The Importance Of Barry Jenkins' The Underground Railroad: An Interview With Editor Joi McMillon thekoalition.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thekoalition.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In my years of doing interviews and roundtables and Q&A’s for the various films we’ve made, there is one question that recurs. No matter the length of the piece or the tone of the room, eventually, inevitably, I am asked about the white gaze. It wasn’t until a very particular interview regarding The Underground Railroad that the blindspot inherent in that questioning became clear to me: never, in all my years of working or questioning, had I been set upon about the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled.
I don’t remember when we began making the piece you see here. Which is not and should not be considered an episode of The Underground Railroad. It exists apart from that, outside it. Early in production, there was a moment where I looked across the set and what I saw settled me: our background actors, in working with folks like Ms. Wendy and Mr. and Mrs. King – styled and dressed and made up by Caroline, by Lawrence and Donni – I looked across the set and realized I was looking at my ancestors, a group of people whose images have been largely lost to the historical record. Without thinking, we paused production on The Underground Railroad and instead harnessed our tools to capture portraits of… them.
*Director
Barry Jenkins has released another teaser called “In Aeternum” as part of his upcoming Amazon Original series “The Underground Railroad” chronicles, based on
Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel.
The clip above brings you further into the world of the series by providing glimpses of various character’s journeys and a sampling of composer
Nicholas Britell’s singular score.
“As we kept editing more and more on the show, there’d be these moments that, as I was watching them, my mind would immediately start unseeing them, and I thought, ‘I think there’s something here’,” said Britell. “So I was literally walking out of the office on one Friday and said to Daniel Morfesis, who cut this piece, ‘Here’s a song. Listen to it, and I want to come in Monday, and all I want to see are images played in reverse. And the catch is those images have to narratively say as much in reverse as they do going forward.’ And so it kind of came out of my own emotional response to making the show.”