Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Barry Jenkins chooses to believe in chaos

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Barry Jenkins is best known for indie films like "If Beale Street Could Talk" and "Moonlight." Now he's helming Disney's "Mufasa: The Lion King." He talks to Rachel about the connections he sees between his old work and the new movie, and he also tells her about the place he sought refuge as a child and why he's compelled to believe that there's no order in the universe.To listen sponsor-free, access bonus episodes and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

A warning, this episode contains brief cursing of the literary variety. Do you think there's order in the universe, or is it all chaos? I think it's all chaos. I have to believe that. I mean, Rachel Martin, it is December 2024. You're going to tell me the last five years on this planet, you know, have been orderly. They have been beyond chaotic. I mean, beyond.

I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard. the game where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest chooses questions at random from a deck of cards, questions about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped them. Because of where I came from and what I do. My guest this week is the film director, Barry Jenkins. There's just always this version of me that feels like I'm not enough. It is virtually impossible to watch a Barry Jenkins film and not be emotionally changed. You can't watch the scene from the Oscar-winning film Moonlight

where Juan teaches little to swim without seeing the full humanity of both those characters. The fragility and the strength and the desperation and love all at the same time. Barry Jenkins never set out to make movies for the masses. He's a champion of independent film who tells stories about black life in America. From a film about a one-night stand in San Francisco in the early 2000s

to the limited series based on the Colson Whitehead Book the Underground Railroad. But that's the thing about art and movies in particular. No matter how specific the experiences reflected on screen, if the story is told as true as it can be, as authentically

as possible, the work transcends boundaries. It'll mean different things to different people, but it will mean something. And Barry Jenkins has made films that matter in the most profound ways. So when I tell you that Jenkins is making the newest Lion King movie for

Disney, maybe you need to take a beat because this is the indie filmmaker taking a big swing in the completely opposite direction. But then you remember that Barry Jenkins wants his films to make an emotional imprint on us. And if a little Hakuna Matata doesn't make you feel joy, then I don't know what will. Barry Jenkins, welcome to Wildcard. Thank you for having me. That was an awesome introduction. Yay, I'm glad I got a little laugh.

How are we going to land this ship? I know, right? You landed it. Thank you. It's a big pivot, and we will talk about that pivot. But we're going to start with this game. How do you feel about it? I feel good.

I've done a little bit of research into this game just to see what it was. Someone told me, you should check that out before you go and do it. Yeah, before you agree to do this. Exactly. I have friends who've been on it, which is pretty cool to see. Wait, tell me who. Lena Waith. Yeah.

It's a good one. I don't know Bowen very well, but I've met him a few times, listen to his episode. I thought that one was pretty fun. I don't know. It's a, it's an interesting way to get into this kind of conversation. So I'm looking forward to it. Okay. So let's do it. I've got a deck of cards in front of me. I will hold up three cards at a time and you will pick one, two, or three. That's the one I'll answer. You get a couple tools to use in this experience. You get one skip and you get a flip where you can flip it on me. I will answer it first before you. You still have to answer it. Okay. And we're going to break it up into three rounds with a few questions in each round.

Cool. Sounds good. Sounds good. Okay. Let's get into it. So, this is round one. I am holding three cards up. One, two, or three?

Two. Two. Right in the middle. Where would you go to feel safe as a kid? Where would I go to feel safe as a kid? Not the first question I expected. Boom! You know, I grew up...

You know, I actually know the answer to this. I grew up very poor in the world that you see dramatized in moonlight. And I lived in this housing project that had been around probably a post-war sort of housing project. I think it was built as barracks probably for soldiers and then became public housing. This is in Miami, we should say. This is in Miami, exactly. And in the middle of this complex, there was an old, like, large... When it was like a like a wash house and it was this one story, maybe like 20 by 10 foot thing, the structure.

