Black Tenderness: Barry Jenkins & Isaac Julien

0:03Only connect, urged the novelist Anne Foster. He wrote this more than a century ago. Today, those words resonate more powerfully than ever. Artists and creatives collaborating across disciplines, geographies, and perceptions are truly leading the way. So join us. Let's connect.

0:27Welcome to the third season of Chanel Connects. I'm Yana Peele, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel. In this series, we bring together global changemakers from the worlds of food, film, art, architecture and beyond. Some are old friends and collaborators. Others are meeting for the first time. All are focused on what matters most and what happens next. And now we get to listen in.

1:05Barry Jenkins is an American filmmaker whose Academy Award-winning feature Moonlight met with both critical and commercial success. In this episode, Barry sits down in London with Isaac Julian, who has been at the forefront of Black British film culture for over three decades. This is a very special conversation with two giants of contemporary cinema at the peak of their powers. We really hope that you enjoy it.

1:41Hello, Mr. Isaac Julian. How are you? Very good. Hi, Barry. Wonderful to see you. We are together again. We have hung out at my house with the illustrious Marcus Hugh and John Waters and your partner, Mark, and my partner, Lulu, and my dog, Chauncey. Janixa Bravo. It was a great, great little time. And now we meet again under the banner of Chanel. It's a pleasure to sit down and talk with you about your work. And it's an honor to speak with you, Barry. And I want to tell you a story about the last time I was here. You know, myself, my assistant, my editor, we're all here working. And it was a Sunday morning.

2:20And I'm not going to lie. I woke up a little hungover. And I just thought, I've got to take back this day. It was my last day in London. And something just popped into my head. And I said, I should go see Isaac's show. So I got online. I was like, I've got to make sure I have a ticket. So I bought a ticket. And I got in the shower. I ran a steam bath. Got in the car. I get to the museum. And I'm walking around. And I'm like, where's the Isaac Julian? Where's the Isaac Julian? But I was like, oh, maybe it's on the gallery on the third floor. Boom, boom, boom. And then someone goes, oh, mate, you're at the Tate Modern.

2:54It's at the Tate Modern. But in my head, I was in the right place because I always think of you as being on the cutting edge or the bleeding edge of culture, of art, of moving images, of depictions, of blackness, of queerness, of all the things that make us human. I wanted to ask you, how do you situate yourself? Because the Tate Britain is very different, I learned, than the Tate Modern. and it just never occurred to me to go to the one and not the other to find your work. Well, it's interesting because, of course, I've always seen like my work has been, as you say, involved in the cutting edge.

3:34Obviously, one of the things in relationship to being a British subject is that, of course, you know, British artists tend to have their exhibitions at Tate Britain. But I think one of the things as well is that, in a way, at least in the London art world, We've been feeling for a number of years that a lot of exciting exhibitions take place actually at Tate Britain. Because there's a way in which in Tate Britain, there's lots of things that you can do that you wouldn't be able to do in Tate Modern. And one of those things was to, in a sense, take down all the gallery walls and recapitulate an articulation for how you might envisage or experience an exhibition such as mine.

4:19And so that's exactly what we did. I had complete carte blanche to... It's a podcast. I wish you could see his face where he says, I had complete carte blanche. The joy of being able to take down the walls and put them up again, which is a form of art in and of itself. Tell me, I just want to go deeper into that piece because it does engage with so many things that are present throughout your work. The Harlem Renaissance, Langton Hughes, Alan Locke. How did this piece come to be? Statues Never Die is a work which I've been in a way researching for a number of years. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

4:56Albert Barnes, the great collector and philanthropist who was very involved in making, I guess you could say, the sort of beginnings of the conversation between African material culture and European painting and that intersection where there's a real influence or confluence of these traditions, you know, which of course emblematically is represented by Picasso and the way that he, in a way, works with African masks. But he's the first person that just opposes Modigliani and African masks and sculptures and Picasso's all in the same space and creates this salon hang in his museum. And he's coming from the same city, Philadelphia, as Alan Locke, who is the father of the Harlem Renaissance, this key black arts movement, which happened, of course, in New York in the 20s and 30s.

5:54And he's also someone who, in a way, writes a manifesto for the New Negro and is into aesthetics and is really, I'd say, the grandfather philosopher of the arts in a kind of more philosophical sense. And he's sort of going to France and Germany, same time as Barnes is. and so when I had this commission I thought wouldn't it be fantastic to do a conversation between Barnes and Locke and the chance to work with an actor you had worked with in Moonlight Andre Holland who I became a fan of as well as a huge fan in that work that you made Barry which is so phenomenally important. It was such an honor when he said he would do this role and play Alan Locke Was it his voice?

