When Barry Jenkins read an early copy of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad,” which would go on to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he knew two things right away: that he desperately wanted to adapt to the screen the potent, inherently cinematic story of an enslaved teenager who flees a Georgia plantation, and that a multipart television serieswould be “the best way to capture the full spectrum of Cora’s experience.”
“There was just too much in the book for a feature film to contain,” Jenkins told The Chronicle via video chat from Los Angeles.
Jenkins’ masterful, nearly 10-hour adaptation, available to stream on Amazon Prime starting Friday, May 14, is a dense, intensely emotional epic that doesn’t flinch from portraying slavery’s barbarism and the trauma those centuries of violence lodged in the hearts of generations of Black Americans. Yet “The Underground Railroad” also gives ample weight to the vital, quasi-magical beauty in its characters’ struggles to survive and to retain their human dignity.
Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of “Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk,” has experience, as well as a deftness and trademark tenderness, in portraying both the trauma and the beauty of being Black in America.
Barry Jenkins carries SF lessons into ‘Moonlight,’ ‘Beale Street’ success
他的新斯es, which he says is by far his most ambitious and challenging project to date, is a testament to what Jenkins calls the “deep wells of fortitude” that kept enslaved people like the teenage lead Cora (played bySouth African actor Thuso Mbedu) and her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre) hoping and running toward even the slightest chance of a freer existence.
Jenkins spoke during a production break from shooting Disney’s “Lion King” prequel about why “The Underground Railroad” speaks to the child and the grown-up artist in him, and the satisfaction of working with the same close-knit creative team he’s been collaborating with since he shot his first feature, “Medicine for Melancholy,” on a shoestring budget in San Francisco more than 12 years ago.
Q: When you decided to adapt Colson Whitehead’s novel to the screen, did knowing how violent some of the images are affect your decision to stretch it out over 10 episodes instead of making a film?
A:Yeah, I thought about what I call hard images and soft images. The hard images, which are rooted in truth, have a way of overwhelming or being so loud that they subdue the softer images, so I thought we needed more space for them to lose a bit of their power or even evolve to the point where you can see something beneath the acute trauma.
I also think when the screen is very large, these images can overwhelm an audience member. When you have a remote in your hand, and you can press play or pause, you can fast-forward or rewind, that creates a very different experience. It empowers the viewer.
Q: In your director’s note you wrote about wrestling with the question of whether we need more slavery movies, more images of Black people being brutalized. You finally came down on the side of “If not now, when?”
A:I did, and I think now I’m definitely on the side of seeing a power and a necessity in these images. Is there a mandate for them? I’m not sure. But I felt it was necessary for me, personally, to utilize my tools as a storyteller to take possession of some of this history of my ancestors and find a way to re-contextualize it.
Q: You’ve said that working on this project reminded you that when you were a boy learning about abolitionists and safe houses, you pictured a literal railroad with train cars taking slaves to free states.
A:Yes. When I heard “The Underground Railroad” (at age 6 or 7), I just knew it was real. I saw my grandfather, who was a longshoreman, and I just assumed men like him built it. It made perfect sense.
Making this show, I wanted to remember how pure that feeling was and translate it into images. It’s why I said to our production designer, “No CGI tunnels, no CGI trains, no CGI tracks. It’s got to be real.”
As I get older, those moments when you can slip into a childhood feeling like that become more and more rare. It was great reading Colson’s book for the first time and feeling, “Yes, this is very heavy, but, oh my God, this feeling!” It was the pairing of those two things, like my 4-year-old brain and my 40-year-old brain meeting in concert.
Q: Because there was no CGI, how did you want Thuso (who plays Cora) to react when she first goes underground and sees there are real tracks, that freedom might be possible?
A:We found a private rail network to film in at a rail museum in Savannah (Ga.), but because of schedules it had to be the very first thing we did. So on day three, we walked into this tunnel and I said to Thuso, “Just imagine. You’ve heard this thing exists, but of course you’ve never left the plantation. What would that be like?”
She did as I would’ve done as a child. She got down on her knees and actually touched the ground and pounded on the tracks to confirm that they were real. It was really lovely to know that we’re making this big piece of art which takes on all this intellectual rigor, and then all of a sudden it’s about just being a child.
Q: You shot your first film, “Medicine for Melancholy,” in San Francisco on a tiny budget. Do you think you still have small stories like that in you, even though you can now do projects like “The Underground Railroad” and the “Lion King” on a massive scale?
A:Those kinds of stories are definitely still in me. I’m actually looking forward to making a straight-up romance.
And I’m still working with all the same people, like the Bay Area’s own (cinematographer) James Laxton, who shot “Medicine” and also shot this massive show. And we’re still kind of working in the same way.
In “Medicine,” the main character is an aquarium guy because the studio apartment we had access to had an aquarium. In the North Carolina episode (of “The Underground Railroad”), we found this summer camp that had wooden houses in a circle and an outdoor church pavilion set in the center. I thought, “Let’s embrace this. Let’s write towards this.” So, we’re still doing the same damn things.
“地下铁路”(TV-MA) premieres Friday, May 14, exclusively on Amazon Prime.