Barry Jenkins
Shawn Dogimont — Let’s forget this thing’s recording and we’ll be ok. You've got to tell me, you first found the magazine in Florida, I didn't even know that the magazine was in Florida.
Barry Jenkins — Yeah, yeah, it was at Borders, a big mega book store, it was like before Amazon became Amazon, Borders and Barnes & Noble were the places you would go. Borders in our town, so Tallahassee, Florida, the state’s capital, they just had a really good selection, it was where we would go to try and find cool magazines. That’s where you went to get Criterions and cool magazines and I’m talking 2002, 2003, before we graduated film school, that was when I bought my first Hobo. What I liked about your magazine at the time was, and this was fifteen years ago, people weren't really displaying imagery, you know, in that way. I loved just how clean it was and that there wasn't a lot of adverts back then in your magazine, and there still aren’t a lot of adverts.
— No, I wish there were more.
— [Laughs] Isabelle [Huppert] is on the cover of the new one right?
— There’s been another one since, but yeah, Isabelle was on the cover.
— You did a great interview with her too man.
— [Laughs] You know, that was so hard.
— I bet.
— You know her?
— I’ve met her a few times, yeah.
— I was very intimidated.
— Exactly. Did you do it French?
— I didn't do the interview, Iris Brey did, I took the photos. I had just gotten in from New York and I literally went straight to the studio and as I do, I get a call from her agent saying she's going to be an hour ahead of time and I’m thinking: Shit. The whole shoot was nerve-racking. I admire her very much and she was rehearsing lines for the next day whenever I had to change a roll of film. I think I was sweating the entire time.
— [Laughs] Wow. I remember finding the magazine and both James [Laxton] and I were like, this is really fucking cool, this is really cool. It was your magazine and a magazine called RES that was out at the time and those were the two that we always looked for and it was interesting because you guys would sometimes print on a regular schedule and sometimes not on a regular schedule but whenever we saw it, it was like “Ooh oh my God, there it is!” I still have a few of them from way back in the day in storage back home.
— Just so you know, I was quite moved and uplifted by the idea that you guys, years ago and in another part of the world, read the magazine and that it resonated. Lately I’ve been thinking: What is this all for? You’re doing a magazine, you’re not a story teller, like you are for instance.
— Well but you kind of are, you kind of are. Over the duration of the time that I've been reading the magazine, you are. That piece on Michelle Williams is one of the clearest pieces about her, one of the clearest interview that I’ve ever read of her. Right now she can do whatever she wants, she kind of does whatever she wants. There was still a lot at stake at that point in her career. To see an interview like that presented in Hobo, which I've always thought of it as, because it’s not one of these other bigger magazines, I think when you sit down with Hobo you feel like this is a safe space, where you can really be honest and authentic, so I think you guys are telling a story.
— Thank you. Well, that’s incredible. You know I heard of Moonlight before I saw it. I hadn’t seen Medicine for Melancholy either and when I read more about the film I thought: This is impossible. How can something we were doing in Vancouver at the time ever reach, never mind affect such filmmakers? It felt like a magical occurrence. Furthermore, his themes are so different, we’re worlds apart. But then I went to see it and thought: Well, maybe not.
— Yeah [laughs], exactly, exactly. I know exactly when it happened. James [Laxton] did an interview with Time magazine. The way he laid it out, it was really nice, it was like a panel for each of the references, and he mentioned Hobo magazine and Henry [Roy] and I think he might have even pulled some stills from the insert for that piece in Time and that was when I think it was public that yeah, we’ve been reading Hobo since we were kids you know. It never occurred to me that there would be someone on the other end, that you guys would be surprised to know that we read the magazine but for us it’s always been this thing that we have been passing back and forth.
— Wow. Where is James?
— James is in LA, he was in Toronto and he was going to come here but he works so much so he went back to LA, but we talked about it, and he says he's been in contact with you. So tell me, why did you start the magazine? I’m curious.
— Very naively.
— Actually I think I took a photo with the Hobo that has Isabelle on it.
— Yeah, you did [laughs].
— Yeah I was like holding it up in Berlin, that’s right. Sorry I just had a flashback .
— I thought that a magazine could be a great way to meet people, to travel, to take photos, to take a crack at writing and for some reason when I was in school, I just wanted to get out and felt that whatever I tried would work. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I also had a sessional professor in university that I really liked, he gave these great film studies and writing lectures and gave me a list of books to ready over the summer after I graduated, a list of twelve book. Twelve like the stages of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. So I read all the books and came back to find him and ask him to come do this magazine with us, that it would be like a continuation of our education.
