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twenty seventeen. Yes it won not La La Land. Moonlight one best picture that year, surprise at the moment, and seems like the better and better choice every year that has gone by, which isn't always the case necessarily for Best Picture winners. I think people and sometimes us we like to joke about them, but in this case, I think they probably got it right. And that's no shade on Lalla Land, which I still love and think is
an incredible film. But yeah, for me at least, there's increasing resonance with Moonlight, even beyond what we found in our original review.
Well, let's see what we had to say in our original review, and also we'll get to hear what Barry Jenkins himself, along with his star Naomi Harris, had to say about the film. I had the opportunity to talk to them back when the film was released in October twenty sixteen, So you're going to get that conversation followed by our review.
What happened?
What happens? Chiron?
Why you didn't come home like you're supposed to?
Huh?
And who is you?
Nobody? I found him yesterday, found him in a hold on fifteen, Yeah, that one.
Some boys chased him in a cut scared more than anything. Wouldn't tell me where he lived on this morning.
Wow. Thanks for seeing to them. You usually can take care of itself.
Be good that way, Barry. I'll start with you.
Medicine from Melancholy was a movie that certainly earned some acclaim. I remember it got generally very favorable reviews. But the response to this movie Moonlight seems to be its own kind of whirlwind. Do you have a sense of what it is that audiences are connecting with so strongly and is it the same thing as what drew you to the material?
Yeah? You know, I think it's really the movie's very personal, you know, and I think people just sort of they identify with, you know how specifically we sort of engage Hyonn's struggle, you know, and it's not this thing where what Chiron goes through is relatable to everyone. I think people see just how deep we dove into that one character, and they go, oh, I wish someone could add the deeply into me. You know, they see themselves in the character.
They don't see everyone in the character. And I think in that one to one exchange, the movie is just spreading, you know.
And you don't have to get too personal, but what you see in the.
Character, well, you know, for Chirone, you know, and Naomi sitting next to me, And to be brutally honest, you know, when I first read Suel's Peace, which was written here in Chicago actually when he was an undergrader to Paul Naomi plays his character Paula, who is a composite of my mom and t Where's Mom? And so I could just relate to Chirone as a kid who was watching this person who he loves, you know, go through this is just terrible ordeal.
And now we speaking of your character Paula. As viewers, we make certain assumptions and judgments about her. I think before we even meet her, her son is so determined not to go home and to hang out with these total strangers, we wonder how horrible his home life must be. When we do meet her, we recognize she may not be perfect, but she is caring and she is protective, like we expect a mother to be. There's a decline
from there. But how did you go about not judging this incredibly flawed character.
I didn't, I think initially. I think that was my biggest discovery. Actually when I started, when I took on the role, I thought initially that I didn't want to play paul Or. I had some resistance to playing her because I wanted to portray positive images of women and positive images of black women in particular. But actually, once I started researching the character, I really realized I had to be honest with myself that a lot of the
resistance was about my own judgment about addiction. I'm miscontrol freak. I'm teetotal and a drink and of smoke and don't even drink coffee. So I had a real problem getting wrapping my head around what drives someone to have an addiction to something like crack cocaine. And it was a wonderful journey where I had to learn deep compassion well, first of all, understanding and then deep empathy for Paula's choices.
Yeah, and without spoiling too much of the movie and the journey Paula goes on, did you come to see her journey as a positive one?
Absolutely? I think it's a shining example of how you know you can only give to others what you have received yourself. You know, if your love tank is empty because you didn't receive what you needed as a child, wild, it's very difficult to give that to another human being. And also another human being is who that's your child because often your child is you know, your child is
an extension of yourself. So I think your self loathing and Paula has a lot of that is taken out on your child because when you look at them, you see yourself. So until you heal that relationship with yourself, I think it's very difficult to have another.
Human I think that really comes through in particular in one scene kind of at her worst moment, where she says almost in a hunting way but also in a loving way, that you're my only and I'm yours. There is that reflection back in those characters. So what's more challenging than shooting a Bond film in this den bowl with all these action scenes, or playing someone so opposite who you really are?
