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" 'Moonlight' changed me. To see people so moved by this movie inspires me to find something else to offer. And maybe the next one touches only five people or maybe just one person. To me, you know, that would still be worth it. "

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" I think everybody can identify, you know, with this sort of struggle to decide for yourself who you are, you know, and what your place in life is. "

Barry Jenkins

Place

Yourself

Think

" At school, film-making had been the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. Then I get to L.A., and it's this whole other thing. I checked out. "

Barry Jenkins

School

Beautiful

" 'Moonlight' is a story that hasn't been told. Whether placed as queer black cinema or urban male cinema, the lack of coming-of-age films featuring people like Chiron and set in places like inner-city Miami is pronounced and unfortunate. "

" My first job was cutting grass. In Miami, this grass grows everywhere. You just get the lawn mower out, walk down the neighborhood, cut grass. "

" It's interesting because I think class is a heavy, heavy part of 'Moonlight,' and I think, in a certain way, through the sum of all these parts, it's become a commentary on the black experience in America. "

" Sometimes, how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference of life and death. "

" Growing up, I wasn't the most vocal kid in the world. I feel like I learned through observation, and usually, when you're watching things, you're not speaking. That sort of metastasized in a way that I began to participate less and less in the world. "

" In hip-hop, sometimes that pace is so fast that you miss things. I don't mean literally miss lyrics; I just think there's an emotion in what these cats are saying that gets by you. When you slow things down, there's this emotion, this yearning. "

" As a writer, a blank page will humble the hell out of you. It always does, and it always will. "

" Filmmaking is a very privileged art form. It costs a lot of money to make these things. "

" We are carrying these images out into the world, and we can't control how people contextualize those images no matter how virtuous our aspirations and our intentions are. "

" It used to be that watching a film was a very special occasion, the same way flying was. Before, if you took a flight from New York to L.A., most of the windows would be open. Now, we get on planes and we just close them because we're so used to what it feels like. I think the same thing has happened with cinema. "

" To me, no matter who you're casting for what role, if something's authentic, usually you can mine something good there. "

Barry Jenkins

Good

Mine

" I'm always about, 'What is the most productive version of what I'm putting into the world?' Something that can be engaged by all folks. I don't have to change everyone. "

" As a filmmaker whose first film was made with the DIY tools of digital cinema, I love how the democratization of the filmmaking process and platforms like YouTube enables people to tell stories that in previous generations simply could not be told. "

" Because I'm so in the eye of the hurricane, I don't have a really good perception of what's happening. I'm in a room talking to people, and that's all I know. But sometimes I go out of these rooms - I live in L.A., and every now and then, maybe twice a week, I'll be somewhere, and someone will say, 'Hey, are you the guy that made Moonlight?' "

" Cinema is a little over 100 years old, and a lot of what we do is built around film emulsion. Those things were calibrated for white skin. We've always placed powder on skin to dull the light. But my memory of growing up in Miami is this moist, beautiful black skin. "

" I didn't really want to be a filmmaker, growing up. Other than Spike Lee's movies, I would think, 'Where is a place for me?' We were so damn poor that it just seemed too far beyond. "

" There's nothing in Hollywood that's inherently detrimental to good art. I think that's a fallacy that we've created because we frame the work that way too overtly. 'This is Hollywood.' 'This isn't Hollywood.' It's like, 'No, this is actually all Hollywood.' People are just framing them differently. "

" Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act. "

" I got into film school. I went and didn't know anything about it. Over the course of two years, I kind of got kind of good at it. You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn't sure if I could do it. I didn't know you needed light to expose film. "

" I just came back from my hometown, making a movie about a kid who grew up just like me, and it was financed by white people in New York. Personally, I can't be angry. In my personal experience, the support was there. "

Barry Jenkins

Experience

New York

" The way I work, things are very nuanced; not everything is explained. "

" Not all my work features black actors. I mean, it's funny: someone was reading back to me all the languages that have appeared in my films, whether they were shorts or features. They span Arabic, French, Mandarin, Cantonese - all kinds of languages. I think it's really cool. "