— And he said yes?
— [Laughs] Yes, he was very easy to persuade. He said yes and we had an amazing time together. He was so good at interviews. I wish he was here now because he would be able to fire off quotes and really get things going.
— How did you guys start it, how did you get the capital, how the fuck does it end up at Borders? For you guys to still be here doing this thing, it’s kinda insane.
— It’s definitely stubborn... My dad helped me a lot, my parents helped me a lot and I was very fortunate for that. We just did it out of passion and it sort became an extension of ourselves, like this novel or a journal that you keep as habit and way of life. Of course you start to get a little bit better at it and you figure out the angles, meet some nice like-minded people that work in fashion, you print a bunch, you find national distributors, they in turn get it into Borders, Chapters and all of those places. And that’s it and it’s crazy, I haven't really had any other jobs when I think about it.
— I was going to say, is Hobo your full time job?
— ‘Fraid so.
— That’s awesome man. I wish I was home right now but you must have the cover of every magazine on your phone somewhere?
— Yeah, I think so.
— I want to look and see and remember which one is the first one I bought. How many issues have you done in total?
— We're working on number twenty-one right now. So… [laughs] you don't really want to do the math because then you see the pace is really erratic.
— [laughs] No, no, no, this is funny, I am doing the math and I know the pace has been erratic. But you’re still at it bruh. And these things… it’s not arithmetic you know.
— So this is the last one with Sam Shepard, there’s Isabelle.
— This one was awesome. Tilda, I have that one for sure, definitely have this one, this one …
— I was proud of that one.
— This one I keep out in my living room.
— Oh really,
— Yeah, that one is lovely, that one is lovely. I’m trying to remember, which one was the first one, definitely have that one. It was different back in the day, that’s right.
— You definitely have that one with Charlotte [Gainsbourg].
— I was gonna say, this might be the first one that I bought. No, no, no, no, I bought this one too, with Viggo. I have them all, I have issue number one!
— You actually have issue number one!
— Yup yup, and issue number two I might still have.
— [Laughs]
— But I definitely still have number one. Yeah, we bought this in Borders man.
— No way.
— Fuck, that’s crazy, that is crazy. This is a good one, man you've got some interesting people on these covers bruh. And what’s that process been like, finding people? “Hey, we’re a really cool Canadian magazine…”
— It’s been chance, you know, sometimes through publicists, but if you’re not a mainstream magazine with a high circulation, they have a hard time justifying dedicating the time so sometimes it’s people we know, I know, and sometimes it’s a traditional route and they have a project to promote and you get lucky. Isabelle was like that and Léa happened to be a friend of my friend Zoë’s [LeBer] who also lives in Paris. But sometimes it’s really hard. What about [laughs] we’re talking about the magazine …
— Yeah this is what I want to talk about, [laughs], this is what I want to talk about. I’ve been reading your magazine for what, fifteen years you know.
— You must be pretty happy with the cast you put together in this last one.
— Yeah, yeah I am.
— How does that work, is it similar, you go through a lot of people?
— You go through a lot of people but for me with this one it was about trying to build families, like Fonny has a family, Tish has a family and it was a family dynamic and you've seen the film, it was very important to the piece. I often watch movies and I think, those people don’t seem like a family, they’re pretending to be a family so it was really important, especially with Tish’s family, with Regina King, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris.
— What a great mom.
— She's so great, right? It was about really trying to build, once we cast Kiki [Layne] and Stephan [James] as the leads, to really build an organic family around them and we did it piecemeal. If Kiki’s a different actress or if that character Tish is cast a different way, then maybe the sister has to be different, and maybe the parents have to be different so it was really about trying to build this nucleus around our two leads and working with them was just amazing. It’s one of the few instances where, because the movie is an adaptation of a novel, it has all this back story that’s right there in the text for all the actors to engage if they choose and in this case, everybody read the novel. They’d show up and we’d be filming scenes and be like “remember that thing and blah blah blah blah” and like yeah, that’s in the novel, not in the movie but you can put it in the performance, so it was a really lovely process of that.
— No one pulled a Marlon Brando and came not having read Heart of Darkness?
— [laughs] No, is that a true story?
— I think so yeah.
