Rolling Stone Menu The Rolling Stone Interview: Barry Jenkins The Oscar-winning director on his adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ‘The Underground Railroad,’ the beauty of black bodies, his unique path to Hollywood, and much more By Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad depicts both the savage reality of American slavery and the danger of escaping it. Much like Gulliver’s Travels, the story takes its fugitive protagonist, Cora, on a fantastical tour through different states via a literal locomotive. Each stop along the way features horrors reminiscent of real-life atrocities. South Carolina is host to a Tuskegee-like experiment on supposedly free Negroes. North Carolina resembles both Nazi Germany and the early Oregon Territory, outlawing the existence of black people altogether. It is a world that requires a deft hand to commit to film, and perhaps no one is better suited than Barry Jenkins. Having brought into vivid reality both the Miami projects of his youth (in the Oscar-winning