Barry Jenkins spent four years of his life bringing Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Underground Railroad” to the screen. In point of fact, he began working on the adaption before his Best Picture-winning, landmark drama “Moonlight” had even premiered at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival. He made another impressive film in the interim, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” but was always shepherding “Underground” on the side, a project that morphed into a 10-episode Amazon Studios mini-series that became his sole focus in 2019 and 2020. And if you’ve seen it (and if not, what’s wrong with you?), it’s clear Jenkins overcame the pressure of living up to high expectations to craft something truly masterful.
“Underground” follows Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a slave in mid-1800s Georgia who escapes her plantation via the Underground Railroad. This isn’t the Underground Railroad that Harriet Tubman risked her life for as a virtual “conductor.” In this alternative history, the twist is that the Underground Railroad is quite real. There are actual trains running through underground tunnels across the South and Cora’s first stop finds her in a fictional South Carolina town where African-Americans think they are free (spoiler: it’s too good to be true). Over the course of the series, Cora travels from state to state never able to escape slavery’s horrors or America’s inherently racist institutions. That includes her looming fear of Arnold Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), a slave catcher for hire who has a horrifying backstory of his own and is obsessed with tracking her down.
Already at work on the announced “Lion King” prequel, Jenkins has been concurrently busy with an extended press tour for “Underground” both before and after the program’s launch on Prime Video. As with any project you’ve dedicated years of your life to, especially something as important as this, it’s not always easy to let go and send it out in the world. Jenkins reveals that even a week after he hasn’t decompressed from the experience.
“I haven’t and I think I have to at some point,” Jenkins says. “It’s interesting. Friends kept checking in on me and I was like, ‘Well, why are you checking in on me? I’m good, man. I’m working.’ It wasn’t until the show went live on Thursday around 5:00 PM – because Amazon always puts it on the platform a little bit early so you can see it. It went live and…”
Jenkins pauses for a moment and begins to describe the scene in David Fincher’s “The Social Network” where Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) launches the service that would become known as Facebook.
“It kind of felt like that,” Jenkins says. “I’ll be honest with you. I cried Thursday, man. I did. I stood in the kitchen. Because Lulu’s* in Hong Kong right now. So I was here by myself. I just had a little bit of a cry, man, because this shit was hard, bro. I know I keep saying, ‘Oh, it was so fun.’ But it was so hard.”
*For those unaware, Lulu refers to Lulu Wang, the director of “The Farewell” and his partner.
And there were some reactions to just the launch of the trailer on social media that were also difficult to take in, even if Jenkins knew where people were coming from with their concerns.
“I realized I’d sort of slipped into this place,” Jenkins admits. “I was like, ‘Yeah. It was hard, but it’s done.’ Then that happened and I was like, ‘No, this is so hard.’ I realized that I hadn’t decompressed. I hadn’t even processed,” Jenkins recalls. “When it went live Thursday, something shifted. I hadn’t read any reviews but I just kind of had this feeling. I don’t know. I’m still processing it, man. But I did cry Thursday, man. I had a little cry by myself here. I don’t know when I will get to because now this other stuff is happening. I don’t know. I need to set this down. I need to set this down at some point. But, man, it was heavy. It was heavy.”
His passion for the project began with an obsession with the factual Underground Railroad that began when he was a kid. Especially since he thought, like in Whitehead’s novel, it was a real transportation system.
“That feeling of thinking it was a real thing was very powerful to me,” Jenkins explains. “It almost felt like somebody pulled the rug from underneath me when I learned what the Underground Railroad actually was. Then there was a course correct, because, of course, anyone who fought for freedom in this time should be celebrated. But the mythmaking of hearing those words is something that always stuck with me, and I’d always wanted to, at some point, use my voice to honor my ancestors.”
You can learn much more about Jenkin’s journey with “Underground Railroad” in the transcript of our conversation below.
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The Playlist: Yesterday Scott Woods penned an essay in The New York Times Opinion pages that made the argument that “Underground Railroad” wasn’t a history lesson but a mirror. I saw that you Retweeted it. What struck you about it?