— No that wasn't the case, you know I think for people who grew up how we did, for most African Americans, most black folks you know James Baldwin is an idol you know, he's a trail blazer, a path finder, he's on the mountain top, the Mount Rushmore of black folks. So everyone approached it with great reverence for the text and so I didn't even have to ask people to read the novel, you know people would read the script and before they came into audition they would read the novel you know and I think because of that, Baldwin’s spirit is really present in the film.
— The story feels more 50s to me in a way, I know it was set in the 70s, in the early 70s, and it also feels, like you were saying, more encompassing than the horror of the situation and the injustice it depicts. It’s really lush and joyful and the look of the film that you made too, was that intentional? I love the black and white photos and how it contrasted with those.
— It comes from reading too many Hobo magazines [laughs]. You know we were aiming for a timelessness in a certain way because the book was written from let’s say ‘68 to ‘73, published in ‘74 and it’s non linear. So it’s jumping all around the time. So there are moments when you are, not necessarily 1950’s but there are moments, when they are kids, when you’re in the mid ‘60s or the late ‘60s or the early ‘60s and so for us it wasn't important to put a stamp on—this is 1973—but to sort of like exist on a continuum where that era itself was kind of tangible and to flash more importantly through their lives where you kind of as you say have this contrast where there are moments where everything seems possible, where the joy, the love, the romance feels limitless and then in the very next scene, everything seems impossible because the systemic injustice is so present and I thought the juxtaposition of the two would make each one more present, more powerful. It’s funny, there was a critic that said the same thing, that it felt almost like the 1950s in a certain way and I think the reason for that is because the 1950s is kind of like the last era we think of where America was this beautiful, lush, innocent you know, place where the romanticism of the American dream was a fact. You move into the ‘60s and then very quickly people begin to get assassinated.
You know Jim Crow can’t be hidden and that was front and centre and then you get to the ‘70s and all hell has broken loose with Vietnam and everything, so its interesting that the more lush moments, the more Kodachrome, saturated, just beautiful bright colours, the reds and golds and greens reminds people of the 50s because I think that is the last period in this ideal of Americana.
— How did you recreate that?
— It was our production designer, all the text in this film, you know James, you’re going to talk to him for this right?1 So you know between James, our composer Nick Brittel and costume designer Caroline Eselin.
— That’s the second time you've worked together.
— Yeah, Yeah, we worked together on Moonlight.
— That’s a whole other side film isn't it?
— It is, it is, you know Nick and I, I went and saw him yesterday because we are touching up a few things that we are going to put in on Monday, but we were talking about it and we feel like we make albums you know, Moonlight was an album, kind of like an EP because there was only about twenty-seven minutes of music. This is like an hour of music.
— I was discreetly trying to Shazam stuff and of course it wasn’t coming up. There are so many references to music in the novel …
— So many.
— You've got “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, you've got Ray Charles, “My Man” by Billie Holiday, which was originally a French song…
— Can’t afford, can’t afford, can’t afford… [laughs]
— Is that really what it is? I thought that maybe today, theses choices would have felt too obvious to you.
— Well, Aretha would have been too obvious, but the Billie Holiday would have been great, but we still have Nina in the film and you know Coltrane, Miles Davis. Part of it was, it’s a very faithful adaptation, as you probably know from reading the book, a lot of the dialogue was taken straight from the book, a lot of the voice over, taken straight from the book. But I felt like it couldn't be literally a translation, one is for financial reasons, all these songs come at a cost but also two, the film wants to insist itself of what music is necessary and then for me as the filmmaker, I’ve always wanted to use that Miles Davis track, “Blue and Green” in a film. This filmmaker named Sally Potter used it very briefly in a film called Ginger and Rosa and the way she uses it is super subtle and just very simple. But there’s that scene between Stephan James and Brian Tyree Henry and I just thought: the conversation they’re having is what this song has always felt like to me.
— Yeah, it’s one of the best scenes in the film.
— I shouldn’t say it, but I agree and I thought: Oh, I'm finally going to use this song , and I'm going to stand up and demand that I use this song and here’s the beauty of the collaborators that I work with.