6:44Was it his image? Was it his visage? What was it about him? Well, I think with Andre and his performance, it's something of both a kind of tenderness and also there's a kind of attention to detail that I see him being involved. And I think the way that he is incredibly, I would say, regal and at the same time quiet and just someone who's incredibly serious about his craft and in relationship to performance, which is really quite humbling. Of course, it's not a unusual circumstance when people work with me. He has to entrust in the kind of methodology, the way that I'm working. You know, I've always been fascinated as well, Barry, how you work in the sort of transformation of textual or literary text into the cinematic.

7:37If Bead Street could talk, you know, this is a work which is a film which is one of my favorite, most important writers, James Baldwin. And the wonderful way that you're able to make this sort of real transition, which is just so inspiring. Yeah, it's interesting. I never considered myself an adapter. That's not what I set out to do, but my first job in the film industry was working for Miss Oprah Winfrey at Harpo Films. And Miss Winfrey's mission was to do exclusively adaptations of black literary works. You do things, and through osmosis it kind of gets into you. Once I realized that I did want to tell stories and sounds and images, that I wanted to be a filmmaker, a film artist in some way.

8:32Which you are. Thank you very much. It became very clear to me that there was work, literary work, that as I read it, I could see it. And if I could see it, that I could run towards it and start chasing this thing, as Ms. Morrison said, chasing the ineffable. And Beale Street is not my favorite work by Mr. Baldwin. That would be Giovanni's Room. And yet that thing is just like a towering mountain of magic and magistry that I felt like I couldn't approach. But in the book, If Bill Street Could Talk, Mr. Baldwin writes this very simple thing. He says, Fonny is working on the wood. It's a very hard wood.

9:14He doesn't want to defile the wood. And somehow I just saw myself. I saw Mr. Baldwin. I saw you. I saw Mr. Locke. I saw Ms. Morrison. And so all of us standing around this block of wood, that is what it means to be a black person alive on this planet. And in some ways, I'll be honest, living in a society that is not homogeneously black and what that experience must feel like. And I just saw this image of Fonny walking around this wood with just the brightest light you could possibly imagine, shining down on him and him just trying to figure out what to do with the wood. That's how I feel when I'm approaching my work.

9:58I imagine how Mr. Baldwin felt when he approached his. And I thought, I have to bring this image into being. And that's the only reason the film exists. It's the only reason that it exists. You know, when I watch Once Again, I think I see Andre and I see the snow falling on him and the snow retreating from him, going skyward. And I go, even if it was just this image, and there are some hellified images in that piece, so I'm glad it's not just that image, that would be justification for this work. I was thinking about looking for Langston in preparation for this conversation because we met the first time because I showed the film at the 2021 Tell You Right Film Festival.

10:46And you couldn't attend, but we had you on this massive screen over Zoom, which I'd never heard of before the COVID lockdown. And yet somehow I was projecting one of the world's greatest artists into a cinema. And I remember everyone stayed for the Q &A. And I remember watching the film and recognizing two things. One, there is this image of a man in a casket. And I realized that that man was you. When the movie ended, I'd seen it, of course, but then I watched it with the audience. I just thought of all those men knowing when the film was made, what was happening in the world. and I just thought of how many of those men either were lost or lost friends or had been touched, had been affected by just this massive, I don't even know how to describe it, what was happening in the world and the community that you depicted.

11:44And I was very glad the images existed. But I just remember watching it and just having this feeling that what it must have been like to have made the piece, to be in the piece, and that this document existed of that time. You know, you're speaking about black male vulnerability, and I think Moonlight, particularly because it's an adaptation of a work by Terrell Alvin McCraney, who is an extremely empathetic and extremely just soulful artist, I feel like I've been working in this register, working towards a depiction of the vulnerability that we're talking about over the course of the works. and it's interesting because I've, over the last three pieces at least, Moonlight, If Bill Shriek Could Talk, and the series The Underground Railroad, I've seen audiences respond to those depictions in different ways.

12:33You know, in Moonlight, the character Sharon, it's very easy for the audience to want to wrap their arms around that character. We all do. We really do. And then you get to If Bill Shriek Could Talk, and it's an angry text. You know, Mr. Baldwin is pissed off. And our movie maybe takes that down just slightly a register. But when you're in that scene with Daniel and Fonny and Daniel says, the white man has got to be the devil because he's showing a man. That's a line taken directly from the text. And, you know, I was insistent on keeping it in the film. And then you're working with these amazing artists.