Barry Jenkins: Yeah. I just thought it was a very thoughtful way to approach the show and to reflect it. It was clearly very personal. It was clearly very personal. I’ve been so off in the wilderness. I haven’t really engaged anyone about the show who didn’t work on it. You’ll notice the only thing I’ve retweeted or posted has been written about the show. There was just something very, very thoughtful about the way he approached it. It’s really cool when someone reveals something about the thing you’ve created to you. I thought there was something very revelatory about what he wrote. Yeah, I thought it was dope.
You’ve talked about how you started working on this in 2016, what about this particular story made you want to commit so much of your own life to it?
It was two things. One, I’ve always been obsessed with the Underground Railroad, maybe three things, and had always, or at least when I was a kid, I thought it was a real thing, man. That feeling of thinking it was a real thing was very powerful to me. It almost felt like somebody pulled the rug from underneath me when I learned what the Underground Railroad actually was. Then there was a course correct, because, of course, anyone who fought for freedom in this time should be celebrated. But the mythmaking of hearing those words is something that always stuck with me, and I’d always wanted to, at some point, use my voice to honor my ancestors. So the parent of those two things, it felt like it was something. Again, at the time, there’s no way I could have ever known how difficult this was going to be because this started even before “Moonlight.” Maybe it was something that I thought, “Oh, I’ll try to do this. There’s no way anyone will ever let me do it.” This is before Moonlight even premiered at Telluride. It’s one of those things where you just commit and then the thing, instead of you driving it, it begins to drive you, both, crazy and to, I think, really wonderful places of creative expression.
You’ve adapted other material before. What hurdles did you have to overcome to transform Colson’s novel into what it is now?
The biggest one was I had such reverence for the subject matter. I felt a great responsibility to do it justice. Yet, I knew there was some very difficult imagery involved with engaging the subject matter. So, if there was something that was most difficult, it was about, “O.K., here is the artist, and then here’s the human being. Here is my artistic responsibility and then here’s why moral, social, ethical responsibility as well. I can’t let either one of these things dominate the other. I can’t let the ethical responsibility dominate the artistic responsibility.” But then vice versa it’s a very subjective and seductive medium. I had to always be aware of why I was creating an image, what the image was saying about the characters, what it was saying about the world that we were creating. Also, I had to take great care with what that image would do to the audience. That was difficult. To a certain degree, we should always be thinking this way when we’re creating any images. But this one was exacerbated to an extreme degree.
In the world of television, a limited series or certain seasons are seemingly capped at this magic number of 10 episodes. Did you feel that you had to break the novel into 10 exactly?
No. That was naturally how it worked out. Man, it’s such a journey. We started with 11 and in that 11, there were two South Carolina episodes – these are scripts that actually exist – where Cora had an episode called “Bessie,” that was an hour, and then Caesar had an episode called “Christian” that was an hour. So, we got to explore that world much more. Budget reasons it couldn’t happen. There was also a true-bottle episode called “Genesis” that featured characters that don’t appear anywhere else in the show. It was about this group of black miners. I just had this idea in my head that, again, as a kid, I imagined my grandfather, who was a longshoreman, building the Underground Railroad. I thought, “There’s something really powerful about that. I want to see this. I want to see the beginning of this thing.” So we wrote this script called “Genesis.” These black men are working in a mine, the mine explodes, they get caved in. There are insurance policies on these men, and there were insurance policies on certain enslaved laborers, rather than digging them men out, the owner of the mine cashes in the policy. It’s dark. The men just start digging and digging and digging. They think they’re digging their way out. Instead of digging, they work their way in. They come above ground, above the Mason-Dixon. They have freedom now and they go, “Oh.” They go back down. They keep digging. This is how the Underground Railroad begins. That’s a very expensive episode. It’s going to be only a 20-minute episode. Very expensive. So we didn’t do that, but the script exists. Then as we were filming the Tennessee episode, Calvin Leon Smith, who plays Jasper so wonderfully, he created an aesthetic in that episode and it became very clear to me that this man has now taken [over] the episode. So “Tennessee” became 2. [Overall,] it ended up at 10. But it was 11, then it was 9, and then it was 10. I don’t know that there was like a magic number we were working towards. To be honest, me being me, I was probably trying to not do that. I was hoping like hell to not have it be a perfect 10. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. But this is where we ended up.