I would say, actually, yeah, yes, because of all the stunts. Yeah it's that's no. They're just completely different challenges, aren't they. They're sure and yeah, it's challenging in a completely different way.
Well, so I guess the more serious version of that question is why is it important to you as an actress to take both kinds of roles, these big action spectacles, but do these smaller, more intimate movies as.
Well, Because I think because I'm ultimately interested both as a performer and as an individual in growth and learning. I think that in life we often play one character, and actually we are made up of multiple characters that usually most people don't get to discover. And I think the joy in acting is discovering all those different parts of yourself. And that's what acting allows you to do. And if I play varied roles and I get to exercise those parts of myself I never knew existed.
Barry, I wanted to ask you about the influences, because I know you've gotten this question a lot. At the Chicago Film Fest Q and A after the movie, you throughout the three movies that you said had the biggest influence on the style of this film, both Travia, three Times Happy Together, and I think you can definitely see those influences in the film and the way that it's quite lyrical. It's certainly not focused on gritty realism necessarily.
And the moments that, as I reflect back on it to stand out to me in the movie are actually just those There. There are moments, There are the moments that you kind of draw out or heighten or return to. There are kind of moments that these tableaux kind of moments that almost take you out of time and space. And I thought that was appropriate because I think those those are the moments we remember from our childhoods. As
we reflect back, we think of those. We we forget a lot, but we remember just certain images and certain sounds.
Yeah, And as a person who has you know, kind of found their voice through creating visual storytelling, you know, through through images, you know, it was something to roll on to always discussed this project as sort of being like a like a fever dream. You know, I said to him, you've taken memories of my memories and and and sort of like presented them as his fever dream. And I feel like in the film, you know, I wanted the audience to experience, you know, what Shyrona is experiencing.
And he is almost like he's a participant in his own life. But at some point this consciousness sort of like you know, it sort of gets away from him, you know, and it takes on this heightened quality, you know, And I wanted to find a way to translate that, you know, in a way that the audience can experience what the character is experiencing.
Yeah, and that notion of it being a fever dream, it reminds me of what Terrell said about having written this this script or written this play and then realized that he couldn't really stage it. You obviously saw something cinematic in the material, was say.
Yeah right away.
You know. It was partly because you know, as a filmmaker, I've never made anything that was like personal in this way, but which I mean that was like at the foundation of how I grew up, where I grew up, when I grew up and Terrell's Peace gave me the opportunity to do that, and because of that, it's like a one to one sort of like translation. It's like, Oh, I know exactly what that looks like and what that
feels like. I don't need to travel, you know, two thousand miles to Miami to know what that corner feels like. I've been there, you know, and in a beautiful way, and then took this filmmaking voice I've developed, which is absent from my home environment where I grew up, and now.
I can I think.
I think film has given me a chance to speak about, you know, the way I grew up in a voice that I didn't think myself capable of, you know, And then the converse happened, where now my filmmaking voice has been elevated because I know this world so viscerally.
The films that you mentioned as influences are those films that you came to through film school and kind of later as you got into cinema, or were they some of the films that really turned you on to cinema in the first place.
You know, The two things happened at once. Yeah, I didn't I wasn't in love with cinema at all. Growing up, I didn't really care that much about movies. I kind of stumbled into it after I was already at Florida State doing my undergrad and creative writing, and I'm a big football fan, and there just happened to be a film school in the football stadium. That's where the film
school was at Florida State. Yeah, so I was going to a football game because they rebuilt the stadium, and I think out of guilt, they had to put something there that wasn't football related, and that was the film school. So I thought, oh, I kind of like movies.
I'll check this out.