But it had this flat roof and there was this massive tree above it. And I remember as a child if things were too heavy or there was too much going on, I would go and I would find a way using the window. And this place is dilapidated like in disrepute. Like it's not being used. I would climb up in the window to get onto the roof and then I would jump onto the window. the tree and I would squirrel up into the very top of this tree like so high that if someone was walking by they would never know someone was up there and I would just go up into this tree and I would just sort of just like listen to the sounds of the day I would kind of just clear my head

and I think I would just stay up there until I felt like I was ready to sort of re-enter the world or re-enter my life. I haven't thought of it in a very very long time. Because the idea of me climbing trees is crazy. Not a thing you do now. Yeah, that's what I would do. And it's interesting, later in life, I would sometimes go on these long walks as a teenager, and I would find these empty houses that had fruit trees in the backyard. It's Florida.

It's my own great fruit trees, avocado trees. And I guess I climbed trees a lot. I would climb trees. It sounds like it was, yeah, on the regular. I would climb trees to go feel safe. And to get perspective, probably. I mean, there's something about getting high above the din of life and the hard things. Yeah, it's weird.

There's a version of it that maybe as you're trying to avoid all these different things, but I think solitude can be very fortifying as well and to sort of re-center yourself before you reenter the rigors of the demands of everyday life, especially that life, because it was a lot for a child to process. I'm never quite sure which of these questions land with different people, and that was a good one. Okay, three more cards. One, two, or three? I will go at three this time. Let's go with three.

Three. What's a moment when a stranger made you feel loved? What's a moment when a stranger made me feel loved? Ooh. Flip. I have answered this before, and I told one story. So now I'm trying to think, I think, well, wow, this really gets into it. This is something I haven't said before.

It was when my mom was dying of cancer and it was a long death, right? We were in hospice at her house, at my parents' house, in rural Idaho. And it's one of those things where you don't know when it's going to happen. It's just long and it's so hard for everybody. And I was working this demanding job in television at the time. And so I had already been there for three weeks and I thought, well, it looks like she's, it's not going to pass for a few more weeks. And so I made the choice to come back to Washington, D.C. And as I was on my layover, I just like collapsed on a wall.

I just slid down a wall and just like sobbed and then went up to the ticket counter and tried to get on the next flight back because it just felt wrong. And the ticket agent, she just recognized obviously. I wasn't making a secret of it. I was like hysterically weeping. But she took care of me in that moment.

And I am grateful for that. Wow. Thank you for that stranger. Yeah, yeah. You know, I listened to a few of the, and you were like, if you want to buy time, do the flip. I just buy you time. This idea of a stranger is tricky, but I did think of a story. Back in 2008, it must have been.

I was in Argentina at this film festival with my first film, Medicine for Melancholy. But I was doing a Q&A for this film, and I was trying to find a way, because I was speaking through a translator, to make my language very simple. And so this movie, Medicine for Malincoly, the budget was 15,000 US.

And so in describing it, I was like, oh, you know, it's a very cheap film. You know, we made it very quickly, blah, blah, blah. And as I'm doing the Q&A, I'm up on a stage. I see this, like, 78-year-old woman stand up in the back of the room. And she just starts walking towards the stage. She gets the foot of the stage, and she reaches up and she taps me on the foot. As I'm answering another question, as she starts speaking to me in Spanish.

And then she turns and she walks off. And it turns to the market. And I go, what does she say? And she said, oh, the woman said she's a very old woman, and so she doesn't have time to waste. And she heard you say that it was a very cheap film. She said, it was not a cheap film. It was inexpensive.

There's a difference. Thank you for bringing this film to Motto Plata. I feel like I learned so much about you and where you're from. Oh, my God. And that was it. It was such a lovely gesture, but it's like she held up a mirror and showed me how my words were almost making my own work diminutive. And I thought it was a really lovely thing

for this total stranger to offer up to this young black man from America with this tiny mumblecore film. I love it too because she didn't expect anything in return. She didn't need to meet you to be able to say, I met the director, Barry Jeter. She literally just wanted you to know it. Exactly. And she felt it was so necessary for me to know this

that she was going to interrupt. She was going to walk up and put her, lay hands on me to make sure I receive this lesson. I'll never forget it, never. Oh, I love that one. Okay. Three more. These are three different cards. One, two, or three.

