“So, you saw the film?” Barry Jenkins is eager to ask the minute we are introduced. He gives good eye contact through those stylish thick-rimmed glasses – not the big-time, Oscar-winning writer-director speaking, but a nervous artist, anxious about the new work he is starting to screen. I love it, I tell him. If Beale Street Could Talk may be only Jenkins’ third feature-length film, but it has already been nominated for three Oscars (best adapted screenplay, best supporting actress, best score), just two years after his Moonlight walked away with the Academy Award for best film. A passionate film about race and love, it’s an added pleasure to see black characters of such complexity on the big screen. British film industry, kindly take note.
Adapted from James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, Beale Street tells the story of a young black couple in 1970s Harlem. When Tish (KiKi Layne) becomes pregnant, they plan to marry – until her fiance Fonny (Stephan James) is set up by a racist police officer for a rape he did not commit. The film explores the different reactions of their siblings and parents, led by Regina King in a standout performance as Tish’s mother, as they fight for Fonny’s freedom.
Baldwin has been dead for 30 years, but his depiction of the fight against a country’s powerful prejudice is a sad reminder that not enough has changed, that Black Lives Still Matter. Yet Jenkins turns a bleak story into a compelling romance, as the young lovers strive to be regarded as human beings. With its lingering, saturated-colour photography – the director has cited Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love as an influence – Beale Street is one of the most visually arresting films I’ve seen.
“That was kind of our intention,” says Jenkins, who also wrote the screenplay. “We thought, ‘How cool would it be, to have this absolutely ravishingly gorgeous depiction of black romance, just pure and lush and vibrant – but then really lean into the systemic injustice issues that Baldwin’s talking about – with a very angry, almost bitter voice?’”
Beale Street was filmed on location in New York and the Dominican Republic – filling in for Puerto Rico, still devastated by 2017’s Hurricane Maria. It was shot on an Arri Alexa 65 camera, Jenkins tells me (he’s a little bit geeky like this: taking joy in the details of the craft), because “it is the best digital camera for portraiture”. Throughout the film, as he did in Moonlight, the director lingers over often wordless scenes between his characters, presenting them as a series of moving photographs.
I tell him that if Moonlight didn’t finally kill off the ugly argument (and I have heard it, from producers and directors alike) that you can’t film black people because they’re just too dark, then Beale Street surely will. “My cinematographer is a white guy, actually,” Jenkins points out, referring to James Laxton, who also worked with him on Moonlight. “We both prioritise exactly what you’re talking about. Every day we’re on set and we’re in colour correction. And it’s always, ‘But how was the skin? What are we doing to protect the skin?’ Not even protect: ‘What are we doing to properly calibrate what we’re doing for the skin?’”
One of the distinctive features of this film, and of Moonlight, is a series of straight-to-camera shots, where the actors seem to directly address the audience, without dialogue. Jenkins says he films these shots without really knowing where they will go, or how he will use them. “Sometimes I see an actor slip into that place where there’s no separation between the actor and the character. That’s when you do these things. The actor isn’t acting. They’re just being.” He says he was struck by a recent New York Times profile of him by the novelist Angela Flournoy, in which she observed the effect of these almost meditative moments in Beale Street. “She was saying that, for non-black audiences, these scenes are so charged, because for them it might be the first time they have ever looked a black person directly in the eye in this [meditative] state. And for black audiences, they see someone they know. It just never occurred to me. Then I looked out at a recent Q&A, for a mostly white audience, and I realised, holy shit, this might be true – that a large percentage of this audience have never looked someone like Stephan James in the eye in an unbroken moment of connection.”
While Jenkins’ film largely honours Baldwin’s novel, the director has added a new ending that follows the original – giving the audience just a glimpse of hope. Even so, he is convinced he has remained faithful to the book’s central message. Which is? “I think it would be: ‘We are not broken. You cannot break us.’ I wanted to show that, even in the most devastating circumstance, the family unit had not been broken.”
He wrote the script almost simultaneously with that for Moonlight, on a trip to Europe in the summer of 2013. Jenkins bought a return ticket to Brussels, booked into an Airbnb for two weeks, and first – because adapting Baldwin looked too daunting to kick off with – started on Moonlight. “I thought, ‘I’ll just get my legs’, because I hadn’t written anything in a while. And then I’ll switch to Beale Street.” When the Moonlight script came together in 10 days, he travelled to Berlin for fresh inspiration, writing Beale Street over the next four weeks – an intensely productive period.