And I saw right away that everybody was the movies they were watching were sort of informing their aesthetic, and I thought, I want my aesthetic to be unique, and so I'm gonna watch nothing but Horn films. And some of those films are the movies I watched as I was first falling in love with filmmaking. And I think it's not a surprise that my voice has been heavily
influenced by those things. And I think the work of the last fifteen years as a filmmaker has been Okay, Now, this is where the influence stops, and this is where Barry Jenkins begins. And this project gave me just the greatest palette to express that.
NI. At that same Chicago film fest, Q and A. A. Trell mentioned one of the central questions in the movie being am I a man? What kind of man?
Am I?
What defines me? Is it my sexuality? How tough I am, how I look? But I recognize I think that that identity struggle doesn't just apply to the boys.
Here.
There's a certain expectation placed on women like Paula as women to be a certain type of mother, and there's a lot of baggage associated with that that I don't know that most of us think about every day, but probably should.
Yeah. I think you know, that's a really interesting question.
We haven't actually, we have never gotten that question.
I apologize.
I minded spinning like that's a good question.
What do you think? I think the question is getting at something that that's really interesting, which is all these characters have a full, full life. It's like the Iceberg theory from Himingway. Uh. Because of the pace we tell the story yet Chyne's Iceberg, we do reveal all these things beneath the surface. It's a part of the character. He's pushing everything down and we're like, Okay, we're going to take you down there, and we want to see
the rest of the iceberg. I think with a character like Paula, you know, we're not privy to those things,
but I feel like it's in the performance. And I think when we meet her on that very first scene, on that porch, you can see all these pressures, all these things, you know that that that she has to be both for herself and for chirone, and it's a lot to deal with, and I think it's part of the reason why, you know, the sort of addiction overcomes her, you know, I think there's just so much weight.
Yeah, And I think that weight is there because actually that's a good point about mothering, because it takes a community to raise a child, and ultimately, what Paula is trying to do is do it on her own because she's surrounded by so many negative influences, and on top of that, she doesn't have the personal resources to be able to do that. She hasn't had the good parenting model that she needed to be able to parent her son on top of all of that.
So I think it's very and I just love that we're in a world where and she has a boy, you know, who is not going to be embraced by everyone in the community for certain stigmas.
And that moment that you have really one of the most powerful scenes in the film, where you have a confrontation with jan That's kind of the undercurrent of that whole scene is that it's very easy for him to judge and suggests that you should be a certain type of mother, but he doesn't actually have the responsibility.
Yeah, I think it's partly that, and I think it's also partly because that's an example for me of how Paula has been let down by men so often in her life in the past that she can't accept any form of help because she's not used to having any and if anybody does offer help, it's always because they've got an angle they want to take something ultimately, so she's very suspicious to that point. Yeah, she's like, what's going to come next? Like, what do you want from my son?
Right?
I want to ask Barry about the casting and the directing of the three actors who play the three incarnations of Sharon, Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Travante Rhodes. But I first want to ask you, I think you're the only direct link between those three characters in terms of seeing you in all three stories. What was it like for you having to maintain some continuity emotionally and psychologically opposite those three different actors.
I mean, I didn't really find that difficult, because you know, I had to have done that research beforehand, in known Paula's arc and journey and her history and so on, and I just brought that to bear in each of the chapters. But I think it really did help having charone played by a different acts is because my relationship with my three sons those in those three stages is fundamentally extraordinarily different, because paul is in such a completely
different emotional state. It's not just that they've changed just because she's almost you know, she's changed dramatically in each of those chapters. So I think it helped.
I was shocked to hear you say, Arry at that Q and A that you didn't have those actors interact with each other, didn't watch footage of each other. It really was shocking to me, just because they're they're not only similar in appearance, but they're similar in their physicality and their demeanors, how they hold their heads when they're silent,
which is a key part of these performances. I would have assumed exactly the opposite, that you were really meticulous about having them study each other.
So how did you pull that off?
Because I think it's so crucial that at the end, when we see the character Black, we have to see little and Chirne in him, and we do.