Nick and I were sitting in a scoring session and were watching our scene and Nick said, “I think we definitely need to score here” and I was like, “I agree” and typically if you have a needle drop going when the score comes in, you take the needle drop out. But we took it out and started to score and then I was like: well, do we have to take it out? Why don't you treat it as an instrument, why don't you play “Blue and Green” so that’s when it starts to go into reverb and the Miles Davis is floating around the room and it’s coming in and coming out, and that’s because Nick now is taking the Miles Davis and using it as an instrument because the room is starting to tilt and swirl as the conversation was getting darker and darker and so it’s just a wonderful process, and I can’t do that with “Respect”. [laughs]
— No, right, of course, and as fate is closing in on him while the Daniel character is talking, things seem to speed up a little and it’s powerful.
— It’s always nice to me when you can take the elements, whether it’s the cinematography, the score, the sound design and the sound effects, the backgrounds, and you can take them and sort of start to filter them through the character because I think in that room, those two men, they can’t really hear the Miles Davis anymore, you know, they just feel this chasm opening. The music, the Miles Davis track, is so potent, so rich and it’s so in tune with the emotions they are exhibiting so that it comes in and it comes out and every now and then a little bit of Miles going, almost like church, like Amen, like YES, Hallelujah. That’s what we’re trying to do with the “Blue and Green” there and whenever I can do something like that and it feels like it organically arises from the character, that’s when I feel like okay, this is why this is a film and not just a novel.
— Exactly yeah. I love the men in this movie, Colman Domingo and of course Brian Tyree Henry.
— There’s two of these men talking conversations, there’s the one between Daniel and Fonny but then the two fathers meet up at the bar and they have a very intense conversation as well. You know in Moonlight, Kevin and Chiron, they do have a couple of conversations but because of the subject matter and what they’re talking about, there’s this extreme hesitation, they’re talking around each other you know until at the very end in the kitchen when Trevente [Rhodes], when Black can finally say what he's been trying to say.
In this film though, because the stakes are so high, the conversations are very direct, they’re very blunt, also because Baldwin is just a blunt writer so it was really important to me because I feel like black men, mostly black men in America, probably black men everywhere, it’s not impossible but it’s very difficult to have a conversation that is that blunt because you always have to project that you’re okay, everything is alright. What’s up man? I’m good. ALWAYS. I’m good, you know, but if you talk through that, then you reveal, no I'm actually not so good, when I say I'm good this is what I mean you know, the world is killing me and so it was really important to me to preserve those conversations from the book and just show that it is okay to have this really blunt, up front conversation and to not pretend that your good although the one with Brian and Stephan we do do the full bleed where it starts off, I'm good and then ten minutes later, oh no, I am a shell of myself.
— I just can’t imagine it, you've got so many elements taking shape simultaneously in a film, were there a couple of things that were really important for you to get right?
— There were, this is the first film I've ever made, first feature film I've ever made with a female protagonist. Baldwin is a man, I'm a man, neither one of us is a woman.
— And a young one at that.
— And a young one at that, exactly. So I was really mindful to try to cinematically, visually, approach things from a female point of view and to also be really diligent about listening to the women on set, especially the actors who were playing these women because there’s just no way I know more about these characters’ experience than they do, so I had to listen even more to what they were saying. In a nice way it kind of made it a much denser collaboration between me and the actors, between me and the female actors in the film because I couldn't say… when an actor asks you a question and you give an answer, as the director it’s like you’re dictating how you would like it to be done. In this case, if the actor asks me a question, I can give an answer but I couldn't be fully sure in that answer, I was waiting for a response to my answer. I have to listen now because I'm not a woman and there’s no way I can tell a woman how a woman should feel especially if that woman is telling me I don't feel that way or I don't think the character will feel that way.
— Did that happen a few times? [laughs]
— Oh yeah, oh yeah, but as it should because there’s a limit to my experience and how it dove tails with these characters’ experiences.
— Absolutely.
— I wish you could have seen it with an audience, because there’s some gallows humour in the film, like quite a bit of it and when you watch it with an audience, partly because the situation is so dire, people are looking for a moment of levity and there’s quite a few laughs spread throughout.
