nprfreshair:

For Film’s Creators, ‘Moonlight’ Provided Space To Explore A Painful Past

Filmmaker Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell McCraney grew up just blocks away from each other in the same housing project in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood. They went to the same elementary school at the same time, but they did not meet until they were adults, when Jenkins contacted McCraney about adapting his play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, to the screen.

Jenkins tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that he was drawn to McCraney’s main character, a young African-American boy named Chiron who lives in a Miami housing project with his mother, who is addicted to crack. “I saw myself in this character,” Jenkins says. “Tarell did this great job of creating a character who, over the course of the years, kind of retreats, retracts within himself, to escape the world around him.”

Jenkins and McCraney went on to collaborate on the new film Moonlight, which tells the story of Chiron’s life and the bullying he endures for being effeminate. Though the movie is a work of fiction, it draws on its creators own childhood experiences.

Both men grew up in poverty with mothers who were addicted to drugs. “There were times when we were without food and the lights got turned off often,” McCraney says. “If I did get money from an aunt or a grandmother or whoever, more often than not my mom would find a way to take it or talk me out of it, or sometimes the TV would disappear, or sometimes the furniture would disappear.”

For his part, Jenkins credits McCraney for helping him address the hardships he faced as a child by giving him the opportunity to put it in his work. “The beauty of working with Tarell and knowing Tarell is he has provided the space for me to … be open and honest about some of these things,” says Jenkins. He’s grateful to McCraney for helping him “feel whole.”