So I made a point that I was going to choose each number at least once, so I have to go number one now. I love that people set their own rules for this. It's so funny. Okay, number one. What's an early memory of appreciating beauty? What's an early memory of appreciating beauty? Oh, I was an athlete growing up. I ran track and I played football.

And I'll never forget I was running what you call the four by four relay. Everyone runs once around the track and I was running second leg. And second leg, everyone's in their lane just staggered. But at the beginning of the second leg, across the first hundred meters, everyone merges into the most inside lane. Because that's the shortest distance to run around the track. And I'll never forget the baton came around to me and I got it. And I'm just running. And Rachel, I'm just like nothing, everything disappears.

There's no sound. There's no light. It's all just like a feeling. But there was this moment where, and this is. happens sometimes in a race, everyone was converging at once. And you're all wearing these different uniforms. And just remember just the streaking of color and light and movement. And just for a moment, I almost forgot that I was running a race. I just wanted to take this moment and just extend it for as long as possible. And what I'm talking about probably was only, I'm doing the math in my

I had three and a half, four and a half seconds this time it takes for this wall of runners to converge into a flat line. But God, it was gorgeous, gorgeous. Oh, my God. You were such a filmmaker even then. Like, you're just seeing the aesthetic. And it's weird because these images stay with you. There's a shot in Mufasa, the Lion King, of all places, where I got to somehow restage this feeling. The two Cubs have this race.

And there's a moment where one of the Cubs catches up. to the other cub, and the camera is just placed in just the right position when there's this light reflecting off the water, and he's running, and he's at an angle. And just for a moment, I was like, oh, that's what it felt like on that second leg in a four-backer-hundred. That's so great. You got to extend the moment in your own way. I did for another three and a half seconds. Yeah. We're in the studio's like, why are we in the shot so long? I'm like, you don't understand. This is my childhood. We're going to take a break from the game and talk a little bit more about Mufasa, the Lion King. Okay.

So this is where I come clean to you because I see a lot of stuff for work. And on my calendar, it just said Barry Jenkins' new film and the theater I was going to watch these excerpts at. So I actually didn't know what I was watching of yours. So I'm like Barry Jenkins. I was getting in like Barry Jenkins. mode. Very different body. And I'm like fortified emotionally. And I sit down and like music is starting and I was like, whoa, okay. This is something different. But I am here for it. Yes. So, yeah, how did this? I am so glad you were here for it. That was the expectation. I don't imagine you'll be the last person to have that experience. But so long as you're here for it, you know, it'll be a, you know, it'll be a,

a very wonderful ride. It was lovely, lovely, lovely. So were you just already craving a massive departure from films that you had made before? Or did the project present itself? And then you're like, yeah, maybe. It was both. I was itching for something different, for a departure, as you say, especially because this came to me about six months into post-production on the Underground Railroad,

which the Underground Railroad felt like the completion of, this is one continuous filmmaking process that began with production of Moonlight. And when I read the script, actually when I get the script, I'm skeptical. I go, I'm not going to read that because I'm not going to do that. Because why?

Say more words. You were just like, I'm not doing animation. I'm not doing anime, but also the conversation we just had where you didn't know what you were going to see, you were expecting to do this one thing. And then when you realized what it was, you were like, wait, what?

Yeah. You know, I had that same wait, what, in my head. And because of that, no, never. But then after about a week, my partner actually said, well, it's kind of a cop-out to say no without actually reading whatever this thing is. You know, what are you afraid of? And so I read the piece. And to my shock, I saw so many things that I think are very present in all the work you mentioned in Moonlight in a Bill Shrika talk in the Underground Railroad. in this story about Mufasa, the Lion King.

And I also saw these opportunities to create a bit of magic in a very different way in a very different tone than I had been working for at that point. I say six consecutive years. And so I made myself open to it. I mean, and we're all the better for it. So I got to ask you about the big Hollywood blockbuster, though, because you worked for Oprah's company, Harpo. I did. And you said after that experience that you were disillusioned with, quote, Hollywood filmmaking. Have you gotten over that?

