way, and allowing yourself to find whatever the throughline is between the thing that you want, the thing that you see, and the thing that everyone is capable of. In that way, it was really great to see the actors make choices that weren’t defined by the book or by the script, but by the character and the space. This idea of the freedom or the elasticity of the process really began on set.”
Barry Jenkins Backstage Live
Drawing the Line
Barry Jenkins on creating his seductive—and difficult—adaptation of “The Underground Railroad” By Liza Rash
The following interview for Backstage’s on-camera series The Slate was compiled in part by Backstage readers just like you! Follow us on Twitter (@Backstage) and Instagram (@backstagecast) to stay in the loop on upcoming interviews and to submit your questions.
As a slave narrative, Jenkins wants you to see what “the
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show really is” rather than “what it represents.” “Before the show came out, there were all these conversations about the content of the show—slave narratives and things like that. That was before anyone had seen the show. I was curious to see how that conversation would evolve, because my point of view was always that it is about the intent of the creator. I think that dictates how the subject matter is presented, and hopefully how it’s received.” Much like a coach, Jenkins aims to foster an open, collaborative space. “When you do something of this scale, it’s very clear that the director isn’t in control of everything. This idea of an
TELEVISION
Sophie Turner Sets Return to Television By Casey Mink
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Want to hear more from Jenkins? Watch our full interview at backstage.com/ magazine, and follow us on Instagram: @backstagecast.
“GAME OF THRONES” ACTOR SOPHIE Turner is returning to the small screen, and she’s keeping it in the HBO family. Turner has signed on to the HBO Max limited series “The Staircase,” in which she will star alongside Colin Firth, Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Juliette Binoche, and Rosemarie DeWitt, among others. Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn adapted their eight-episode series from the true crime docuseries of the same name, which depicts the life of novelist Michael Peterson and the suspect circumstances surrounding the death of his wife.
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EVER SINCE HIS HISTORIC best picture win at the 2017 Oscars, there’s been no denying that “Moonlight” filmmaker Barry Jenkins is a genius storyteller and a cinematic force to be reckoned with. He followed up that effort with the Oscar-winning “If Beale Street Could Talk” and now, a stunning limited series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning “The Underground Railroad” for Amazon Prime Video. Sitting with Backstage as part of our inaugural BackstageFest, Jenkins discussed his work on the series, what fuels his vision, and how his creative process manifests on set.
auteur, when it comes to something this big—this many pages and this many days—there is no way one person can control or dictate what is happening. So what I tried to do instead was empower people to be very giving and to be very open about what it was their instinct was telling them. It’s almost like not having a playbook and starting off the game with people just running around, and then you see this person runs best this way, this person runs best that
He supported his actors emotionally and gave them the space they needed to create and breathe. “I just didn’t want anyone to be destroyed by creating these images. The people we cast, I knew they would be very committed…. You do [a lot of takes] because you’re trying to reduce the line between the actor and the character. I felt like, especially on this [show] with this process, especially because we were in the spaces where many of these things happened, I knew there would be moments for me where you look to the left and you forget that you’re standing on a set. You forget that you’re creating a work of art. I thought it was important that the actors always be reminded that I understood that what they were doing was incredibly difficult, that what we were doing was incredibly seductive. It’s very easy to slip past that line.”
