Barry Jenkins Revisits ‘Moonlight,’ 10 Years Later

Moonlight, the tender coming-of-age drama following a Black boy named Chiron as he grows up in Miami, came into the festival under the radar. But after it was released in select theaters in October 2016, it became a critically acclaimed sensation that would lead all the way to the Oscar stage.

A decade later, its legacy endures, both as an astounding artistic achievement and as one of the most singular episodes in Oscar history. Its best-picture win remains one of the most shocking moments ever to happen on the Academy Awards stage. At first, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner, and it was only after the team had taken the stage to give their acceptance speeches that the Oscar producers rushed on to reveal that the wrong envelope had been read and Moonlight was really the winner. While it was a monumental moment for the A24 film, it was also a bittersweet one for Jenkins and his team, who didn’t get to deliver a traditional acceptance speech amid all the chaos onstage.

Jenkins, who also won the best-adapted-screenplay Oscar along with his cowriter, Tarell Alvin McCraney, would quickly get back to work, making the drama If Beale Street Could Talk and the limited series The Underground Railroad. He then helmed Disney’s 2024 prequel Mufasa: The Lion King.

Sitting down for a chat on the last day of the Telluride Film Festival, as rain threatened to break through the cloudy sky, Jenkins seemed on the precipice of a new chapter in his career. He’s gotten married (to filmmaker Lulu Wang) and had a child (a boy, who is around 15 months old), and he’s focused on two films that he has been developing for the past several years: Be My Baby, an A24 film starring Zendaya as singer Ronnie Spector, and a biopic about the choreographer Alvin Ailey. He hasn’t been on the set of a feature film as a director in years, and now that he’s ready, he’s determined to line up a few projects in a row. “I don’t want to make a film and then take all this time off,” he says, adding, “there’s a couple little secret things that we’re working on as well.”

But before he moves forward, he takes a moment (with some resistance) to look back. It had been years since he watched Moonlight all the way through, but he did so for the new 4K remastered cut that A24 will release in theaters on October 2. He spoke with Vanity Fair about the birth of Moonlight at the festival, the emotions it brings up in him now, and the Oscar moment that sent him to therapy.

Vanity Fair: How does it feel to be rereleasing Moonlight?

Barry Jenkins: It’s cool—not something I expected. Moonlight’s always been sort of a part of my life, but in the last five years, it has kind of receded a bit. I’m married, I have a kid, I’m trying to build the next phase of my career with all these things I’m working on and developing. So it was kind of out of sight, out of mind.

But the thing for me that I realized instantly, because this happens on social media, was if you were 17 when the movie came out, you’re 27 now, and then there are people who were seven years old who are 17 right now who might really identify or see something in this character that they need, even if they don’t realize they need. Or they may just be moved by it, and putting it in a cinema will give them the ideal opportunity to do that.

Before you had to watch it for the 4K restoration, when was the last time you’d seen it?

The entire thing? Years and years and years ago. Tarell and I were advisers at the Sundance Labs this January, and [founding senior director] Michelle Satter asked us to screen Moonlight, and I only watched the last 15 minutes. And then when we were doing the Q&A with the fellows, the first 10 minutes of it, I just couldn’t speak. I was a mess. I was just like a crying mess.

Really?

I’m sitting in front of all these very smart young filmmakers and I’m just dying. I couldn’t say a thing. And then Tarrell’s trying to comfort me and I don’t know why I had that reaction. Maybe over the next few months I’ll get some more understanding of it, but I think it was just how meaningful it was that we created this thing. It’s not about the film itself, but just how meaningful it was that we actually did it. And so that’s the last time I’ve seen any of it. So, of course, I did not watch it here [at Telluride] because I think that’s what would happen if I watched it again.

Were you aware after Telluride that Moonlight would be going into the Oscar race?

I didn’t understand it until maybe October, November, when the movie was released theatrically. I think I was a bit naive about what happens here at the festival. I had emceed the world premiere of 12 Years a Slave, so maybe I should have been more savvy about it. But I didn’t realize that that was a thing that was beginning to happen for us. I think it was better that way. I’ve worked here since 2002. So the awards vortex thing, even if that was happening when the movie was here, I just wasn’t aware of it because it was about the person I made popcorn with, the person I hammered nails with.

How does the whole Oscar envelopegate moment sit with you now, 10 years later?

I was having a conversation with someone and they pointed out very well that, as a result of that, this film and its win will always have some place in the global memory of what the Oscars is. The fact that this movie won best picture is still just a very delightful surprise to me. I think it’s something that I look back on now, because the trauma of whatever the hell that was, and I didn’t even realize it was traumatic until I had to go to a little bit of therapy and unpack it a bit.

How long after that happened did you do that?

Maybe after the next Oscars. I didn’t realize how disorienting it was until I watched the next year’s Oscars. And then I was at the 2018 Oscars for Beale Street and that was fine. But between those two years, I just had to go and just talk it out a little bit.

It was a weird thing to happen to you on a world stage.

It was a weird thing. And even now to this point, it’s not something that I’m looking to talk about, but it’s the thing I get asked about the most.