— You’re going to get asked this question, the ending…
— The ending, yes because you read the book. We filmed the ending as written in the book, the script was very faithful and if you watch the teaser, if you watch it with a very keen eye, you’ll see that we filmed the ending as written in the book and we use part of it in the teaser even though it’s not in the film. There were a couple of things, one the film becomes so heavy in its final stage, just like the book does, that this moment when Joseph comes in and is like, they found Frank, you know, that Fonny’s father commited suicide, I just didn't want to kill another black patriarch in this film, I just didn't want to fracture a black family at that point in the narrative. I don't say it didn't happen and so I think if you’re familiar with the book, you can infer that that still happens, off screen, out of story, off camera. The other thing was, I know that in the book it’s almost like Baldwin is trading life for a life, Frank commits suicide and now here comes the baby, but I think in film as you’re watching this thing over two hours as opposed to reading over twenty hours, it casts a dark shadow over the baby’s birth and even though I think the movie is grounded and realistic in its depiction on how the systemic injustice is tearing at these people, I still thought there was a way to be grounded and yet hopeful. And so we extended the ending because I’ll be honest, Stephan is so strong in that last prison scene. By strong I mean he looks like he's lost it, he looks like he's slipping away, he's losing his grip on reality that people honestly questioned, you know, is he going to make it, is the family going to make it, how can this baby live a healthy life if the family is being so torn apart? So I just wanted to confirm that the family unit was still intact.
— That’s such an important aim, it makes me think of that quote by Truffaut wherein he says: Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love2
— You've got to send me that bruh. You've got to send me that.
— I was reading the essay Joyce Carol Oates wrote on the novel. She was saying that as society disintegrates in a collective sense, a smaller human unity would be more and more important and that the human bond, love, can save you and that those without it may not survive.
— Exactly, exactly
— So you know, Fonny, he has love but perhaps his father not as much in the sense that he's a little bit on his own with the women in his family and of course the Daniel character, are they going to make it?
— I mean, you know, again there are all these little things that we wanted to do to at the very least hint that they are going to make it and so after that scene with Daniel where Brian Tyree Henry basically sheds everything in the course of ten minutes, we follow it up with this Nina Simone dinner, Grace laughing you know and to me what I hope is clear is that whenever he needs, he can come over and have that moment. In the book he asks as he's leaving, "do you guys mind if I swing by from time to time," and they’re like yeah, of course. I think that the simple gesture of that last scene which for me was very difficult to write because I revere Baldwin so much, I revere the novel so much that it was very strange to see, it was very strange to insert myself into the narrative that way by writing this extension to the ending but I felt it was important. It was actually in response to exactly what you just pointed out, I wanted it to be clear that these people have not been broken. That yes they will suffer the consequences of being simply black in America, because the system is so tilted against them but they won’t be broken, you know, the baby is healthy, Fonny somehow kept it together, they’re visiting, there are all these things and I hope that in seeing Tish, Fonny and the baby together you can then project that well, maybe Daniel has a family of his own now and maybe Frank didn't commit suicide. It just leaves open the possibility that the glass can be half full and not fully empty, that’s all. But man it was tough, I didn't want to do it.
— Oh really, you doubted?
— I didn't want to do it, you know, I thought that the way the book ended, yes it’s very ambiguous.
— Yes, he's neither free nor incarcerated.
— Exactly which is a very strange ending but I think for me that felt realistic.
— I like it, I think it’s a really modern touch.
— The ending of the book right?
— Your ending.
— Oh, thank you man, thank you, and again it was terrifying, terrifying, then also too, just about all the voice over in the film is taken directly from the book but because this extended ending is not in the book that’s me then paring Baldwin.
— [laughs] You’re going to have some Baldwin scholars analyze it in minute detail.
— I know man, trust me I know.
— You've got to tell me if you've got to split.
— No, no I’m good.
— Because I’ve got to get some photos of you, you've got to become a model after this.
— I would have worn some cooler shit man.
— This is your look, you just came out of the library.
— Exactly. [Laughs] I’ll go upstairs and get a coat or something.
— Have you ever been to Paris?
— Yeah I went there a lot for Moonlight. I actually was there when we wrapped this movie, I was there in December of last year, the last time if was there. Tough city man. And it rained the whole time I was there. I was there for a week and it rained every day, it was early December.
— I was reading Baldwin’s notes on living in Paris and he said something about, as a tourist or an expat, feeling “an arrogant indifference” from Parisians, which sounds believable.
— Were you familiar with Baldwin before this piece? No? Wow so deep dive.
— He was a good film critic. What would he have made of your film?
