"Moonlight" is a film as luminous as its title, a story in three chapters about the son of a crack addict, growing up in Florida, bullied and neglected. We see him as a child, befriended by a kind-hearted drug dealer, as a teenager, abused by classmates and having his first sexual encounter with another boy. And then we see him as an adult, hearing from an old friend after a long separation. The bleak story is buoyed by spacious humanity and a deep love for all of its characters. It constantly challenges our expectations and its conclusion is profoundly moving. I interviewed the people who made the film, screenwriter/director Barry Jenkins, playwright Tarell McCraney, actors André Holland, Naomie Harris, and Trevante Rhodes, and composer Nicholas Britell.
Barry Jenkins spoke about adapting the play by Tarell McCraney for the screen.
I think structurally T left open a lot of things that were very interesting that I would sink my teeth into. Before I began writing there was a period of 5 or 6 months where we communicated about it. I wanted him to write the piece himself, to do the adaptation himself at first but he became a MacArthur Genius and so he didn't have time. In that process we both made it clear what I wanted to do and why he should trust me. So before the writing even began for me we got on the same page. And I don't know that this ever worked as a play. I always described it as being something between the stage and screen, and I was glad that it wasn't all the way one way or the other because I could apply the thing I do to what Tarell had already started.
Tarell McCraney said,
I swear if I give you this script right now, you would be like, "Oh yes, this is definitely not the script for the stage." I make my living writing plays and I've been doing so for a long happy time with my good friend André Holland here. So seeing my plays on the page, you can tell they are about what we hear, about what's said, about was not said. I even write in the rests, when you don't speak.
The play ["In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue"] was an early piece, written at the same time when I wrote "The Brothers Size." It definitely came to me in a different way; it was about feeling, it was about seeing things. I don't know what Broadway producer would be like, "Yes let's do a play where we swiftly go from the drug hold up in Liberty City into the Miami Beach ocean." That kind of fluidity doesn't exist on stage in that way, unless we tell it to you and then you still wouldn't feel what Barry so aptly does and what these actors embody which is the collisions that happen, the beauty that is Miami and the kind of turmoil/awkwardness/hope that they have in each other. Those things had to happen simultaneously for the piece to work. So when Barry was like, "Yes we're going to split up the three pieces," I said, "Let's do it. Let's see what it looks like." It felt right because he was speaking visual language to the piece.
Trevante Rhodes plays the adult version of the main character, now known as "Black," discussed playing a character who speaks very little.
I find it to be very liberating. Quite honestly, I think that the actors I respect the most can say so much without saying anything at all because you can lie with your mouth but you cannot lie with your facial expression. So for me it was just an incredible experience to have a wonderful director who trusted us to be able to convey this person that way and to be able to embody it and to just live in those moments and breathe in that space with wonderful actors. So it wasn't anything that I was just afraid or our focused on, it was really just knowing who the person was and living in the skin and just living in those moments.
Composer Nicholas Britell spoke about developing the haunting, evocative score.
Early on in our conversations, Barry told me about his passion for "Chopped & Screwed" music. This is a style of Southern hip-hop where you take tracks and slow them way down; in the process of doing this, the pitch goes down and you get this real deepening and enriching of the musical texture and the sound quality. This style of music is really woven into the film's landscape, and we then had an interesting idea of how to bring it into the score. At one point in our discussions, Barry and I wondered: "What if we chopped and screwed my classical score to the film?" In other words, what if I wrote and recorded instrumental and orchestral music and then we chopped and screwed it? We both got really excited by the possibilities that this aesthetic approach presented. We thus started a two-part process of scoring the film. First, I would write music inspired by the film and record it with live instruments. Then, I would take those recordings and chop and screw then, bending them, slowing things down, morphing the whole audio of the pieces.
The results of that process were fascinating: slowed-down violins started to sound like cellos, cellos started to sound like basses, piano notes started to sound almost like weird bells - the possibilities were just huge.
André Holland plays Kevin, the adult version of the boy who was the only friend his age Black ever had, the one who gave him the nickname he took as his identity. He spoke about playing a character who has changed quite a bit from the teenager we last saw.
He was a guy who didn't share very much in the beginning. He was quite guarded, performing what he thinks masculinity is. He's also a boy without a father as far as we know. In the third chapter, when I started playing those changes, he was more vulnerable, more open, trying to live a more authentic life. I think that's something that really resonated with me personally, I consider myself to be fairly caring and generous, empathetic person. And I think that sometimes that in a modern-day way of living that gets dismissed as being a fault, a weakness. I think that's actually real currency. It has real value in my mind and I think in Kevin's life it does too. Even when you see him in the café, he is very good at what he does. He seems to make people feel good. Mr. George who comes there all the time, he especially comes there because of the service. It's no small thing that a man who has been through what he has been through still finds it in himself to reach out and connect to other people and care for the people in the way that he does.
Naomie Harris is the only actor who appears in all three chapters of the film. She plays the main character's mother, who loves him deeply but who is consumed by her addiction.
I think one of the beautiful lessons that we learn through watching her interaction with her son is how the lack of love goes on to affect you for the rest of your life. It's the reason why he feels the need to fortify himself against the world by building this armor, this physical armor and to make himself into what Barry described beautifully as toxic masculinity. It's precisely because he didn't get the nurturing and the encouragement and support that he needed and guidance as a child and that's because his mother also didn't receive those things. Her tank was empty so could she fill somebody else's, you know? We see in the third chapter this really beautiful moment where you realize that she has managed to get herself off drugs, she has realized the error of her ways and she's been given resources and support that she desperately needed so that she can transform her life. Her life now is about helping other people with their addiction, which is a really beautiful thing.
It always troubled me about playing a crack addict because they are often reduced to a one-dimensional character and I wanted to show the full humanity. But Barry is someone who was emotionally invested in ensuring that he told Paula's story with her full complexity and humanity. If you're going to play someone with an addiction you have to show the many layers that make them up. Paula hates herself, she hates her son but she also loves herself, she loves her son. There are so many layers to her, there are so many issues around addiction, and I wanted to show all of those.
McCraney added,
André has been a muse to me in so many ways and one of the reasons why it's so easy to work with him is his level of generosity of spirit. We talk about it all the time. The reason why I think we come to the work with such generosity -- and this might get way more political than it is supposed to -- but it is because that more often than not we're not offered the same generosity in return and we don't offer it to people where we come from. André is from Alabama, Barry and I are from Liberty City. The characters who come out of where we are from aren't offered that kind of generosity and it's hurtful in a way because we have been nurtured by these environments. Sure, they were tough times, sure poverty is not fun for anybody but at the same time we had love. When I was faced with that kind of adversity as a child, the drug dealer in my life said to me, "You don't need to know all the answers to everything right now."
This story was me trying to figure out what that love meant, how it got me here, what sustaining me was about, what does it mean to be a MacArthur fellow but also one of my heroes is a drug dealer and that's true, that's real life and so if that subverts somebody's idea of what the world looks like, that's okay but that's also true.