“I’ve never had that happen again in my life. I’ve tried to replicate it, and I think the reason it worked was because, as a human being, I ceased to exist. I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t have a cell phone, I didn’t know anyone, I had no family. It was just the bartenders who were helping me, giving me caffeine or alcohol.”
Jenkins came to Baldwin as an adult. “I didn’t grow up as a voracious reader. James Baldwin was recommended to me by a girlfriend, who was a little older than me, more mature, worldlier, smarter, more attractive,” he says, with a laugh. “And she, in breaking up with me, recommended – so I could grow up – that I read James Baldwin: ‘I’m done with you, but I’m going to give you a hint. You need to read James Baldwin.’ She recommended Giovanni’s Room and The Fire Next Time. That was how my love affair began.”
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In his first job after film school, Jenkins, now 39, worked as an assistant at Harpo Films, Oprah Winfrey’s company which, before shutting down in 2013, focused on literary adaptations (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God). Part of Winfrey’s mission was to make movies that would encourage people to read those authors. Has literary adaptation always been part of Jenkins’ own plan? Beale Street is the first English-language Baldwin adaptation, and Jenkins had to lobby the writer’s estate hard to make it. “As a visual storyteller, it’s just nice to have someone, like Mr Baldwin, or Tarell Alvin McCraney [the American playwright and Jenkins’ co-writer on Moonlight] who’s already put so much thought and so much richness into the source material, that I can then take and try to find ways to lift it up even higher, taking it into this realm from that,” he explains.
Jenkins is currently working on another adaptation, of the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. It is the story of two slaves who escape southern plantations through a network of safe houses and secret tunnels to reach the northern states, where they will be free. Working with a team of screenwriters, Jenkins will direct a 10-hour TV series for Amazon.
Moonlight was based on McCraney’s semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, about a tough childhood with a drug-addicted mother, and a painful coming out. Both McCraney and Jenkins grew up in the predominantly black, working-class Miami neighbourhood of Liberty City, attending the same high school (Jenkins is a year older). “We never knew each other,” the director says. “This is sad to say, but I might not have been brave enough to have been Tarell’s friend when we were kids. I feel like Tarell was always proud to be who he was, and was likely ostracised for it. I was more a follower than a leader, you know, when I was that age.”
Like McCraney, Jenkins’ mother was an addict, and he was raised by a family friend, his father having died when he was 12. Two years ago, the director told the Guardian: “There were seven or eight of us in a two-bed apartment. There was usually food, but sometimes not.”
How did his childhood shape him? “I think when you know nothing else, that thing becomes normalised. So, I didn’t think there was anything extraordinarily disadvantaged about my upbringing until I extended further out into the world and saw that not everybody grows up this way. That, ‘Oh, this thing I’m just learning about now, these kids learned about when they were five. And these comforts that I’m just experiencing now, these kids have experienced their entire lives. When I was growing up, it just didn’t seem cruel or difficult at all. It was only in the making of this film [Moonlight], and to be honest, watching the actors relive some of the things we lived through. Then it was like, ‘Woah, that was an ordeal.’”
Which films inspired him, growing up? “I wasn’t really inspired by film,” he says, “but I admired Spike Lee’s movies because they just felt very, very, very black. I remember watching School Daze and thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ There were colleges for black people that just black people go to? And those colleges had all this shit going on? This is so energising!
“Otherwise, it was the really big Hollywood stuff – The Color Purple, Aliens, Die Hard, Coming To America. I would catch the bus to go to the AMC theatre downtown. But I never thought, ‘Hey, maybe one day I might like to do that.’ It just didn’t seem possible.”
Winning an Academy Award for best picture must have felt even more farfetched. He grins when I bring up one of the most rollercoaster nights in Oscar history. How did he feel when Damien Chazelle’s widely tipped La La Land was announced the winner of the best picture Oscar in 2017, before the error was corrected?
“OK.” Jenkins takes a breath and takes himself back to the night in question. “When Faye Dunaway read out La La Land, it was perfectly fine, you know? It wasn’t an unexpected result, it wasn’t a shocking result. The only thing shocking about the whole night to me was the switch, you know? I remember hugging Jordan Horowitz [co-producer of La La Land], and I remember hugging Damien Chazelle, and just the look on everyone: ‘What the hell just happened?’ I remember seeing Warren Beatty backstage, him showing me the actual card, and me for the first time believing – or accepting – that we had won best picture. Because there’s nothing written on the Oscar when you first get it. It was a very wild night. Very wild.”