There's two words bruh, hocus pocus no. No. You know, it's almost like Naomi was just saying, you know, so much time passes between each chapter that you know, I think there's this commentary in the film of how the world shapes us, you know, or how we can allow the world to shape us, both for good and for bad. And so I wanted to show, or to illustrate in the physical embodiment of this character that the world has
made him a different person. So I wanted to cast different actors, you know, to play the same person, and I didn't want them to physically mimic one another, you know, I didn't want them to try to carry the performance that came before and to their performance, because again, I wanted to show just how different the world can make us, how the world can shape us if we allow it, and if we don't have this nurturing you know that we see in the first story that isn't present in
the second and the third stories. But and yet at the same time, there is a continuity, you know, amongst those three young men. And I'm sure when we were casting them, we were trying to find this feeling, you know, the soulfulness, because I think there's this idea of spiritual transference in the film. It's why the swimming scene, you know, is the way it is. You know, there's this transference
between one in little in that scene. And it felt like if you could look into Travante Rose's eyes and you could still see Ashton Sanders, still see Alex Hibbert, that you would feel like this character has changed. Yes, he's a different person, but he's still He's still in there,
you know. And I think it's interesting because you know, we're trying to create this journey for Travante and the third story where he is the characters crawled so deep inside and buried himself so deep inside that the work Travante is doing aided by you know, Andre Holland and Kevin is to slowly dig his way back out to the surface, and I want to do that. I thought it was it would be best, you know, to literally have the character embodied by a different person.
Yeah, how confident were you in your decision to did not have them mirror each other at all?
Did you ever have doubts about that?
Yeah? You know. So, you know, we shot them with me mostly in sequence. You know, we did a story one, story two, story three. The only overlap was when Naomi showed up because she had visa issues. We did all her work in three days. But other than that, that was the only time those three days when the main characters jumped, you know, I had to work with all
of them. So Travante shows up and does his first two days and because of the way the shoot was scheduled, his first two days, I mean and Travante.
Roads this is radio all say.
He is just just hulking, you know, like you know, five to eleven, two hundred twenty pound guy, like two percent body fact, just like ripped. And his first two days he's walking around in his boxes like working out, and he's like, you know, on the phone and count money. And it was like it was like really jarring departure from this real thin teenager you know that we worked with before, which was Ashton Sanders, whose shoulders are always trooped and he was always like kind of sad and brooding.
And I thought, man, did we go too far? Because it was so jarring going from working with Ashton to working with Travante. And then we did the phone call where Travante call or Kevin calls, and Black picks up the phone and it's just Travante in the room and Andre Holland's voice is actually on the phone, and I can see Travante just breaking and just so this huge,
hulking guy, just so sensitive, vulnerable. And after the first take I looked at him, I said, that's why you got the part, and I was like, okay, we're on the right track certainly, but but for those that day and a half, I was like, oh, man, but but but but then I said in the audience, and I see the audience have the same reaction he comes from screening, and sometimes the audience will go yeah, like literally it takes the breath because they just the gasp, this is
what this is what the world is done to this guy, you know.
Yeah, But then when we when we see him at the diner sitting across from Kevin, and we see we see chirone in him in those moments, then I think we gasp.
Well, And the beauty of this process is, you know, I can only write this thing and get the actions in place and push the button, and then an intellectual idea, you know, a scripted idea, you know, it's given this flesh and blood emotion when somebody like Dramonte can actually express that vulnerability and sensibility that we don't associate or we don't think someone who's that masculine this case, Sure.
Enough, just two more quick questions and I'll get you guys on your way, nail we the mention there of doing this whole role in just three days. Is there any advantage at all to having to work that quickly? There is as an actress, Yeah, there are many?
Actually, well yeah, because you don't spend hours in your trailer agonizing about what you're going to do, plodding it out in your head. You know, you just have to get on and deliver. And the best place to be always is out of your head. But the place you always want to go to is your head. Sure, sure, but yeah, I think it actually really helped me doing it in those three days.
