Top 33 Barry Jenkins Quotes

I used to be obsessed with race. I’m more obsessed with class now.

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.

How did I feel as a guy who was making a movie about a single mom who’s a crackhead? That – I was scared. I mean, it was scary. But part of that’s because it was so personal and real to me.

I was hiding behind athletics and all my jockitude, so I didn’t have to deal with being ostracized as the weird art kid.

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.

‘Moonlight‘ isn’t an issue film. It’s not about addiction, it’s not about sexuality, it’s not about identity. It’s about all these different layers, because they are all a part of the character.

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

My films are personal-voice-driven films about human characters and the place we live. Technically, I’m an independent filmmaker.

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.

Making films. It gave me a voice. Legitimately saved me.

I grew up really poor and have always been the type of person who will work earlier or work harder or more than the other person to even the playing field.

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.

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

There were times when we didn’t have hot water or a phone line. But I guarantee you, we always had cable, and it was always on.

I’m very much a person of nurture over nature. When the world is not nurturing, it can really change a man.

I love production. I could do it 365 days a year. Post is different. It’s just too slow, and everything is very finite.

I have friends who I consider my peers, who have done amazing work, particularly in the film and television space, who came up as independent artists and who have been – to be brutally honest – much more prolific than I was able to be.

I’m so damn boring. I like reading and writing and making coffee. And walking. Barry Jenkins likes long walks.

As a filmmaker, I really want to utilize the tools to carry the voice – my voice, and the voice of the characters.

You graduate from film school and move to Hollywood. Hollywood tells you, ‘We’re not the place for you to make films,’ so you decide you have to make a film yourself.

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.

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

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.

A month alone would make me so happy. Not good for my dating prospects.

As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other.

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.

Whenever I tell people I’m from Miami, they always ask me about the beach. But I can count on one hand the times I went there as a kid.

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.

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.

I’m process-orientated. Awards, by their nature, are results-orientated.

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

I’ve worked at this film festival in Telluride called the Telluride Film Festival. Been there since 2002. I used to make popcorn. I was an usher. Cleaned toilets, everything. Grew up there as a kid.

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.