— You know it’s interesting. I'm not sure. I think he might feel like it’s a little too sweet when it’s sweet. But I think he would love the scene between Brian and Stephan. I know he would dig that. I think he would also dig, I only refer to it as inspired because that’s how I felt when I wrote it but there’s this very simple moment in the book, it’s near the end and it’s kinda Tish speaking even though its interior, he says: Fonny is working on the wood, it’s a very soft wood, he doesn't want to defile the wood. And to me that translated as this moment near the end of the film where he's in prison, right after Puerto Rico, and the camera is just going around and around and around and you see him chiselling at this block of wood. It just felt to me almost like Dante’s descent, this swirl of Dante’s inferno. There’s this element of possibility and dreams deferred and the ground being snatched from underneath you. Baldwin can be a very academic writer, he can be a very fiery, passionate, earth bound writer. But he can also be densely intellectual and I always loved taking the most complicated, intellectual even emotional feeling of writing and distilling it to simple imagery.
— I mean you did it, there’s a passage, I'm just going to read it: Everything seemed connected—the streets sounds, and Ray’s voice and his piano and my Daddy’s hand and my sister’s silhouette and the sounds and the lights coming from the kitchen. It was a though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for
dinner, and listening to the blues.” You managed to film this somehow.
— Again, it goes back to all the people working on the film with us, our production designer Mark Freedberg, I have no doubt that as he was building the set, that is what he had in mind. That he had his book by him and was dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. Everybody just really cared man. When Fonny’s family comes through the door and you see those women and the dresses they’re wearing and the way their hair is pressed, all of that, it’s not me going “her hair looks like this”, that’s all these people uniting around the text.
— And there’s a lot of love I think in the movie, just as there is in his writing. You've got the women, these church going, Hunt family women but there are no judgement condemnations of them.
— Only of Fonny’s mother, when she curses the child, the response to it is extreme, but that was the period and that was the text. Even the woman who accuses Fonny, she's not the antagonist in the film, she's a victim like everyone else. I think Baldwin does a great job of showing that all these people, even the racist cop, all these people are in some ways the victims of these systemic expectations, these systemic projections that you know, we call America [chuckles]. Especially circa the time when this book is written and set.
— How much of you, your own identity and experiences inform the film?
— Not as much as Moonlight I would say. Part of that is due to the main character and the perspective and the point of view here being female, and part of it was a dedication, almost a fierce objective to honour the text and to try to allow as much Baldwin into the film as possible. I mean look, I keep coming back to the scene between Stephane and Brian Tyree Henry because I think in a moment like that, ya there is a lot of me in the film, a great deal. I identify with the Fonny character for sure. You know when he's circling that block of wood I turned to James and said, that’s what it feels like to make a film, what he's going through right now, that’s what I feel like every time I sit down to write a script, every time I walk on the set, I feel like I’m just circling this block of wood and it’s impenetrable but I have to work at it, you know, figure it out as I go. But this is Baldwin’s story, I'm just facilitating. He's the coach and I’m the point guard. It would be interesting watching James Baldwin coach a basket ball team [laughs].
— I would have loved to walk around taking photos at that time. It’s nostalgic to think but there’s something aesthetic about dire circumstances that can both contain and free you.
— It can free you or it can restrict you but it can also be exploitive or it can be inspiring in a way that seeks to address the root cause of the dire circumstances. It’s funny you mentioned this idea of taking photographs because most of our visual research on this film, it wasn't other films, it was still photography. It was still photography from the era, the work of Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, Camilo José Vergara, Jack Garofalo, and in certain places we literally recreated some of those images. There’s this beautiful photo of a group of kids jumping up and down on a burnt out car and so we had a burnt out car towed to set and as Tish and Fonny are walking by, the camera just pans off them and it gives the moment over to these kids. It was interesting because the imagery in this film has been described as beautiful, and it is in some ways, but it’s still a depiction of kids and the only place they have to play, on the top of this rusted, burnt out car. And yet there is joy in it. So that textual tension, and when I say text I mean on the surface, that kind of tension, if you treat it with
respect, not just for the sake of viewing a dire situation, I want to see this for the sake of looking into it and trying to understand. How is it possible to still have joy? Let me just show you, this is how it’s possible. People gotta live you know, people have to live. It reminded me of Miami and the way I grew up, we never had much but we always somehow found a way to have joy.
— And that Miami [in Moonlight] was beautifully shot as well and while the place looked beautiful, I know that seen through certain people’s eyes, it’s not.
— One of the really cool things about the book is that Tish feels more at home in Harlem than she does in the Village even though theoretically the Village is a nicer place than Harlem. But the faces are familiar, the cracks in the sidewalk are familiar, they aren’t obstacles, they are part of the texture of home, whereas the space that she has in the Village is discomforting because she doesn't know how to relate to all these people and she feels more alone, because she literally is—there are very few people who look like her. It’s interesting how, if you start to look beneath the surface, or you look past the text and really get into the subtext, I think most things have more to reveal about themselves than we assume.