You’ve dipped your toe in television before, but did you feel like you had to reframe how you work in this medium?
It was much more about the structure and not about the direction. We didn’t want the episodes to have a very defined beginning, middle, and end. We wanted you to be able to drop into an episode. Especially, because, for Cora, it’s a roadshow, you get to a new state, there’s a whole new world. We wanted to have this idea of world-building and there’s a beginning, middle, and end of this world and then Cora moves on. Filming-wise, craft-wise, no, we approached it the same way. The only thing that intellectually we had to be aware of was a wide shot on television is not a wide shot in cinema. So we don’t have too many of those. I remember watching, whether it was “Hereditary” – it’s crazy. I’m going to compare Ari [Aster] and Michael Haneke now. Whether it’s watching “Caché” or watching “Hereditary” in a cinema and just knowing with this, I guess, you can call it a medium shot, the longer your eye is trained on the frame the more you can really shock and awe with something very deliberate in this part of the frame. But on a laptop that’s just not going to work. So when it came to the wider end of the spectrum, that was where we realized we had to be very cognizant that we were making television and not a feature film.
Outside of any budgetary limitations did you feel like Amazon gave you the complete creative freedom you wanted? Was there pushback on anything?
There wasn’t pushback and we did have robust resources. They demanded and we agreed that there should be a therapist on-set at all times. So if there was something they were very concerned about, and I’ll give them credit, it was that even in depicting these traumatic events they wanted to make sure that we were all O.K. Yet, they didn’t tell us whether we could or could not depict certain events and how we should depict certain events. So, I felt an incredible amount of freedom. I staffed on “The Leftovers” Season 2. So my most experience in television is in a writer’s room. Watching Damon [Lindelof] work it was very clear how you can arrive at a good idea but then the whole point of the job is to keep smashing it. So, you see a good idea, becomes a great idea, becomes an excellent idea. Directing-wise, directing every episode of the show, and as the characters began to evolve, and all these different things, going into this I thought, “Oh, we’ll have to know exactly what we’re doing on every one of these 116 days.” About 30 days into it, I realized, “Oh my God, we can just keep creating.” So we just kept changing things and evolving things. The okra scenes, that wasn’t planned. It just kind of started to happen. The whole thing with Royal’s gun and the kid jumping in the well with the match. That only happened because it was going to be that the kid gets stuck in a river and instead of taking his time to pull him out, Arnold yanks him out and it breaks his leg. Then I was like, “No, the kid is birdwatching in a tree and Arnold goes up to get him and he falls off, Arnold’s holding him. The whole point was there had to be this act of cruelty, but the cruelty is kind of masked in this act of nurturing. We couldn’t do that because it wasn’t safe for the kid to have Arnold hold him and then drop him from a tree. Then I was like, “Oh, so much of this is about this idea of the Great Spirit and Arnold having this hole in his heart because he knows his father doesn’t see this thing in him.” I was like, “What is a visual way that I can depict this organically?” Because it had to be real. I wanted so much as no fake trains, no CGI tunnels. Also, I wanted as many moments in time to play over the duration as possible.
