Introducing Barry Jenkins

youmightfindyourself:

One of the characters in “Medicine for Melancholy” muses that there sometimes seems to be a contradiction between being “indie” and being black. Barry Jenkins, who lives in Oakland, Calif., is one of several filmmakers on this list challenging that dichotomy.

A. O. SCOTT What projects are you working on now?

BARRY JENKINS I’ve just returned from Europe, working on a project with [the producer] Mark Johnson of “Breaking Bad” about a group of black radicals running from the ’60s through today. While there, I also finished a script I’ve collaborated on with the playwright Tarrell McCraney, who grew up virtually a block from me in Miami. My short-term plans are to make more features. I spent the summer overseas getting away from my pay-the-bills work on commercials, away from the industry to complete writings I’ve begun in recent months, more personal pieces while working on the project with Mark.

Talk about your identity as a filmmaker.

I’m a black filmmaker. I must be. When I think of characters, or rather, when characters come to me — as the best ones do, outside of conscious thought — overwhelmingly they are black. And when I introduce these characters and films into the production framework of this industry, the funding and distribution “restrictions” I’m met with as a result of those characters’ blackness would remind me, if it weren’t clear already, that I am indeed black.

When and how did your interest in moviemaking originate?

I grew up very poor, but through one means or another, we always had cable. We lived in some rough spots. It’s a cliché, but movies were an escape. I vividly remember living in a house where we had to boil water in a kettle to bathe, and yet there was a satellite dish in the backyard. There was also the summer I went film by film at the local Blockbuster renting my way through the foreign section. I remember watching a film called “301/302” and having this feeling of how big the world was.

(Editor’s note: Barry Jenkins is a very talented director. The NY Times has him as “20 Directors to Watch”!)