FEATURE February 13, 2019

Barry Jenkins on James Baldwin, Filming Black Skin and Filmmaking in the iPhone Era

“Literature is a very interior medium, it’s all about the interior voice,” Jenkins says. “And cinema, it’s about externally acting out in a certain way. You know, sounds and images. You’re not necessarily allowed to be inside the character, and James Baldwin, the power of his writing is all about the interior voice. So my job in making this film, from the craft standpoint, from the aesthetic standpoint, was about trying to translate interiority into sounds and images, and to do so with the words of James Baldwin.”