Yes. Those were the words of a 24-year-old person who thought that the world should be given to them. You know, I worked at that company for two years, one as a director's assistant, one in development, air quote here. And I thought, after these two years, give me a film. And when that didn't happen, you know, and Ms. Winfrey and I, friends now. When that didn't happen, I was pissed. I thought, why can't I make movies like everybody else? It was a total, totally ridiculous, I should say. And to me, the Mufasa, it wasn't about making a tent pole or making this massively scaled film. It was about using a completely new set

of tools to tell a story to create images. That was the way I thought about it, standing apart from the other work I'd done. At the end of the day, it's a story just like in the other. And Mufasa is a very, very interesting character. And so it's top. Yeah, yeah, these are the two cubs. Okay, so now you have to settle a bet with my, with my editor who had never heard of the Simba cam, and I was, oh, no, your face, now you don't know what the Simba Cam is. Oh, my God, how do you not know what the Simba Cam is? You're talking about this? Yes, yes.

Oh, I mean, come on. I don't know the term for it. The Simba cam, okay. For the record, for our listeners, you're lifting up perhaps a baby into the air or a pet or whatever, and many professional sporting events, they will have in the center of the Kiss Cam, it's the Simba Cam, and everybody holds their baby up. So what I love about this is, this is

proof positive, just this idea of language. Because again, I've been to Brazil, Italy, France, Germany, in Spain, just in the last like two weeks with this movie. The Lion King, it sort of crosses these barriers of language

of culture, because if I go somewhere and I do this with a puppy, everyone knows. Everyone knows. what I'm referencing. Totally. And that's a really, really powerful thing. With Mufasa,

what I love is then you have this great starting point with audiences anywhere, everywhere, especially with these built-in notions of good and evil. And we get to sort of unpack that and add what I think is all these really amazing layers of complexity. Because I think, you know,

2024 is a much more complex world than 1994 was. And I think children and parents are just a lot more sense. avie, you know, about these totems, you know, that they're receiving an entertainment. And so I relish the opportunity to go in and the Simba cam, as you say, to use that as this tool to unpack what I think are some really amazing and naughty issues. And now we're into round two, okay? Copy that. Round two, cards are blue. Three more questions. The cards are blue. I mean, we're sort of going deeper as we go, but one, two, three. Let's go three.

Three. What's something you think of very differently than you did 10 years ago? Something I think of very differently than I did 10 years ago. I would say friendship. Oh. I would say friendship. I think I took the meaning, the power of friendship for granted 10 years ago. I was floundering in my life at this point.

I was very unmoored, unrooted. I didn't know what it was I wanted to do when I'm a filmmaker. And I was certain that I needed to find out how to sort of, like, answer these questions, how to solve this problem. I felt like I was a problem. And the projects that people know me for, you know, Moonlight, Those Street, a Talk, the Underground Road, and the films we produced, you know, After Sun, Alderate Rose Taste of Salt. This is this woman at Dela Romancey, who was the primary producer on those projects. We went to film school together, and we just lost touch. And she called me up, and she said, Barry Jenkins, I need to figure something out.

And I want you to figure it out as well, because I only want to work with people I love on things they care about. And I love you. So let's figure out how to do this together. this opened the portal for everything that has come into my life over this past decade. And so now when it comes to making these choices, we're talking about Mufasa the Lion King a little bit today. I would not have made this movie if my friends did not make it with me. You know, it wouldn't have been worth it. It just wouldn't have been.

Because spending time with them, growing with them, I just realize how important it is to me. I won't even say invaluable, how important it is to me. So I think that's something that I have a much different relationship to now than I did then. Good for her for making that first phone call, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. One, two, or three, few new cards.

I'm going three to one this time, so we're going to... Two. Wait a second. Do I get a flip again? No! You already used it! Greedy! You're so greedy.

