Barry Jenkins on Life Post-Oscars

Wesley Morris and Jenna Worthen host Barry Jenkins on the latest edition of their Still Processing podcast. Find it at
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/magazine/barry-jenkins-on-life-post-oscars.html

MAGAZINE|Barry Jenkins on Life Post-Oscars

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  Barry Jenkins on Life Post-Oscars
  
  Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham
  
  STILL PROCESSING APRIL 27, 2017
  
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Barry Jenkins in the press room at the 89th annual Academy Awards on Feb. 26 in Hollywood, Calif. CreditJason LaVeris/FilmMagic
Barry Jenkins has had some year. His second feature film, “Moonlight,” won the Academy Award for Best Picture in a moment of live television that no one is likely to forget soon (the award was mistakenly handed to “La La Land”). Not long after that strange, exhilarating, unprecedented night, Jenkins’s next project was announced: an adaptation, for Amazon, of Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad,” which just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Because of the confusion onstage at the Oscars, we never got to hear the speech that Jenkins had planned to give. We wanted to ask him about that, and about what it meant to him to make a movie about poor, black, gay southern people that was also rivetingly quiet and stylistically risky.

Jenkins dropped by the studio this week. He told us about his directing style, his plans for “The Underground Railroad,” his love of science fiction, and, yes, that bat-scat crazy night at the Academy Awards. He’s a voluble, thoughtful, warm, funny, movingly humble guy. You might be able to believe he has an Oscar. But he can’t. Not quite yet.