Barry Jenkins, Oscar winner and director of Amazon’s The Underground Railroad series, exchanged ideas with Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times‘ The 1619 Project, which reframes slavery and the Black American narrative.
The Underground Railroad, a 10-part series adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead, debuts on Prime Video on May 14.
BARRY JENKINS When I was a kid, I was always fascinated with the Underground Railroad. When I first heard the words “Underground Railroad,” I really believed that we had built this network of trains underground. Then you learn what the actual Railroad is, but I always held on to that feeling. I was a big fan of Colson Whitehead’s work. And when I heard that he had written a book about this, I assumed he was going to do something with the conceit to make the railroad real. I just felt like, “This is the one,” because I always wanted to do something that involved the story of our ancestors.
It’s incumbent upon us — the work that you’ve been doing is filling in some of these gaps in our public consciousness. I’m making a show where the Underground Railroad is a real thing, so I’m like confusing people, but hopefully, it will drive them back to the actual history.
JENKINS To feel very different, that was kind of easy. This is just such a whole different world than anything I’ve worked on. I was able to create these worlds and whatnot by going out on the weekend and getting a whiskey with a good friend; I had to bring myself back to myself. And especially because we filmed the entire show in Georgia, we were walking these spaces that my ancestors walked and there were all these wonderful Civil War actors, all these white gentlemen with old guns in these battlefields and they pretend they’re having these battles. There were also Black folks in the South who were preserving these traditions of our ancestors. We had so many of them who came down to make sure we were being accurate.
Film is a very seductive, powerful medium, and these images we’re dealing with are very powerful as well. They’re very triggering and incendiary. I was always fearful I was going to lose my focus over where the moral and ethical line was — being forthright in these depictions, but also not allowing them to devour myself or the audience, especially the actors who were creating them. I had to have two minds, one mind of the artist: I’m just here to make a work of art. The other mind was almost like an ethicist, where I have to make sure I’m doing this for the right reason in the right way. I’m only taking it as far as necessary. And it created this scenario that felt like I was making two films at once
The one movie is the story of Cora Randall, who’s on this journey. It’s this big adventure, but it’s rooted in the condition of American slavery. That was the one movie. Then this other movie: I’m also aware of the power of the possibility of doing harm with these images. And so I’m making that in my head — I had to see it in order to not do it. Then there was this third thing that happened, which was [about] disconnection and erasure. I feel like we haven’t been allowed to really see our ancestors.
The historical record has systematically erased them, but even image-wise, there are very few portraits, very few photos of our ancestors. Here I am with all these tools, all this equipment, all these people. And then there were all these wonderful actors and especially the background actors, our advisers who were giving my ancestors a body and voice. So in addition to making the show that was in front of me, I would sometimes stop filming the scenes and just turn the camera on our actors.
A few of those images have made it into the show, but we have hours of them. I created this thing called The Gaze. Because every time I have a conversation like this, I end up talking about the white gaze. Why has no one ever asked me about the Black gaze? I’ve got to make sure I’m not making this from the white gaze.
JENKINS We’ve seen these images, unfortunately, of our ancestors lynched during Jim Crow. It’s always the aftermath and someone suspended above a crowd. Oftentimes these people were looking at us, the white gaze … there’s a certain brutality and horror in the fact that these people are so proud of what they’ve done. But I feel like we don’t get the other side of it. We haven’t seen what it’s like to suspend a man by his wrists and separate his flesh with the whip. It’s not just that the whip is hurting that man. It is doing things to his flesh. It was tough, man. I will say, when we filmed it, it’s visual effects. There’s no blood, no fire, the guy’s in a harness — wonderful actor.
So it was upon me to say how far we’re going to take this. Visual effects-wise, we could have taken it much farther. It’s onscreen for the briefest of moments.