No. I just have a... feeling about this one. You do? Okay. What is something you still feel you need to prove to the people you meet? What is some, you know, hmm, because of where, of where I came from and what I do, that there's just always this version of me that feels like I'm not enough, you know, that I, that I constantly have to prove to reaffirm my ability, my value, my merit, my, my value, my merit, And so anytime I walk onto a set, I walk into a conversation like this, and it sucks because it's the antithesis to us actually communicating and connecting as me bringing this voice in the back of my head that feels like I am just simply not enough. I'm not good enough.

The flip side is, you know, it keeps me very driven. I am trying to put my full self. I am trying to just be unimpeachably affirmative of a value, of merit, just of merit. And I think it's something that will always be with me, unfortunately, because I don't think it's something that adds value. You haven't experienced it abating over time. It's still pretty constant. No, no, I have not. I think when you go, you know, I made this film of Bill Street.

a talk, which is an adaptation of James Baldwin. And there's this great quote that we put into the movie. It's taken directly from the book. The children have been told that they weren't worth shit and everything around them proved it. On one hand, a very lovely, beautiful book, but also a very angry, justifiably angry book. And something of that line just stays in the back of my head. And for some reason, I feel like I'll always be working in the opposite direction to disprove it, you know, that, that I'm not worth shit. And so that's it. Again, I'll get you to honest answers, Rachel, Rachel Martin.

Yeah, yeah, I get that. I appreciate your honesty, just so you know. Thank you. Okay. Last one in this round. One, two, or three. It's got to be one. We've gone three, two, more.

One. What's your shortcut to a good cry? What's my shortcut to a good cry? I cry over the most random thing. To me. You know, in anything that is just impassioned, I cry over. I had this moment during the pandemic where I just somehow stumbled into, I guess because I was watching, you know, making Mufasa the Lion King, I just fell down this backyard

against rabbit hole. Have you heard of the show, the backyardigans? Backyardigans? Uh-uh. Yes. It's this wonderful, wonderful children's television show. Really? That had been on, I believe, Nickelodeon.

I don't even know what network, but I found it not. I literally bought full seasons of the show on Apple TV. And I start watching the show. And the show is so full of life. It's so just like overwhelmingly just expressive. And then I find that it was created by this young black woman name, I believe her name is Ms. Janice Burgess, who's recently passed away. But before she passed away, I started tweeting,

about how wonderful it was that she had made the show. And I was just like, I was losing my mind on Twitter over the backyard against. And somehow, I didn't realize she was on Twitter. She found the tweets. And she replied to me. And something about that, it just moved me so much that I cried. I was sitting at home.

And I think part of it was, I think this woman, Ms. Burgess, through this work, raised so many children. Not children of her own, but raise so many children. And I imagine oftentimes you get to a point and you assume that maybe your connection to people, your impact is now dormant. And the fact that this whole,

just through be tweeting this thing, this sort of like energy catches back up and myself from this woman get to connect across time. I am not her son. But in a way, I'm getting this feeling of being mothered through this woman's work. And I don't know. Something about that just made me very emotional, and I did cry.

So now this happens for you if you will just cue up an episode of Backyard Against. It'll still trigger that. You know, now it would be about the memory of Ms. Burgess because she passed away. But, Rach, I cry all the time at movies. Like, I'm a sucker. I mean, I am a total, total sucker. I mean, we go to the movies to fill that. I've been told I do that for people.

And I'm saying right now publicly, so many people do that for me. It's the circle of life. Oh, that was so good. It's the circle of cry. The circle of a good cry. Barry Jenkins. Three new cards. One, two, or three.

I want you to choose one for me. Do you? This is not the game. There are new rules. What? Oh, my God. I really, what? Okay, fine, since you asked.

But I am not setting a precedent. Okay, well, now I'm assessing. Okay, okay. I'm going to choose this one. Dealer's choice. What's a belief you chose to let go of? A belief I need to let go of, you know, is the one we were just speaking about, this idea of being less than, you know, or lacking. I need to remove that from my psyche, this idea that I have to prove myself. You know what? So we'll consider that first with my skip. Yeah, skip.