Very last question for you then, a film school film geek question, because we have a lot of them who listen to the show, people who are just really getting into film or who are aspiring filmmakers. At that Q and A, you mentioned Walter Merchant in The Blink of an Eye, And that's a book that whenever people write into the show and ask me to recommend books, I
read that in film school. It's one of my top five, I always say, but can you just talk about the influence of that book on your visual approach with this film or any other work that you've done. And what a their books do you throw out when you get asked that question?
Yeah. The only other book I throw out is a book called Masters of Light, you know, and I would say find the original version. It was this book where they really thick book, thin paper, thick book. They interviewed cinematographers about their process and it's really really dense, but it will teach you, if you pay attention, some really solid things about the visual approach I mean craft, yeah, to the process, how craft can be elevated or sublimated
into art. So that book is the only the only other one I recommend as far as Merch, you know, Walter Merch was an editor and sound designer. He worked with Coppola on some of his just greatest, some of the greatest films in the history of American cinema. And he wrote this book as a thesis statement on what he thought, you know, was the true essence of craft and cinema, which was the eyes of the actors and
the eyes being the window into the soul. And literally he wanted to break down why editorially when you make a cut, you know what that does thematically emotionally to the audience, because you're breaking the link between you know, the actor and the audience. So for me, I use it for casting because if I'm close on two actors and they're pretty much neck and neck, you know, the same ability, whoever blinks the less they're getting the part,
you know. And it came in to play a little bit on the casting of this the old Michael Kaine acting school trick as well. Yeah, exactly, and well, because you want to have that continuum that continue on, that continuous sort of feeling with the audience. And then like I said, you know, I knew I wanted to cast three different actors to play Chirne in this film, and what we found ourselves honing in on was it's got to be in the eyes, you know. It was why
casting someone like Travonte Rhodes. I was okay with it, or I was comfortable with it because I thought he looks so different than Ashton, you know, just because he's so bulked up. But I thought, you know what, I'm gonna have faith in this principle now of my filmmaking process, which is the eyes of the window into the soul. Find the eyes and you'll see the soul, and if the soul is the same, the audience will follow the character.
Thank you both so much for the movie. Thank you for your time, best of luck with it.
Thank you, man, I ain't seeing you in like a decade.
That's not what I expected.
What did you respect My thanks again to Barry Jenkins and Naomi Harris. I knew they would be a delight to talk to you after hearing them talk for a little bit at that film fest Q and A the night before, But they exceeded my expectations and I was the last stop on their way out of town. I knew they had been locked up in a hotel room all day answering questions from idiots like me, and then they were stopping to see me at the studio and
head out. And usually that can mean sometimes they're a little tired and maybe not quite as engaged as even they'd like to be, and I'd like them to be. That certainly wasn't the case with them.
I'm really glad that Jenkins brought up cinematography there at the end and mentioned the book Masters of Light, where Dennis Schaeffer and Larry Salvado they have conversations with some of the most noted cinematographers, and Jenkins comment too about how the book explains how cinematography can be a craft that can be elevated to art, because that is exactly what my takeaway was from Moonlight is watching that actually happen on the screen. This is just a master work
in cinematography. And Jenkins was working here with James Laxton as his cinematographer, and really it becomes it's not only that the movie is beautifully lit, but it's that the skin tones, particularly the African American skin tones, are just exquisitely lit in this movie and I single that out because it's not always the case. Even when you're talking about you big Hollywood films with massive budgets, sometimes they don't know how to light all of the actors correctly.
And this connects very much with what I think Moonlight is doing on a thematic level as well. There is just this aura of compassion that seeps down from the movie. And obviously they're getting this a little bit by the reference that the title pulls from, you know, the illumination of the moon. That's a guiding light in a couple of ways for this film, but it really carries through no matter whether they're in a dark night scene or whether they're in one of the high school classrooms where
there's fluorescent lights, or wherever they may be. There is such care to make these varied skin tones illuminate and you can see the texture and the detail. And I think that carries over again to how the movie sees Schyron, how it sees really all of its characters, but particularly him, in just giving this sort of beneficent hue that makes us just fall in love with this kid, an ache for him, really ache for him in a way that few movies manage to make audiences do.