I wanted to give this man agency, because typically in these films, when these things happen, people are responding to acute trauma, they’re screaming in pain, or begging for their lives. In this case, he speaks to his fellow men and women who are forced to witness. He says, “No more masters, no more slaves.” And then to the brutalizer, he says, “God damn you.” I thought, “If I can just give this man some agency, maybe I can unearth something else in this moment that we aren’t often privy to, but I have to do it.”
I can’t tell anyone what the line is for them — where they’ve been forced to witness too much trauma, where they’ve been forced to witness too many atrocities visited upon Black bodies — they have to draw that line for themselves. There’s this and the ending of Moonlight — the two most difficult choices I have ever had to make.
JENKINS In the North Carolina episode, we originally thought we would reflect that; it was in the book. This is what they do: After these lynchings, they collect souvenirs and put them on display, as a fear tactic and hate tactic. And I thought, “That’s too far, that choice.”
JENKINS It is coming from very constrained versions or depictions that we’ve received. I wanted to make this a television show because the hard images, the brutality, is so loud. If you house that in a two-hour film, those things are going to overwhelm the viewer. With 10 hours, 10 episodes, you have the ability to compound those hard images with soft images, to give another perspective and to build agency into these moments.
I didn’t see that TikTok video. But when our trailer released, oh my God, Twitter gathered me the hell up. “Why is Barry Jenkins profiting off our pain?” The one that got my attention was someone said, “Oh, I don’t want to see any more shows about slaves; I want positive imagery.” If you unpack that sentence, it’s saying that anything that involves my ancestors is inherently negative. That’s where I draw the line. That’s where I think this idea of erasure comes into play. I wanted to understand the comment, but I also wanted to go, “No.” I also realize people were making these comments without having seen the show, but I thought, in some ways our ancestors were wizards — not like Harry Potter. If you do the research and understand what this was, you and I even having this conversation is impossible. Even in making the show, I hope people will understand that this is just us re-contextualizing our ancestors — because they’ve been contextualized.
JENKINS We were in preproduction when that happened. I’m always trying to go, “How do I understand what this person is saying?” Because I remember being a kid and we were like, “Oh, if I was a slave, I’d have been out of the house, I’d have ran, they’d have to kill me,” you know, the dumb shit you say as a kid. I thought, “Is that what he’s saying?”
Then I tried to unpack it, what choices that my ancestors had. Doing this research, you understand how militaristic this system was, whether the weaponry or communication — if everyone had taken up arms, everyone had rebelled, everyone would have perished. It was just such a virulent system, such a well-oiled system.
These people were herbalists. They could have systematically wasted themselves away, if they wanted to, if they decided life wasn’t worth living — but there were children everywhere. I thought, “Oh, the choice was to live and protect these children,” because somehow they had faith that, eventually, those children would beget children who would not be under the yoke of slavery and who could perfect themselves as citizens of this country or people of this world.
So in the show, we have children everywhere. As you go on, you realize it’s kind of about parenting. I decided this show is about honoring what I think is the greatest act of collective parenting the world has ever seen. Two decades later, there were men born into slavery, who witnessed atrocities and horrors of fatalities, who were sitting in Congress, actively trying to work through legislation — as you have said — to help make this democracy a better democracy. How was that possible? Through the greatest act of collective parenting the world has ever seen.
JENKINS These projects take so long to come to fruition. We made the show over the last four years when “Make America great again” was the dominating statement in the public culture, yet interest must have been seeded the previous eight years, when a Black man was in the White House. Many of these projects, whether it’s Watchmen, Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country, Underground — maybe seeing that symbol in the White House made us all feel like, “OK, this is the time.” Now, this country, the world, was ready to acknowledge the true, full facet of this history, and of our role in building this history.
At the same time, there’s been this pushback, because things open and then they contract. We’re in this great contraction right now. It makes me more compassionate to people who feel like maybe they aren’t ready or they don’t want to see things like this, but it also strengthens me in knowing that, no, because there’s so much pushback, we have to push forward, put these things into the public consciousness. Otherwise, people are going to very conveniently forget and very conveniently double down on this failure to acknowledge.