13:14You know, Brian Tyree Henry plays that character. And he brings everything into the line. And I could feel the audience go, I don't know that I'm meant to hug. I'm like, yes, you are. You're meant to hug them as well. If you have empathy, you should feel like, why is this happening to these men? And where is my role in it? What is society's role in it? But I also had the feeling that this was something that you did in Moonlight, because the way in which you're constructing certain scenes and we're able to have this sort of tenderness, which I think is one of the things which really galvanizes audiences to experience your work in a very moving manner.

13:59And it'd be wonderful to hear about that process because I think it's something that you're also deeply involved in. It's interesting because I make these movies under duress. You know, Moonlight was made for a very small budget and 25 days. Incredible. Thank you. So there wasn't a lot of time to evolve things or to explore things. And yet Andre Holland and all the other actors, Herschel, Janelle, Trevante Rhodes, who plays the main character in the last chapter. I try to create an environment where this tenderness is clearly something we want to run towards, not something we want to obscure. And maybe that in and of itself becomes politicized or a political act simply because there isn't a large quantity of images, you know, where the tenderness of black men is explored.

14:54And then in the case of Moonlight, where that exploration actually somehow becomes commercial, where it really extends out into the populace and is actually seen and engaged by people in a very broad way. It's not anything I set out to do, but it is something I've always felt, you know, as a tender black man. And if it's something that's true in me and true in the people that I knew, even despite their efforts to obscure those aspects of themselves, it's worth exploring. It's worth presenting. for me when I think about looking for Langston there's a way in which I was really also trying to talk about this vulnerability because during the sort of late 80s early 90s during the height of the AIDS pandemic how it affected the black communities and black men in particular and the black sort of gay communities at that time was devastating and I think that the late Essex Hemphill, who was such a great poet, so influenced by James Baldwin's work, was able to give this sort of, in a way, experience of how the vulnerability was part of the way in which the black queer body politic was experiencing suffering and at the same time having its own joy and these were themes which I was trying to visually explore in Looking for Langston and I do believe it's that question of the vulnerability of black masculinity that we don't often see which in a way has a kind of radicality to it which allows if you like these questions of blackness and queerness that in a way is something which I think audiences have been moved around looking for Langston generationally and I'm particularly thinking about the song by Blackberry Beautiful Black Men and the question of the self-image and the question of reparation and how that is something which is felt in relationship to growing up in white societies where blackness is not always, in a sense, treated and framed and given that space.

17:21And so I think in your work in Moonlight, I really felt this empathy and people were really so moved by those experiences which were shown so beautifully cinematically in your work. And so for us, I can say it felt like a real moment a breakthrough moment. Wow, thank you. You know, you were speaking about music and the musicality of your work. Sometimes it's difficult to employ a musicality in a commercial feature film because of the restrictions of the act structure and things like that. And yet, when I think of the work, when I think of scenes, I often am hearing music. Moonlight in particular, I would have my headphones in, in one ear, and I'd be listening to music.

18:13I'll never forget the scene where Trevante Rhodes' character, Black, walks into the diner for the first time. It's one shot. The doorbell rings and the camera's just Dolly's right, Dolly's left, Dolly's right. Andre walks up and then we cut to these two close-ups. I had the Aretha Franklin song playing in my ear as we were doing the shot. and it helped me understand that I didn't need more coverage, that there was something in the movement of the camera. You know, they're kind of like these satellites or these atoms that are attracting and repelling one another, the way they move around the space, which is a very simple architectural space, and yet the musicality of it, it gave me confidence that the scene was going to work as we'd imagined it.

19:00And my composer, Nicholas Patel, Moonlight in particular, he had given me the main theme of the film before we shot. So I also had that in my pocket as well. And then, you know what? This is so crazy. This is why you talk to geniuses. On Beale Street, there was a busker in the subway. You know, these people who play, you know, and you drop a little tip in the jar. It was a gentleman furiously playing. Isaac, it was like the devil and Jesus and all these people were having a war within this man's horn. and the F train is coming into the station. It's loud, it's hot, and he's just blasting the saxophone.

