An Interview with Barry Jenkins

Last month Barry Jenkins and I chatted via mobile phone, Chicago to San Francisco, for Jenkins' first ever interview. He began his work in film at the prestigious Florida State University film production program, and from there headed west for bigger things. One of his first stops was Telluride, Colorado where he and I met at the 2002 Student Symposium; later he was off to Los Angeles for a short tenure at Harpo Studios, and is now in San Francisco shooting his first feature film, Medicine for Melancholy.



[Pamela Kerpius] You were first at the Telluride Film Festival in 2002 as a member of the Student Symposium…

[Barry Jenkins] That’s right!

…You’ve returned every year as a production intern or volunteer. How has that film culture in Colorado influenced your filmmaking?

Ah, you know, this kind of sucks. It’s going to be a bad answer for you. But every year I go back to Telluride it’s less about film. This year I saw maybe, four films out of the thirty that were there. I pretty much go back now for the production crew that comes out to work every year. But I can’t deny the impact that the Symposium had on me, it’s where I met Lynne Ramsay; I had no idea who she was before that, and she’s a huge influence on my filmmaking now.

The more I go to Telluride the more I realize how I need to make films, which is pretty much on my own with my friends, outside the system. I realize more and more that Telluride isn’t the place for me as a filmmaker; at Telluride a film screens there and it already has merit, and I think you have to be within a sort of a box—not necessarily a safe box—but a certain box of prestige to make it at a festival like Telluride. I’m more interested in films that take more chances. I actually enjoyed the films at the San Francisco International Film Festival more as a filmmaker over the last two years. They pushed and challenged the things we’re used to seeing when we go to see cinema.

What did you see?

This year I saw Agua by a filmmaker named Veronica Chen from Argentina and it was amazing! So beautiful, and simple. It’s a story about a swimmer and a young swimmer who he’s coaching, and the kid is really good but he doesn’t have his heart in it; it’s kind of an underdog sports tale—but, the way she shoots it, the way she shoots the actual swimming it brings another language to the story. It’s the kind of movie I haven’t seen in Telluride for years.

Barry, you also keep a blog and you write a fair amount of film criticism and reviews on your own. How has the criticism industry shaped how you think about filmmaking? And who are your favorite critics?

You know the answer to that question, J. Hoberman! He’s the mother-fuckin’ man.

What’s his nickname again?

“J. Hobe.”

Yeah, I love J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and I like A.O. Scott, generally speaking. He’s a major writer. With A.O. it’s weird, he’s an amazing writer, but I don’t know that he’s an amazing film critic. He writes so well, sometimes I wish I had the quality of his criticism…

That is, opposed to someone like Rosenbaum and Hoberman who have some pretty dense thoughts about pop culture and film?

Exactly, exactly. Those guys are film first, writing second, whereas I feel like with A.O. Scott it’s the complete opposite, and his background is as a literary critic. But yes, I love film criticism. When I was in film school that was also one of the things that influenced me probably as much as watching films. I had a subscription to Sight and Sound and I felt that was the best criticism I could find. At Florida State it was a film school that’s really production based, you learn by doing, so there wasn’t much theory. One of the ways I would try to supply theory would be to read film criticism, and that’s when I found critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum, and all those guys who write at Sight and Sound.

Nowadays, I find the best criticism on blogs. That’s where I do most of my film reading now.

Which do you read?

There’s this one I go to, and it’s sort of a portal that stems out to all the others, called girish. It’s run by a professor of mathematics at a school on the east coast, in his spare time he writes about film, and somehow he got pretty popular. You can go there and always be up-to-date on what’s going on with film criticism on the Internet.

In 2005, how did working with Darnell Martin [as Assistant to Director] on the Oprah-produced TV movie, Their Eyes Were Watching God, influence you? How did she as a female and an African American influence your approach to filmmaking?

Darnell is a realist, she’s a pragmatist. She’s very straightforward, she doesn’t bull-shit. She hired me because she liked me as a filmmaker. I remember one of the first things she said to me was, “When you write characters people are less likely to identify with an African American character if he is complex.” In the two years that I spent in Hollywood, I can’t deny that there was some merit to what she said. I learned a lot from Darnell, she’s great.

You’re current (and first) feature film is loosely based on Ray Bradbury’s novel A Medicine for Melancholy. He says (as posted on your film’s website), “Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.” Where will we be following your characters, Barry?

Well, the film itself, it takes place in one day; there are two characters and they wake up together and they don’t remember how they met, and it’s those circumstances that put them together for the day. Really there isn’t too much that happens. The journey isn’t that far, but I guess to put it at its simplest, what ends up happening is that in the course of spending time with a stranger, they don’t come to realize this stranger is a thing that’s been missing from their lives; there’s some sort of melancholy within them that they haven’t recognized yet; the incident, the experience of going through this incident, makes them more attuned to that melancholy. Hopefully after the film ends, they’ll want to change, find what it is they need.



The film takes place in San Francisco…

In San Francisco.

…that’s a prominent feature of the film. Is the city a character of its own, or it is simply a matter of using the resources around you?

