The now Oscar-nominated Joi McMillon’s contribution in the edit room was key, especially on one of the film’s most celebrated scenes.
[A lot of the editing process was finding the] pace the scenes wanted to flow at, how much silence the scenes wanted to contain. But then there’s also…there’s a song that Barbara Lewis plays [“Hello Stranger”], and we did something you’re not supposed to do there — we played the song every time we shot the scene [in the diner]. You’re not supposed to do that, because we didn’t have the rights to the song when we were shooting. But I knew every time a producer saw the scene, they’d hear the song and know how much I wanted it.
But where that scene ends is complex. You know, it’s just the camera running on the two of them, and there were a lot of out points. And I remember, because Joi knows intimately who I am, one day in the editing room, I got up and was like, “Joi, I’m leaving. I’m going home and when I come in tomorrow, I want something better than this. Fix it.” And I left. And she laughed, but she knew I was serious and when I came back in, well, that scene is now one of the characters looking down, down, down (he’s actually hearing the song being played on set), and then he looks up and [clicks fingers] Joi cut. [beatific smile] My goodness! I gave her a hug, I was like, “this is why you’re here. I mean, you’re here because I love you and you do a great job, but THIS is why you’re here.”
He consciously collaborated with his regular DP James Laxton to create a look that ran counter to prevailing norms for social-realist drama.
If I tell you I’m making a movie about a poor black guy growing up in the hood with a mom who’s addicted to crack, you think you know what that movie looks like and sounds like: a very social-realist style; a very dispassionate camera; a very observant, non-obtrusive camera and we think of that as being naturalism. But there is an artifice in that rigor as well. So I wanted to take this notion of artifice off the table. We didn’t want the film to be beholden to its genre — you know, a horror film looks a certain way, an action film looks a certain way, a social-realist drama looks a certain way. And Miami is this beautiful gorgeous place, full of bright colors and bright light, and to subdue that light would have been immoral because it would not have been truthful to the world that Tarell [McCraney] and I grew up in.
That also led to the film’s unique palette, though he had to stay away from too much blue for an unusual reason, and the memorable pink-lit moment in the hallway was partly a response to budget constraints.
We tried not to be too overt with the color blocking. Céline Sciamma does an amazing job in the film “Girlhood” with the color blue, and I saw that film and I was like, “Shit! Now we can’t do that!” (because the movie was originally called “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue”). So we had to be a bit more subtle with it.
Really, the most thematic thing we did with color was all about the Paula character. In the first story, there’s this light at the end of this hallway. Naomie [Harris]’s work we had to do in three days, so we only had her in each location one time. And when you work that way, you have to utilize the location as much as possible. And I remember looking down that hallway and realizing that the hallway could symbolize this distance between the characters that could not be traversed.
I knew that we couldn’t go into the bedroom because production design-wise, we couldn’t afford it, but I wanted the bedroom to have this presence as this place that Chiron cannot go. And I dunno if there’s a Freudian or Kinseyan thing with how color temperature relates to psychology, but we just went into the room and started dialing up the temperature and we ended up with that pink/red light. So it wasn’t about tracing a path across the film, but there were certain places where the spirit moved us.
Although Jenkins considers himself an “active ally” to the LGBTQ community, he was very conscious of the potential dangers of making a film about a gay character when he himself is not gay.
There was hesitation about whether or not I could do justice to this character. But I had Tarell’s words and Tarell himself to talk to, and I thought if I can harness his voice respectfully, and do justice to it, then I could take ownership of the piece.
I did actually try to get Tarell to do the adaptation by himself, because I was very aware of this issue. But he’d just become a MacArthur Genius, so he was too damn busy being a genius and shit. But he said “I trust you” and once he said that, Chiron became me. You know, I grew up the same way as this kid, everything about my life is Chiron’s life with the exception of my sexual identity. Now, if that difference was so massive that it kept me from identifying with this character that I share everything else with, that would have been me saying that homosexuality is this massive thing that makes this character inhuman to me in a certain way.
McCraney was deeply moved, to the point of discomfort, by the film, especially in how it deviates from the story he wrote at the end.
After he saw it, he sat, staring at the wall for 20 minutes. And then he said, “I don’t know how many times I can watch that. Because there are things in it that I have not reconciled.” In the source material, the phone call that happens in the third section is where the story ends. Black never does drive to that reconnection.
Nicholas Britell’s Oscar-nominated score is designed to evolve along with the character, and also owes a debt to the slowed-tempo hip-hop genre, “chopped and screwed.”
I knew the kind of music I wanted, and some of the music — like the Barbara Lewis song that plays in the diner — is written into the screenplay. Like, the lyrics, were literally written into the screenplay. But the score is a whole other thing. I knew the tone I wanted, I knew the instrumentation I wanted — that it was going to be sort of a chamber orchestra. But the composer Nicholas Britell — Academy Award Nominee Nicholas Britell! — when the film was about 90% of what it was going to be, I started going out to New York to meet him and we would sit together and watch the movie through. And he’d try certain instrumentation along with it. And we did it in sequence, so as the character evolves, so does the music.
To the point that, towards the end of the film, the character is becoming more masculine and there’s this style of hip-hop — chopped and screwed — primarily in Texas but also in Florida, where they slow hip-hop down and alter the pitch and it gets very bassy and quote-unquote “masculine.” But this also means you can really hear the words — and there’s a lot of hurt and yearning in hip-hop, but usually the BPM means you can’t catch it. So these chopped and screwed artists think they’re making the music sound a lot tougher, but they’re actually making a sound that’s way more sensitive and vulnerable. So as the film progresses, the cues are getting more masculine, but Nick, it’s like he’s chopping and screwing those violins, too.
So the score is a journey, even without the images, to the point that there are these three cues: when Chiron’s on the beach (the most sexually overt scene); and it plays again in the kitchen; and there’s a cue when Kevin is making the chef’s special. And the end-credits suite is a journey back through the film, chopping and screwing those three cues and then coming out of the chopping and screwing to the character’s birth with this violin and cello and piano.
His working relationship with Brad Pitt’s Plan B, and with A24 was exemplary.
I always try to shout out A24 and Plan B because they were like, we’re going to open this door and you and Tarell just walk through it. We’re not going to tell you how to alter your voice — I’m not going to touch your hair, to quote Solange. So this movie arrived pretty much unfiltered, to the point that we opened the film with a track by Boris Gardiner [“Every N—–r Is A Star;” listen below] — that’s a decision that only happens when people are not telling you what to do with your image. We still got notes on character and such, but I had the right to reject those things. And I think that’s why we have a film where certain characters just disappear from the narrative, that stars three faces you’ve never seen before and has a color palette you’re not used to for a social-realist drama — because Mr. Pitt and Plan B and A24 were like, you do you. And we did us, and here, we have eight Oscar nominations. Imagine that!