Before they were Oscar winners, director Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney were two Black boys growing up in Miami.
McCraney was raised in Liberty City’s Liberty Square, known to many as “Pork and Beans,” a neighborhood once separated from surrounding communities by a segregation wall built during the Jim Crow era. Jenkins grew up nearby in Lake Manor and spent much of his childhood in Liberty City around family.
Drawing on their own lives, including growing up with mothers who struggled with crack addiction, they made Moonlight on a modest one-point-five-million-dollar budget. The film follows a young Black boy searching for identity, love, and belonging while growing up in Miami.
Now, after winning the 2017 Academy Award for Best Picture and grossing over $65 million worldwide, Moonlight is back in theaters a decade later.
WLRN spoke with Jenkins and McCraney about how Miami shaped them, why telling this story mattered, and the unforgettable Oscars moment when La La Land was mistakenly announced as Best Picture.
The interviews, recorded seperately with McCraney and Jenkins, have been edited for clarity and brevity.
We see a Miami in "Moonlight" that audiences don't always get to see. It's not the postcard Miami, but the streets, the housing projects. What do you want people who have never been to Liberty City to understand about that place?
BARRY JENKINS: I want them to understand that those places are ecosystems just like anywhere else, and there are people there who want nothing but to nurture the young people especially, who find themselves through no cause of their own, being raised, being forced to come of age, you know, in an impoverished situation.
You've taken this story from Liberty City to Hollywood, to the Oscars, and all over the world, and now bringing it back to theaters ten years later, when you now watch "Moonlight" with the audience, especially Miami audiences, what do you hope that they get from it?
BJ: What I love about Moonlight is that Chiron is not a famous person, you know? He's not, you know, Martin Luther King. There've been really wonderful films made about MLK. I'm very happy about that. Malcolm X has got one of the greatest biopics ever. We've made films about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, all these people, and yet Chiron is just a kid, um, like any kid. And I think there are so many kids just like him from all different, races and genders who are growing up under very adverse conditions, and their stories are worth telling. And I think the story of Miami, and not the glitzy Miami, not the, the, the well, the well-off Miami ... [is] worth telling. I hope Moonlight is a document that that is true.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools has so many students of so many different socioeconomic levels. Why is it so important for teachers, and especially adult figures in young people's lives, to tell them that they have stories that can be told, and to empower them the way that you experienced?
BJ: There was a teacher, who I never even had her class, uh, who recently passed away, Mrs. Seward, who ran the Payback Program at Miami Northwestern, which is a performing arts program, and she just let me sit in on her classes and just bear witness to young people trying to express themselves through performance. Little things like that. When outside the building, maybe the neighborhoods are depressed or there's so many things you see that aren't inspiring, being within those buildings and coming in contact with individuals who can just look at you and show you that there is something inside yourself that you can realize, that can mean the world, a world of difference.
READ MORE: Marking Millionaire's Row: UM students design markers to preserve Liberty City’s Black history
Tarell, as the author of the play that the film is based on, I know that especially for the process of writing, writing is sometimes different than seeing it play back on screen. So was there a moment in the film that was easier for you to write than to watch back?
TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY: Innumerable to recount, if I'm honest. I don't watch the film. We screened it in Sundance, in the spring, this past spring. Barry and I were there. I think both of us probably hadn't seen it in a few years. And, yeah, I couldn't sit through it, and not because it felt cringey or bad. In fact, the opposite. There were moments that I was like, "Oh my God, how gorgeous is that?" And here are people I haven't seen in now 30 years, in terms of the characters that they were portraying. Here, there's my mom, who I've lost and haven't seen in almost 30 years. There's people there I haven't been able to talk to, or reach, or, or who were in my life and now are not. And there's a level of knowing that you had to put that down, so it's somewhere in the world, and that that feels great and good.
And Barry, moving on to the Oscars controversy, the film's Oscar win came with a strange historical footnote, the Best Picture mix-up with La La Land. What's your actual memory of those minutes on stage?
BJ: I don't remember the minutes on stage, if I'm being honest, but I remember the other movie, La La Land, going up on stage. And there are so many award shows. You immediately think about, "How am I gonna get out of here?" 'Cause it's always tricky getting out. But the weird thing was Tarell and I had just won for screenplay, and because it was so close to the end, we didn't get, we didn't go backstage to do an interview, and you always go backstage to do an interview when you win an award like that. And so I was just trying to figure out logistics. And then when everything happened, you know, when you're in the room, we didn't have the visual feed of when Jordan Horowitz held up the card and said, "Moonlight, Best Picture." And then I just remember being backstage, and Warren Beatty's showing me the card that actually said Moonlight. So it's not something I remember very well.
And have your feelings about that moment changed at all in the years since?
BJ: Yeah. I do appreciate that it's very easy to remember what film won Best Picture when the envelope got mixed up. That part I've realized, over the intervening years, is very, very nice and very useful.
