Quotes from Barry Jenkins

Making films. It gave me a voice. Legitimately saved me.

Growing up, I wasn't the most vocal kid in the world. I feel like I learned through observation, and usually, when you're watching things, you're not speaking. That sort of metastasized in a way that I began to participate less and less in the world.

I'm process-orientated. Awards, by their nature, are results-orientated.

I'm so damn boring. I like reading and writing and making coffee. And walking. Barry Jenkins likes long walks.

It's interesting because I think class is a heavy, heavy part of 'Moonlight,' and I think, in a certain way, through the sum of all these parts, it's become a commentary on the black experience in America.

I just came back from my hometown, making a movie about a kid who grew up just like me, and it was financed by white people in New York. Personally, I can't be angry. In my personal experience, the support was there.

I got into film school. I went and didn't know anything about it. Over the course of two years, I kind of got kind of good at it. You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn't sure if I could do it. I didn't know you needed light to expose film.

I grew up really poor and have always been the type of person who will work earlier or work harder or more than the other person to even the playing field.

Because I'm so in the eye of the hurricane, I don't have a really good perception of what's happening. I'm in a room talking to people, and that's all I know. But sometimes I go out of these rooms - I live in L.A., and every now and then, maybe twice a week, I'll be somewhere, and someone will say, 'Hey, are you the guy that made Moonlight?'

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

Cinema is a little over 100 years old, and a lot of what we do is built around film emulsion. Those things were calibrated for white skin. We've always placed powder on skin to dull the light. But my memory of growing up in Miami is this moist, beautiful black skin.

Filmmaking is a very privileged art form. It costs a lot of money to make these things.

I worked for Oprah Winfrey for two years right out of college in 2004. I was a director's assistant on the film 'Their Eyes Were Watching God,' which Oprah produced.

The way I work, things are very nuanced; not everything is explained.

My films are personal-voice-driven films about human characters and the place we live. Technically, I'm an independent filmmaker.

I have friends who I consider my peers, who have done amazing work, particularly in the film and television space, who came up as independent artists and who have been - to be brutally honest - much more prolific than I was able to be.

You graduate from film school and move to Hollywood. Hollywood tells you, 'We're not the place for you to make films,' so you decide you have to make a film yourself.

As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other.

It used to be that watching a film was a very special occasion, the same way flying was. Before, if you took a flight from New York to L.A., most of the windows would be open. Now, we get on planes and we just close them because we're so used to what it feels like. I think the same thing has happened with cinema.

I was hiding behind athletics and all my jockitude, so I didn't have to deal with being ostracized as the weird art kid.

I've worked at this film festival in Telluride called the Telluride Film Festival. Been there since 2002. I used to make popcorn. I was an usher. Cleaned toilets, everything. Grew up there as a kid.

If you try to create something that everybody can relate to, you're gonna make something that nobody can relate to.

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

There were times when we didn't have hot water or a phone line. But I guarantee you, we always had cable, and it was always on.