like art house sort of filmmaker. So I think my approach to music in this film was kind of like a blend of those two things. But I didn't want them to clash.

And so there's a point in our movie where the source cues become this chopped and screwed music, this very southern version of hip-hop. And we take the score, and we filter that through chopped and screwed principles too. Because again, everything's meant to reflect the consciousness of our main character. One thing I'm really curious about, both medicine and moonlight are about characters reckoning with identity. And that leads to a lot of writing and reception.

And I'm sure the way that people talk about the ideas of your movie. What does it like to receive interpretations that maybe you weren't planning for or even that you don't agree with based on what you have spent all this time putting together? I think it's wonderful. I mean, rather than recontextualizing how I see the film, which it does sometimes, what I see is people applying their own experience to the film, which I think is one of the things that I think every person who creates a piece of work should hope for. You know, you want people to bring themselves to the work. And when you do that, what you have to accept is that their selves are going to play a part

and contextualizing how they receive the work. So I kind of love it, you know. I wasn't trying to make a think piece movie. You know, I know we live in Think Piece. We live in think peace times. We do. But again, what I see whenever, and some of those things come to me through Twitter, and they're really provocative. Like, they expand my appreciation of some of the work the actors did, of some of the work that James, a cinematographer, or Joy Annette, the editors did, these juxtapositions of things and the cultural value people see in them or lack there of for some of the harsher think pieces out there.

But I think it's cool, man. I have friends who've made amazing provocative work that nobody sees, that nobody talks about. And so I think anytime anybody writes anything about the movie, I see it as a privilege. Now, some of that shit hurts, no doubt. I mean, with this film, we've been fortunate. You know, I shouldn't pretend that I've been anything but fortunate with this film. But yes, so that shit hurts. But most of it is dope, you know, it doesn't hurt at all.

So you've already won some awards. We're in a complicated political climate. there's a lot of expectation on people who win awards. Do you feel responsibility to express ideas that or maybe subtext in your film as text in real time when you're faced with the opportunity to speak? Not really. You know, I don't feel the need not to speak on things. I try to accomplish whatever goals there are things I want to speak to or issues I want to address in the work.

I think it's much better to address that stuff in the work because I think the platform that we're speaking, from at these shows and things like that, you know, there are other people who aren't watching that need to be reached as well. And I was at the SAG Awards and Herschless speech, you know, brought me to tears. I think what I've learned from working on Moonlight is we see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves. And what I was so grateful about in having the opportunity to play Juan was, uh, was, uh, you know, playing a gentleman who saw a young man folding into himself as a result of the persecution of his community and taking that opportunity to uplift him and tell him that he mattered, that he was okay,

and accept him. And I hope that we do a better job of that. He has something he had to speak on him. So, you know, I think it works both ways. You know, if I'm so fortunate, you know, what will I say? I have no idea, man. I'll just speak from the moment. But what I also try to do is not be beholden to getting to the podium, to speak on the things I want to speak about, try to put it in the work. Now that you made a movie on the scale of moonlight,

which is bigger than medicine, though not a huge film, do you feel the need or desire to go bigger? Not the need or desire. But, you know, as a filmmaker, I like all different. kinds of stories and some of those stories demand a larger canvas for sure even if not a larger canvas you know larger resources you know so absolutely I have no intention of working solely at the budget levels I've worked at you know to this point but I also have no intention of never working at these budget levels again again there are certain stories that are appropriately

told at this budget level the beauty of making this film the way we did was we had pretty much total freedom you know and if we had made it at the budget of saying you know in America, we would not have had that same freedom. So what comes next? There's a book by Colson Whitehead called The Underground Railroad that I'm working on. I'm adapting into a limited series. And then there's a few other things.

I'm batting around. You know, to go back to your previous question, the beauty of the moment I'm in right now is I do have those options, you know, and I'm going to consider them like I consider any other option. Anything different about approaching a series versus a contained film like Moonlight? No, I hope not to.

You know, one of my favorite filmmakers is working right now, Stephen Soderberg, and I love that when you watch the Nick, he didn't approach that any differently than he approached traffic. It's very clear. You apply it the same mindset to it, and so I hope to do the same thing, whether I'm working in television or features. One last question. You shared your first short film by Josephine on Twitter recently. I'm wondering if you, when you look back on that, if you feel like the same filmmaker that you were at that time. You know, I do in a certain way. I can't remember why I put that up. I guess it was right after the election.

You know, I look back at that very young person, that 22-year-old person, and I'm a different filmmaker entirely, I think. I'm definitely a different human being. I'm more mature. And yet, I love that even at that stage, I was still speaking to what I would say is some real shit, you know. And I want to be reminded to always be at least trying to speak to some real shit in the work that I do henceforth.

It's a beautiful closing message. Thank you very much for taking the time today. Thank you, bro. All right, man.