Given the #OscarsSoWhite furore of the previous year (when there was not a single actor or director of colour among 25 nominees), there must have been air punches around the globe when Moonlight belatedly scooped the prize. “I have no doubt that the OscarsSoWhite thing played a role in Moonlight’s success,” Jenkins says. “But when it becomes, ‘Oh, Moonlight only won because of OscarsSoWhite,’ I’m like, ‘Well, say a film won the top award from this critics’ body, then that same film was the highest-rated film on this website, then it goes on to have one of the 10 highest ratings on Metacritic in the history of the website – if I told you that same film won best picture, you wouldn’t question it. But if I told you a black film about a gay black boy whose mom is addicted to crack-cocaine won best picture, then you go, “Oh, it only won because of diversity,’” he laughs.
A new renaissance in black film-making is declared every few years, but this time it feels there’s some truth and momentum to it. As well as Jenkins, in the US there is Ryan Coogler, who directed Black Panther and is working on a sequel; Spike Lee (nominated for his first Oscar last month, for BlacKkKlansman); Training Day director Antoine Fuqua; Ava DuVernay (Selma, A Wrinkle In Time); and Jordan Peele (Get Out and the upcoming Us).
“I think there’s something about the present moment that is collectively inspiring,” Jenkins says. “I don’t think any one of us sees the success of another and feels anything but joy and pride. And I can see that the generation behind us, they see that, and they feed off it.
“You have people like Ava, Ryan and Jordan who are leading by example. Ava did Selma and then created this television show [Queen Sugar], and said every episode was going to be directed by a woman, most of them women of colour. Jordan had massive success with Get Out, and said, ‘Hey Spike, I’m going to help you make this film’ [BlacKkKlansman, which Peele produced]. When you climb the ladder, you send it back down. And that’s exactly what’s been happening for the last 10 to 15 years.”
He points to technology as another democratising force. “You see more people from backgrounds that are way outside the core centre, which has always been hetero white American men in the Hollywood system. You can go to any film festival in the world right now, and there are so many people just – not waiting, because waiting’s the wrong word, but who are going to get put on one way or the other. And your ass is going to get left behind if you’re not hiring these people.” Dear British film industry, again, please take note.
I tell Jenkins I look forward to the day when the list of British black film-makers who have been entrusted to make hits is as long as the American one. But the director says he has always admired the European system of financing films. “Here are the funds: you don’t have to really worry about the commercial prospects because it’s not private money, it’s public money, and so it’s just about the art. Stateside, it’s almost impossible to raise the funds to make a movie like Steve McQueen’s Hunger, and to make it in that style.”
Even so, I say, the US seems more awake to the talents of a generation of British actors and film-makers: Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Amma Asante, John Boyega, Aml Ameen, Naomie Harris – all of whom have followed the likes of Idris Elba to work Stateside, and who can blame them? How many more times can they play a stabbing victim on Casualty? But Jenkins doesn’t want to overstate the opportunities the US has to offer, especially now. “We were moving in this direction where we were trying to eradicate borders, and now we’re trying to build them again,” he says. “I have to think about how we went from the election of Barack Obama to the election of a reality TV star with a heinous past. There were many millions of people who voted for this guy, and I’m trying to understand why that is. What was it about the present moment that made them feel, ‘This is a direction I don’t want the country to go in? This is the direction I want the country to go in.’ Borders and lies and fake this and xenophobic that.” He sighs.
Instead, Jenkins thinks there are reasons to be positive about black British culture right now – and that a change is coming soon. He gives an example. Just over a year ago, he was in London and looking for a quiet place to write. He went to Soho House and, spotting Daniel Kaluuya in a corner, went over to say hello before starting work. “I was there writing for four or five hours, and there were all these young black men who just kept coming in and sitting down with Daniel. I recognised one of them, Kibwe Tavares, who directed Jonah, which Daniel starred in. This was at the height of Get Out and Daniel was having all these meetings with young black UK directors. And just from watching the demeanour of it, I could tell he was like, ‘What are you working on? What’s going on? How can we build?’ And so, this shit’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.”
• If Beale Street Could Talk is out now. Roy Williams’ plays include Sucker Punch, Fallout and Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads
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