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.
by Ailsa Chang
Dec 06, 2018
5 minutes
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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