Jenkins continues: One of the things that we decided was as few edits as possible. Instead of cutting to a new shot, let’s create a new shot with the camera. So I was like, “Oh, if I have a well, the kid can jump four feet down and it’s almost like a playpen at McDonald’s. If I just film it in this well, that I can do safely.” So it was this combination of always logistically trying to figure out what was possible. Then, “O.K. He could jump into a well, but what’s it about?” “Oh, the Great Spirit. The flame. The match.” It was really fun getting into the show and over the course of 116 days, just smashing ideas, smashing ideas, and trying to evolve to even greater and greater metaphors. It was great. It was brutal, but it was fucking awesome. Ridgeway walks into Royal’s cabin and the holster just happens to be sitting there. Joel, because he’s so in the character, of course, he’s not going to leave a gun behind. He grabs it and he puts it in his waistband. That’s on maybe Day 78. I know we’re not going to film them going down the cottage till Day 83 and we’re not going to do the big set where they’re falling into the tunnel until Day 100. So I just start writing because I know he handed her that gun. He handed it to her in a great, big Steadicam shot. Now, I know that gun’s going to travel. Because he gives it to Homer. Homer drops it. Homer goes down. “Run little girl. Come back.” The little girl’s handing her the rifle, but then she sees that gun. She kills her with her lover’s gun. That only happened because Joel walked in and the holster was there and he grabbed it. The process was so elastic that now it’s like, “O.K., cool. That’s going to travel. Let’s go in and rewrite and make sure we know how that’s traveling.” It was so cool. There so many things like that.
In that context, is there one shot or one scene, that now that you look back on it, you were most blown away that you were able to pull it off?
It was really important to me that I didn’t create a show where a black mother abandons her daughter just because of hate, of darkness, of anything. The book is very clear she makes a choice to go back. The whole episode [10] was about, “There’s a psychotic break. How can I engineer this world that it’s organic that this woman has this break?” Even through the break, her love, her warmth, her feeling for [her daughter], it punctures the break and she goes back. I knew I don’t have the luxury of the interior voice, so I had to do it with screen direction and that’s in the script. She’s walking, she’s walking, that whole journey, left to right, left to right, left to right. I said to [cinematographer James Laxton] “I know it’s difficult filming in a swamp and I don’t know how we’re going to get the rig out there, but we have to be going left to right, left to right. We got to stop and we can not cut. Then we’ve got to come back, right to left. We have to.” That was the one I was like, “It has to work. If it doesn’t work the show fails.” We pulled it off, man. It’s one of the moments that I’m most proud of, because when I first sat down to make the show, that was the moment I pinpointed, “I have to get this right and I have to get it right in just sounds and images.” I think we did get it right.
You did. That is an absolutely incredible shot. But I remember thinking at the time, “Oh, this is f**king good.”
Thank you.
You’ve committed so much of your life to this. You were editing this during COVID, which couldn’t have been easy for anybody, and then you had to go back and finish filming. How have you decompressed from all of this? Is it just knowing like, “Hey, I’m moving on doing something else. I’m working on ‘The Lion King’ prequel or whatever I’m doing next.” How have you been able to let it go?
I haven’t and I think I have to at some point. It’s interesting. Friends kept checking in on me and I was like, “Well, why are you checking in on me? I’m good, man. I’m working.” It wasn’t until the show went live on Thursday around 5:00 PM… Because Amazon always puts it on the platform a little bit early so you can see it. It went live and… Oh, this is so terrible. But, you know Jesse Eisenberg from “The Social Network” where he sends the app live? It’s not the one at the end when he’s hitting refresh. It’s the one at the end of the first act when he’s coding, coding, coding, and then he runs home and inputs his relationship status, and boom, he hits the button. It kind of felt like that. I’ll be honest with you. I cried Thursday, man. I did. I stood in the kitchen. Because Lulu’s in Hong Kong right now. So, I was here by myself. I just had a little bit of a cry, man, because this shit was hard, bro. I know I keep saying, “Oh, it was so fun.” But it was so hard.
Jenkins continues: I knew there was pressure on it, but when the first trailer dropped… You know I’m active on Twitter and the reactions to the trailer, site-unseen. I understood where people were coming from but that shit was hard, man. I realized I’d sort of slipped into this place. I was like, “Yeah. It was hard, but it’s done.” Then that happened and I was like, “No, this is so hard.” I realized that I hadn’t decompressed. I hadn’t even processed. When it went live Thursday, something shifted. I hadn’t read any reviews but I just kind of had this feeling. I don’t know. I’m still processing it, man. But I did cry Thursday, man. I had a little cry by myself here. I don’t know when I will get to because now this other stuff is happening. I don’t know. I need to set this down. I need to set this down at some point. But, man, it was heavy. It was heavy.
“The Underground Railroad” is available on Amazon Prime Video worldwide.