Yeah, you mention the reference there in the title Moonlight, and it does come up within the text there of the screenplay. But the story that McCraney originally wrote, the piece he originally wrote that he couldn't stage, is called in Moonlight, black Boys Look Blue, And that is such
a brilliantly striking central metaphor. Like I said, that does come up in this movie because it sets up exactly what this whole film is about, but in a pretty subtle way, which is that other people are always going to try to define you. They are going to see you how they see you within a certain moment, and you may not be able to escape the way they see you. It is ultimately on you to define yourself. And as simplistic as that might be, there's nothing simple
about this film or about the performances. And one of the things that I was really glad Barry Jenkins said in my conversation there in praise of Harris, he mentioned how we're not privy to a lot of information about her, but it comes through in her performance, and that's so true, and that must be so hard for any actor or actress to pull off. But I felt like I knew
her entire backstory. I understood her relationship with men, I understood her problems as a mother raising this boy just from the performance, no flashbacks, no other dialogue to spell it out. It really does all come through in the experience of watching the performance.
And she does have the benefit, as you mentioned in the interview, of appearing in each of the three sections. So not she doesn't have huge part in each of those, but she does appear and makes a large impact in those scenes that she has. But really, every actor we see manages to make the most of their time on screen, and there's a continuity as you guys talked about among the three actors playing Chyron and how they manage to capture things that are similar in each section but also
make him distinct in each section. I think the through line again is the cinematography. When we see him in the same literal light, we connect him as being the same person. But I also want to take time to praise Mahashala Ali because that was the performance that I don't know why just and it's devastating when he disappears from the narratives, feel that absence in the other segments that he's not in because he makes such an impact in that first segment, and not because he gets any
grand standing scene. He's almost in the background, so quiet as this drug dealer who takes young little under his wings, and at first he's almost you wonder, is this a wolf in sheep's clothing? You just were trained by other movies, right, more than anything else.
To that, and this is a bad situation. He does hand either way.
No, he does not. I mean, you still get a sense that maybe this could go wrong near the end, even after you've seen him and really feel that his protection is genuine. There's that gorgeous scene where he takes little swimming and teaches him how to swim, and I think that's where we finally begin to understand that his
interest is genuine in the boy. But just the way Ali makes these quiet moments hit so hard again without pushing any sort of demonstrative personality, you would think, as this drug dealer who runs the block, the temptation would be to go big, right right, No, it's just his quiet presence and it's really one of my favorite performances of the year.
Yeah, I'm with you, And I think that gets back to what I was saying about Harris as well, where she's playing the crack addicted, negligent mother. We've seen a character like her in plenty of films. We've seen a character like Ali's playing one in a lot of films, that drug dealer, even the drug dealer with a heart of gold, which sure he is more or less as we get to know him. But there isn't anything cliche at all about these characters as it comes through in
these performances. And Ali's one of those faces where as soon as I saw him on screen, I felt comfortable. I knew I had seen him before. Recently, I looked up IMDb later and he's been in a bunch of things, but recently in the Hunger Games movies, and that's where I did have his face in my mind. But what about Andre Holland. Andre Holland, he plays Kevin. He's talking about your scenes, yeah, that third act of this film,
and he's someone again I'm watching him going. Not only is he remarkable, I could watch him and Ali in their scenes. Just give me a movie that's just in those their stories. I would so watch those films. I'd watch multiple films with those guys. But he was another face that seemed really familiar to me, and I couldn't place it, and then I looked up later he was in the Nick the Steven Soderberg series, and he's another
wonderful actor. And I wanted to remention the three titles that came up in the interview that Jenkins listed as the biggest influences on this film, because some people may not be familiar with them, or maybe they just went by too fast and they didn't catch the titles. But you talk about cinematography and the craft of that and
how that's art. Not as surprise that those elements would come through in this film when those influences were Clardoni's film Bo Trava Ho, Shau Shen's Three Times, and then wankar wi Is Happy Together?