I’ve never been to Vancouver man, I want to go. I’ve heard some very interesting things. I heard it’s very posh.
— It’s a weird thing that happened to Vancouver. A lot of money came in from Hong Kong and then mainland China. It’s still a new city.
— Do you still go back?
— I still go back, I miss the coast.
— So what was in the air in Vancouver?
— I love Canada, and I loved growing up in B.C. but Vancouver was an odd town for me. For me it was more about the vicinity. Being on the West Coast, the frontier, I spent a lot of time just north of Vancouver in the Sea to Sky.
— Because Hobo has never been about Vancouver. I remember reading the first issue, it was all about, it was like Hobo, we just hop train cars and go places you know and yet this is where all this stuff came from. For James and I it was like, this is wild. A, why’s this here in Florida and B, why the fuck are they making this, it makes no sense.
— [Laughs] You have to go, it’s changing a lot I think.
— Friends of mine work up there a lot. It’s just strange that I haven't done anything that I needed to go there for yet. They showed Moonlight, they did. I almost went for that.
— I know the film’s going to come to Paris, I think you guys should organise a screening before it does.
— I think we will.
— You've got to come for that.
— I think we will.
— Vancouver… I don’t know if I’ll ever move back.
— Hobo magazine… Crazy, crazy!
1 Excerpt from my conversation with If Beale Street Could Talk's cinematographer, James [Laxton].
James Laxton — Barry and I have this history of knowing each other since university. The choices we made in 2001 when we made our first film together, I think I find myself making similar ones today. The way we approach the creative process, I don't know if it has changed a whole lot to be totally honest. I hope that it will always stay the same throughout our careers going forward as well, that we hold on to this foundation that we learned early on in our university days that still continues to take place today. So yes, things change with a bit more money but I think the creative process and our collaboration is very similar and I hope will always stay that way.
— And you guys have a similar visual language. I imagine you share a lot of the same references.
— Yeah. The way I describe it now, is something like, if you grew up in Texas let’s say, and you were born there and raised there, you grew up with a Texan accent and a Texan dialect. That dialect is particular to you and your family, the close friends you grew up with and you’re able to speak with specificity to that area, even that neighborhood within that city. With that comes a certain kind of humor and particular ways of phrasing ideas and stories. I think with Barry and I learning the craft of filmmaking at the same time, it’s a very similar concept where we have the same dialect and we have the same sort of accent when speaking visually now because our infant days were in the same space with the same films and the same teachers. That’s how I think about it. It’s similar to learning any language. Spoken language is like visual language, it’s very relatable actually. [Laughs] On a side note, I’m not sure that you spoke to Barry about this already, but I hope you did, but Hobo Magazine was definitely part of that [laughs]. I mean we sat down at cafes together on many, many days, picking up the book, magazine at the local book store and flipping through it together and tagging photos. I remember specially so many Henry Roy photos we would like obsess over and love and cherish and look at them again and again. So it’s funny talking to you now. I just feel like having this conversation about how voice is created and how dialect and visual language kind of finds its way into your psyche. The truth is, I think your magazine played a pretty big part in it to be honest.
— Wow, that’s an incredible compliment. [Laughs] Yeah, we did talk about that. It was pretty funny because the first half hour of the interview, I mean I knew we had limited time and he just started, he was basically interviewing me on the magazine. [Laughs]. At one point I said: Listen, I’ve got to ask you about the film and he said: “No no no! This is what I want to talk about!"
— [Laughs] That sounds like him, that is definitely Barry.
— Thinking about what you were saying about the sheer preparation that now goes into your shots… I ended up taking Barry's photo after the interview. I didn’t have much time, we had like fifteen minutes to do it and Barry really wasn’t helping [laughs] because he was just like: "Hey man this is great, this is Hobo, I can’t believe it”, and I’m thinking, Christ I haven’t taken one good photo yet! What are you guys going to think when you see these.
— Oh my gosh, that’s so funny, [laughs] and just knowing Barry a little bit I can envision that moment very well actually.
2 “The films of the future will be more personal than autobiography, like a confession or diary. Young filmmakers will speak in the first person in order to tell what happened to them: their first love, a political awakening, a trip, an illness, and so on. Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love.”