It’s definitely a character. I actually had the idea for this film a year or so after watching Claire Denis’s Friday Night. It’s a film about two people who meet amidst a traffic strike and end up spending the night together. When I saw it I thought, “Well, yeah, that was good, but it’s not really true of my generation,” because I felt like, of my generation, if there was a film covering a one night stand it’d be about the day after, not about the incident itself. So that was the idea, that it would be cool to make that film. We could do it really cheap…

(interrupting)

It’s almost like Knocked Up but over a shorter duration of time?

I haven’t seen Knocked Up, but from what I hear, yeah. Maybe.

…But in the process of living here—it’s, it’s such a weird place for a major city. It has such a small population of African Americans, and that was interesting to me. The more I started to think about what two people in that situation could learn from it, the more I started to put in my kind of weirdness of being here, that is, being a black male in San Francisco. It started to make that story worthwhile, if I can add that layer to it.

Race is a primary topic of your film, obviously too. Is that something your characters address outright, or is it something unspoken because the characters are black?

No, it’s addressed outright. It’s totally addressed outright. And it came about, it stems from a broken heart; I had a girlfriend here and it didn’t work out. We broke up and it was my first functional interracial relationship. A lot of the conversation in the script we had, the two of us did, me and my Caucasian girlfriend. It was funny, because at one point we got into a really serious discussion, and I asked her the question, I said, “Did you ever talk about [race] with your exes?” I asked why not, and she said “Why would we?” And I said well, I talk about race with black people all the time. It made me think about how different people treat race across ethnicities, and then I thought about how in this city, maybe black people don’t talk about race as much? I don’t know, you’re tripping me up here!

Well, my next question is about the places you’ve been—L.A., San Francisco, some time in Telluride, Colorado, Tallahassee, and inner-city Miami where you were born and raised. Thinking of the places you’ve been to in the past, and the ideas you have about being a black male artist in primarily white cities; how is space conceptualized in your film, how do memories from these places in your past manifest themselves in a totally different space like San Francisco, where you’re guiding these characters?

I don’t think they do at all. San Francisco is beautiful, and it doesn’t look like any other place I’ve ever been. It’s one of those things, it’s a beautiful, amazing city; it’s unique and doesn’t remind me of any other place I’ve ever been, but all the small deficiencies I’ve seen, and in all the other cities I’ve been to, as a black male, they’re all kind of magnified here. It’s one of those things, I can’t comprehend it—every little social issue that I’ve ever taken note of is magnified here in San Francisco, and I think that’s why it’s the right place to for the script. I can’t imagine making it anywhere else, it wouldn’t make sense in L.A., it wouldn’t make sense in Chicago, or New York; but in San Francisco the gentrification is more different than it is anywhere else. It’s a city, that’s not necessarily coming apart at the seams, but it’s changing so rapidly that no one can get a grip on it. When you put characters in a setting like that, it has no choice but to become a character.

Who designed the Medicine for Melancholy t-shirt? I love it.

Justin Barber, my buddy. He designed the t-shirt, and this is going to cut down on the “coolness factor” of me a little bit, but the movie’s only called Medicine for Melancholy because I was watching a Rohmer film, Chloe in the Afternoon, and in it there’s a scene where one of the characters is reading a book; the name of the title of that book is “A Medicine for Melancholy.” I had already written the script, but I couldn’t find a title, and I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect!” So that is why the film is called Medicine for Melancholy.

And Justin, who did our t-shirt, did a whole bunch of digging and found that quote from Ray Bradbury. It was very appropriate. It was kind of a synergy that’s just happenstance there, but it works.

I think that makes it more cool.

Alright, alright. Well, there you go!

Will there be any of The Sea and Cake in the film? This is your favorite band, right?

That is my favorite band. That’s one of those things that’s proving to be difficult about making the film—everything about making a film is difficult—but I think when you make a student film people are inclined to help you, they think it’s cool (Barry used a track from The Sea and Cake in his 2003 thesis film My Josephine.) Whereas when you’re making an independent film it’s a bit harder to get people to loan you resources. On our movie, we just don’t have the money to pay for music or locations like a big film does. But I would love to have The Sea and Cake.

That’s about all, but one more question, and I ask this as a friendly baker who’s known for her cookies: If Medicine for Melancholy were a cookie, what kind would it be?

Ah, you know what? There’s this place called Specialty's right down the street here from where I work—I think it’s only in San Francisco, I don’t know—but they have these cookies, these oatmeal chocolate-chip wheat germ cookies, and sometimes you can wait and they’ll take one out of the oven right to you. I physically remember writing the script and sometimes getting on my bike and riding down to Specialty's to get a cookie, it used to help me get through a block. The film would definitely be an Oatmeal Wheat Germ Chocolate-Chip cookie.

And what kind of cookie would Barry be?

Me? Aw, I’m chocolate-chip! I’m simple. Chocolate-chip. Real simple.



Note: Thank you to Short End Magazine for linking this interview to their main page. You can read more in the magazine here, and see Scarlett Cinema's exclusive page here.