Director Barry Jenkins Talks On Behalf Of 'Beale Street'
The director of Moonlight has made a new film: If Beale Street Could Talk, based on the James Baldwin novel. He's using it to represent black complexity, vulnerability and skin colors.
The new movie If Beale Street Could Talk is based on a James Baldwin novel of the same title.
Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) adapted and directed the film. And in working with the Baldwin estate, he received a leather notebook filled with Baldwin's handwritten notes about how he would have approached a film version.
"When I opened it, it was like this slow epiphany — this dawning where I understood what I was holding," Jenkins says in an interview. "And it was electric. ... It wasn't this thing where they were sending me this thing to go: 'Just so you know, this is how Jimmy wanted it done.' If anything, it was a confirmation that we were moving in the same spirit."
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