Now Have you seen Happy Together?
Having Days of Being Wild was the last one I caught up.
So that's a Wankar Wai film. I regretfully haven't seen either. But a friend of mine who loves that film and who was at the same Moonlight screening I was, and who loved Moonlight, said that there's definitely some one car why happy to get our touches there, especially in that third sequence with Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland. We meet Andre Holland's character first through a phone conversation he's having. We hear his voice, and we only see parts of him as he's a cook, he's in a kitchen. We
don't actually see his face for a while. And my friend said that that is really something that is mirrored actually in the Wan car Why film. So I did want to mention that for people who love that film as well. A couple other things that came out of the Q and A after the screening that I thought were really fascinating.
I just wanted to throw out there. Trell.
Alvin McCraney, the playwright and writer of the original piece, was part of the Q and A, and he said something that I don't know that I would have been able to articulate at all, but absolutely felt in every moment of that third act with those actors, those grown up versions of these characters we've met earlier in the film.
He talks about how there's heightened tension and a sense of urgency in there because of the fact that they are what he termed real minutes, and what he was articulating or what I took away from it is that he was saying, when you're watching this film that starts with one version of this character in the past, and then we go to another version and we realize that he's older. We know we're watching this construct where we're very aware that this happened in another place and time,
and it's almost like it's not really happening now. And when we get to that version of him right now in the present day, these two characters meet again. Now we know that we're watching them starting a whole new trajectory, and we have no idea where it's going to go. It's where their lives in some way begin for us as viewers, and we have to fill in the blanks. And there is something inherently fascinating about that that does raise the stakes of two people mostly.
Just talking real minutes? Was that the phrase real minutes? Yeah, that's my impression, and while I was watching it is what incredible patience on the part of Jenkins to allow this reunion to spread out in what almost feels like real time. There's the phone call to set it up, and then when Sharon, who's now goes by the name Black,
shows up at the restaurant to meet with Kevin. He first says hello, and then Kevin goes to serve some other people, just minute boring things that I won't go on to describe except to say that it extends the scene so that it's not that all we get are there conversation together, and even their conversation is interrupted by Kevin having to go do some more work, and that does exactly what you're talking about. It breaks up the pattern of what we've seen before, where they're not vignettes,
they're not episodes. We're here with these two in the right now, and that lends it so much more drama.
Yeah, the other part, and this is something I certainly wouldn't have been aware of had Jenkins not expressed it and described it in answer to a question someone the audience who was aware of this style of music. But what he did with the score here in the music as well, it really comes through in that third sequence.
But you reflect back on.
How some of the more traditional movie score sounds are rendered in this film, where they seem distorted in some way, they seem like they are perfectly in keeping with this notion of a kind of heightened fever dream.
But I couldn't put my finger on it.
I didn't understand exactly what was being done to the sounds to manipulate them, to make them have that distorted, heightened effect. And what he described is this style of music that came out of Houston in the early nineties, mainly called chopped and screwed, and it's where you take hip hop and you remix it so that everything is slowed way down and it does have that distorting kind of effect. So we hear that in the songs that are playing in Black's car really the whole time that
we are with him. But then you realize that even the obos and the other strings and things that you're hearing in earlier portions of the film, they have that same technique applied to them to give it that effect.
Yeah, and it's just the use of those classical music instruments all together where you might not expect it. In the early segment where the boys are just out on the field, you know, rough housing and wrestling and messing around, we get this lyrical music to it that makes it suddenly seem as if it's something from a Malick film.
And I believe the same sort of music accompanies that swimming scene, which is some sort of you know, baptism moment taking place, and so these are other uses of the usual cinematic techniques in ways that maybe we've seen here or there, but not always applied to a story like this.
There are, of.
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