I'm going to ask you a different one. Yeah, please. Thank you. Do you think there's order in the universe or is it all chaos? I think it's all chaos. Oh. I really do. I have to believe that.

Whoa. People usually give the complete opposite answer, that there is order because they have to believe that, because the alternative is so unsettling. The alternative is unsettling, but there's also something quite beautiful about it as well. I do believe that the universe is chaos and our role in it, which is, I think, the beauty and the agony of life is to make sense of it and to try to create order, but to do it ethically, to do it in a way that's spiritually balanced. I truly and fully believe that because if the universe was completely the situation of order, I think the history of me, you know, I'm the descendant. of African slaves, what order gave

birth to that path? That certainly came out of complete chaos and horror. But I think we can take that chaos and create something quite profound. I really do. I mean, Rachel Martin,

it is December 2024. You're going to tell me the last five years on this planet have been orderly. They have been beyond chaotic. I think, mean beyond. And when we go out and create work, when you do these interviews, when I create these films, I do think we're all trying to have conversations, dialogue, to make sense, you know,

of all this chaos, to show that we're all navigating it in our own ways. And we are just doing the best we can't. Indeed. And I think when people give the opposite answer that there's order, it's their projection of order that makes the chaos manageable, you know? It is true. I have to be us and say most of the people come onto the show, myself included, we're speaking from places of extreme privilege. Not all of us, but quite a few of us. And I just can't, I can't ever really sit in that place. Yeah, I get it. Okay. Three more. One, two or three? Let's go two. Do you think there's any part of us that lives on after we die? I don't know. I've been thinking about this a lot. I just turned

45. And so I'm at the point where statistically I probably, there's more life behind me than there is ahead of me, just mathematically, scientifically. And so I am beginning to think of this. And I do think as you present energy

into the world, Moonlight is a great example. Moonlight and the score for a Bill Street could talk, but my good friend, Nicholas Bertel, those two things are going to far outlive me. But once this consciousness shuts down, is there going to be some other form of it that's floating around?

I don't know. I will say maybe six years ago, I would have said absolutely not. But now, to go back to your question of order and chaos, of making order out of chaos, of the profundity of experience, a friend of my, Rommel Ross, just made a film called Nickelbor.

It's an adaptation of cultural life. It's extraordinary. In the whole film feels like you're in someone's soul, sort of moving through life. And I would love for all of us to have that experience, possibly, you know, through the vessel of someone else. But I can't say for certain that that's the case. But that film opened the possibility to you?

It did. It did. It did. And it's a very recent watch, and I've seen it twice. There's something about whatever Ramel is communicating. and that film, and he's using the tools of filmmaking to do it, that it feels like a second life and afterlife, you know, to use Tony Morrison. It's both life and post-life in this really, really beautiful way. And so maybe, possibly, I need to read more Marilynne Robinson.

Back when I used to read Marilynne Robinson a lot, I was certain that, yes, we all did have a post-life experience. I do hope so. You hope so. Yeah. Okay, this is the last question, Barry Jenkins. I've given you almost no definitive answers in this last round. I apologize.

That's the best stuff is the mushy gray matter in between the definitives, I think. It's where I love to be. It's, you know, filmmaking is very concrete. But we're trying to create, at least I'm trying to create things even with this virtual production animated, you know, lions. trying to create an image that's very mushy and gray. You know, that's open to interpretation and open to many different modes and gradations of feeling. That's always the goal.

Okay. Three more. One, two, or three? Three. Three. What truth guides your life more than any other? When truth guides my life more than any other. It's interesting because someone,

I believe Bowen made a comment about being present. And I feel like being present is the one truth that guides my life. You know, I think there's something so wonderful about being in a space with other people and always being very clear to acknowledge how those other people are sharing the space with you. It's the way I think a film set functions the best. and it's like this petri dish, you know, for the human experiment for me. I think the best way, at least I've found, the best version of me as a creator is when everyone is so present.

