Although Barry Jenkins grew up in the same poor Miami neighborhood as Tarell Alvin McCraney, the men never met until Jenkins decided to adapt McCraney’s stage play for the screen.
A mutual friend, unable to believe that two men whose lives had intersected so much had never met, emailed the play to Jenkins on McCraney’s 31st birthday. In it, Jenkins recognized his own upbringing in Liberty City, Miami, complete with a mother who succumbed to HIV as a result of her addiction to crack cocaine. Jenkins settled on adapting the script, and the rest was history.
At first, Jenkins was sure that the story wouldn’t be too personal, but just personal enough; after all, it wasn’t literally about his mother or about his experience with bullying. As time wore on, however, Jenkins began to feel just how personal the story was to him.
“I thought I could hide behind Tarell in this piece, thinking, ‘This is personal for this cat; it’s not personal for me,’” Mr. Jenkins said. “I was wrong” (“From Bittersweet Childhoods to ‘Moonlight’”).
Certain elements of the men’s lives did not line up, however. Juan’s character, for example, was a real man in McCraney’s life, his brother’s father, named Blue. Like Juan to Chiron, Blue acted as a father figure to McCraney until his death, the result of gun violence, when McCraney was six.
Also unlike Jenkins, whose mother is still in recovery from her addiction, McCraney saw his mother die from AIDS when he was in college. For him, the scenes in Moonlight where Black visits his mother in rehab are imaginings of what he would’ve said to her if they had repaired their relationship in time.
In adapting McCraney’s play, Jenkins drew inspiration from the foreign filmmakers that he had grown to admire when attending film school at Florida State University. The Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wei, for example, was a huge influence on Jenkins’ similarly delicate, dramatic style and color palette, along with French director Claire Denis for her similar treatment of the human body within a film frame (“Barry Jenkins’ ‘Moonlight’”).
Jenkins also deliberately chose not to introduce the actors playing Chiron at various ages to each other, figuring that society has shaped Chiron into radically different people at each stage of his life (“In 1980s Miami”).
“What I was concerned about was, when the camera’s on them and they’re not speaking, how’s this person going to emote?” Jenkins said. “Are they going to try to externalize their emotions, or are we going to just feel the pain beneath the surface? The iceberg theory. They’re all iceberg actors, man” (“Song of Myself”).
