Early on in what has to be the year’s best film, Moonlight, the main character—a young boy named Little—is taught how to float in the ocean by an older man, a drug dealer somewhere between a new friend and mentor. The music in that scene, part of the original score, is ominously beautiful, imbued with the understanding that this perfect moment of suspension will not last. Much of Moonlight’s soundtrack and score is filled with similarly fleeting moments, care of Jidenna or composer Nicholas Britell. Moonlight’s director Barry Jenkins spoke to Pitchfork by phone recently about the sound of his movie. Please go see it.
Pitchfork: How did you decide to open your film with Boris Gardiner’s song?
Barry Jenkins: The first time I heard “Every Nigger Is a Star,” like most people, was on Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly. A lot of the music in the film was actually written into the screenplay, but this was not. We were going through post-production and I felt like we had to rage at the beginning. I kept thinking I wanted to plant a flag at the very beginning of this film. I was some on blog and read the actual story of that song. It was taken from a blaxploitation film in the ’70s, and I thought that the purpose of that film aligned with the purpose of our film—that these lives are valid and they’re worth exploring. I imagine whoever showed the sample to Kendrick, that he had the same experience when he heard it. This movie isn’t about the entirety of the black experience, but in recognizing that people from our neighborhood don’t get films made about them often.
One of the lyrics is, “We’ve got a bright place in the sun/Where there’s love...”
“...for everyone.” Exactly.
The next thing we hear is “Little’s Theme.” I was trying to think of a word to describe the original score and while it’s extremely beautiful, there’s almost a terror in some of the music. Does that sound right to you?
That sounds very right to me. The film is inherently intersectional, and one of the sections is about masculinity, and how the world projects this idea of masculinity, in particular on young African-American men. Sometimes how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference of life and death. So I do think there are things at stake, even in a score, like in the idea of this drug dealer trying to teach a young boy how to swim. That’s a very gorgeous image, and yet there’s a storm coming. I think the music carries that edge.
How did you and composer Nicholas Britell come up with this sound?
At the starting point, working truly off the script, Nick sent over a bunch of things he had composed. Just his feelings. One of those things that came right out of the box was “Little’s Theme.” That was the very first piece that we hooked into. “Little’s Theme,” “Chiron’s Theme,” and “Black’s Theme,” all of those happened with Nick, on his own with just the script. For whatever reason, that was where his heart took him. We used those as a starting point.
Even before that, how did you decide that you wanted an original score rather than simply a soundtrack?
I just always knew that I wanted to have an orchestral score for the film. And it was really beautiful because we didn’t even have to test that theory. Most of the source cues I wrote into the script, but I didn’t write, “Now we have score here.” So it was a really organic process, over the course of post, watching the film with Nick and deciding when and where we were going to have score. And then using those three themes, figuring out how to augment around those.
When we very first started the process, even before Nick sent over his original music, he made a playlist, without me telling him to. It had Southern hip-hop and orchestral chamber music—UGK, 8Ball& MJG, OutKast, but then also Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Even at that most early stage, I knew I wanted to blend these things. One of the pieces he sent over in that first draft was that Mozart piece that we use in the film to open the scene where the kids are playing football. I always knew that that was what it was going to be. The shape it was going to take, I wasn’t sure of. And that’s when the process got super fun, because we started chopping and screwing the orchestra.
When I first met Nick, I was describing to him what chopped and screwed was, because he hadn’t heard of it. Because how’s a guy from New York who went to Harvard’s gonna know what chopped and screwed music is? But maybe, who knows. I’m not going to judge people who go to Harvard. Or are from New York.
So was he like, “wow”?
I don’t know if it was me or him who said it first, maybe me as a joke, “Yeah, I mean I want to have a score, but you can’t chop and screw score, can you?” And he was like, “Well, why couldn’t you?” And so when he sent over this playlist, I took a couple of the Mozart and Beethoven pieces and put them into Final Cut Pro and slowed them down, like 75 percent, and said, “You know what? This shit ain’t too bad.” When Nick heard it he said, “Yeah, it’s kind of weird but it’s not too bad. But I can do it better.” He really, really dug deep. He found ways that we could lower the octave but retain the register. We were really sort of dialing it in throughout the process. We were taking analog instruments and putting them in as well. It was so fucking fun, man. There’s some shit that’s not even in the movie because, you know, we got aggressive with it. Some of the bass was just ridiculous, man. It was beyond.
Why does the texture of chopped and screwed feel right for Moonlight?
In hip-hop, sometimes that pace is so fast that you miss things. I don’t mean literally miss lyrics, I just think there’s an emotion in what these cats are saying that gets by you. When you slow things down there’s this emotion, this yearning. I think in some ways, in Moonlight, we’re doing the same thing. There’s this idea, especially in the story, of Black trying to project this idea of masculinity. But as his life slows down you get to see that he’s just sitting there. When he actually talks to someone, he can’t hide all this shit that’s very deep down. I listen to chopped and screwed every day. It annoys the shit out of people. But I think there’s something about me that I just want to actually just live in this stuff. I’m listening to fucking Tame Impala chopped and screwed right now, and even that shit is dope.
Black listens to “Classic Man” in his car screwed and chopped.
I think the character assumes he’s doing one thing, but I think he’s actually doing another. By listening to “Classic Man”... you know, Jidenna is cool as hell. He’s not, like, hard. And so I can listen to Jidenna, but I want to listen to Jidenna in the way that he’s hard, so you put it on chopped and screwed. But by trying to make it hard you actually reveal even more this sensitivity, and this yearning, that maybe sometimes gets past you because of the pace that you’re receiving the stimulus. I think the lyrics in that song, when you can actually take your time with them, it’s some sensitive shit, you know? It’s extremely vulnerable.
When Black drives back to Florida from Georgia, that Caetano Veloso song—“Cucurrucucu Paloma”—comes on. What I immediately felt was that it’s the same song used in Talk to Her by Pedro Almodóvar. Was that on purpose?
It’s more on purpose that it’s the same song used in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together. It’s a direct homage. Even the way we framed the car driving down the highway is the same. I remember watching Happy Together a long time ago. It was the first movie I would say that I saw that was outright a queer film. One of the first films I saw that had subtitles, even. Moonlight is worlds away from Happy Together—it’s a movie about two Asian men living in Argentina, and here we have these two black men from fucking Liberty City, Miami. The world is very big and also very small, because they’re experiencing the same things. I feel like film has given so much to me and I just wanted for 30 seconds to show how small the world is. It doesn’t carry any thematic impart, but hopefully it will introduce a certain audience that has been going to see this film but who has maybe never heard Caetano Veloso—the same way that when I watched Happy Together, I got to Asia by way of Argentina and discovered Caetano Veloso. There’s also a hard cut out of it to fucking “Classic Man”—the Caetano is very soft and cool, the Jidenna comes in hard as fuck. Because again, the worlds clash.
A friend of mine who is gay said that in light of the election, something that has given him hope was that you made Moonlight but you’re straight—that it showed people can understand each other.
Which right now is so fucking important. This election, I feel like part of it was... I’m not going to talk about the election. I’m not going to talk about the election! I’m not going to talk about the election. I’m not going to talk about the election. Fuck, I’m going to talk about the election. I think some people felt like Barack Obama couldn’t understand them because he didn’t look like them and that’s just so fucking wrong, you know? So all this animus came out of this block that this person is incapable of understanding what’s important to me because he doesn’t look like me. And it’s like, no, that’s not how humanity works. We have all this history that shows that it’s not how it works, which is a shame that we’ve regressed so much, but, what the fuck are you going to do? Continue to make shit, that’s what I’m going to do.