And because of my energy, everyone knows that it is incumbent upon them to be present. Like, that's what they are here to do, and that I am not taking that presence for granted. it something about that both in work and in life, you know, if I'm home and my partner is I can tell there's something going on with them that has nothing to do with us, but has very much to do with them, their work, their life. You want to be present to recognize those things, to either know when to give space or when to be an ear, to be a vessel. Something about that has always deserved me just very, very well. And I think that it's this really wonderful principle. It's kind of hard

to take things from work and sort of bring them directly into your life in a way that actually creates change. But I think this thing, this notion of being present absolutely has. And we should just assign, I want to assign other words to that too, because be present, be present is like a thing that's in the culture and we hear it all the time. But it basically just means like paying attention. Attention. Being slow. And I love that.

I try to do that too. Yeah. Okay, so you've listened to the show so you know that we end it the same way every time. Trip in our memory time machine. You get to choose one moment from your past, a moment that you would not change anything about, but a moment you would like to linger in a little longer.

Which moment do you choose? Oh, it's, you know, Moonlight winning Best Picture at the Oscars. It was absolutely chaotic. Just talk about, again, chaos. Totally, absolute chaos. Absolutely chaotic. This was when they announced the wrong Best Picture winner and then live on stage, they took it back. And typically you would expect that, oh, I wish they would have just said moonlight and it would have been a normal thing.

I don't wish that. Because, you know, sometimes you go into a foreign country and, you know, the customers are like, oh, And what do you do? And maybe, oh, what did, well, you know, you wouldn't know, but remember that thing with the envelope? Oh, I made that film. People always. Really? Oh, my God.

And so, yeah. And so I don't, I wouldn't change the way it happened. But I just didn't allow myself to be present. And so I just don't have a memory of that moment, that night, that event. I just don't. It's all just, it kind of, I feel like it got away from me. It eclips me. It eclipsed my experience in a certain.

way. So you want to go back and actually have a memory. So we are changing it a little bit because you want to actually pay attention in that moment. Well, you said that you could live in for a longer time. Yeah, there you go. And I do wish I could have had more time with that moment. Not because of winning Best Picture, but it was the culmination. You know, one of the questions earlier, Adela Romanski. This woman who we took the time to rebuild a platonic love. Yeah, your friend. And then out of that love, we went on this journey to create something in our image, this very small story about myself and this gentleman, Terell Ava McCraney's life,

and look at how far it traveled. Look at how many people it impacted. And at the moment when that was celebrated, I just don't have a memory of it. I don't have that in-body. This thing I talked about, this race, you know, this lane change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a clearer, more less. of those four and a half seconds,

than I do of the night, the moment we won Best Picture. I hasten to even talk about that because it's so far in the past. No, but it's still with you. Yeah, it's still with you. You ask the question, and so it is the answer.

God, Barry, how much I wish I actually did have the power to put you in a magical time machine. So you could do that. Well, Rachel, this is the power of what you do. You just did. Okay. You just did.

Okay. I hope so. You just did. And I thank you for it. As a person who watched it, it was a beautiful moment. It was awesome. You were great. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have been at a watch party.

Watching, as someone who watches a lot of live sports, watching that happen, would have just been absolute madness. It was madness and it was magic. Mary Jenkins, it was a thrill to talk with you. I'm so excited for your new movie, Mufasa, the Lion King. It comes out December 20th. I'm just so happy for you and this new thing

and I can't wait to see what comes next. Thank you very much. If you like this episode, you really should go listen to the episodes with Lena Waith and Bowen-Yang that Barry mentioned.

Both of them were so incredibly thoughtful and frank and hilarious. I especially loved when Bowen opened up about how conflicted he is around transparency, how open to be with his fans. I really am still reckoning with that idea where I'm like,

I've always been an open book. I've always shared my thoughts pretty extemporaneously on things. And I haven't really regretted them too much. But now I think I'm re-evaluating what it means or like how worth it it is to like be honest about everything. This episode was produced by Rommel Wood and edited by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Wildcarts executive producer is Beth Donovan. Our theme music is by Romteen Arablewey.

You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr.org. We're going to shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.