19:40And I took out my iPhone and I recorded it. And I like sat it on the, let the train come and go. I listened to him play for like 12 minutes. And that was what I had in my ear as I was making Beale Street. And so you're right, there is a way that these things fuse. And I think they really do elevate the work. At the very least, they give it a feeling that it can attain, I think at least. I've always felt in your work you've been very interested in a way, the aesthetics, you know, there's a way in which sort of the film is made cinematically is as important as what's being said. I'm just really interested in what you're influenced by and where you get your inspiration from.

20:24We're kind of aligned in that way. I'm mostly influenced by my memories, you know, and talking about beauty and our practice and sometimes the aggression towards that beauty in critical spaces or in critical responses. You assume a person who grew up where myself and Terrell Evan McCraney grew up, this neighborhood Liberty City in Miami, Florida, which was a very socioeconomically depressed place, a very crime-ridden and drug-addled place at the time that we grew up there. And to this day, you would assume there's no laughter there. No one makes love there. No one falls in love there. There's no romance.

21:00And yet, of course there is. You know, how could I sit here in this chair and have this conversation with you if there were not? And so in building Moonlight and approaching the aesthetic, we didn't paint any of those buildings. And they haven't been painted in 40 or 50 years. And yet the pastel colors, you know, constantly beat by the sun and constant rain, somehow it's washed away to this patina that just resolves so beautifully. Everyone I grew up with, you know, you'd put shea butter, cocoa butter on your skin and then you go out, you sweat a little bit. Everybody would just glisten, you know, the most beautiful shades of black and brown you've ever seen.

21:40You know, this is for Chanel, and we're talking about beauty right now. I grew up in a world surrounded by beauty. For me, the images had to live up to the memories in my head. And yet I also knew that I was going to get this question, but why is the beauty justified? You know, why does it look this way? I'm expecting something very gray and drab and sullen. If I try to deny that beauty, try to remove it from the image, then I'm presenting an even less truthful version of these events. I will say when I went and saw the exhibit, the Tate Britain, I felt like I was overwhelmed with beauty. That's just a compliment to you, my friend.

22:18You know, when you're speaking in so many different languages, so many different forms, how do you know when to be the poet, when to be the storyteller, when to be the architect? Well, I think one of the things cinema does, in a way, it's a seventh art. It encapsulates all the arts. In film, there's music, there's sound, there's the mise-en-scene, there's a space between objects. All of these things you have to think about simultaneously. I see myself being part of a film culture, and in a way, when I make films, I bring all of that apparatus with me in the making of a work. You are a part of film culture.

22:57you may be a film culture unto yourself, my friend.

23:02So Isaac, what's next for you? What do you have coming up on the horizon? Well, I must say I thought it was very moving when you were talking about your approach to Moonlight. And I think that one of the things that I'm really thinking about in my next works is a return back to the East End where I grew up. And I kind of thought that haunts me. And there's one work which I made, it's in the exhibition. called Hughie Colin Roach. And at the moment, I'm interested in using that work archivally as a springboard for making a work that could be a narrative work, a film maybe even, that explores what happens to the family when there is this death in police custody because Mr.

23:55and Mrs. Roach died without ever knowing what really happened to their son. And I just feel like that's something that haunts me and something that I need to somehow explore. But, you know, in saying that, Barry, I was really wondering then what's your kind of next project? My next and current project is a controversial film called The Lion King, which is definitely a departure in some ways from the work I've done prior to this. I worked nonstop on a series of projects that all existed in a very similar register and that were very, very difficult to mount and pull off. And so I was in the mood for something different.

24:35And when I understood what it was like to make the piece, the technology and the way you sculpt images with digital tools instead of analog tools, and I thought, OK, cool, maybe this is what I'm here to do. And then once that's done, I have a piece on the great Alvin Ailey that I'm hoping to mount. Oh, wow. And then some other things as well. That sounds incredibly exciting. We can't wait to see these films. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking, what would Isaac Julian's Wizard of Oz be like? Oh. And hopefully that is where My Lion King will win. I have to say thank you for having this conversation with me.

25:12This is as close to Chanel as I've ever gotten. And if somehow every time I get close to Chanel, I get to speak to Isaac Julian, and I think that'll make me a big Chanel stan going forward. Well, thank you so much, guys. It's been an honor to be able to have this discussion, which I've dreamt of having ever since I saw your work. Oh, mutual, my friend, mutual. And now in person, now on a Zoom screen. Yes.

25:43Thank you for listening to Season 3 of Chanel Connect. We look forward to bringing you season four before too long. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Revisit conversations from the first two seasons with guests including Tilda Swinton, Kehinde Wiley, G-Dragon, Keira Knightley, and Grimes.

26:17Thank you.