The Marma Spot:
Hello Barry. Please take a moment to introduce yourself.

Barry Jenkins:
Hello, my name is Barry Jenkins and I’m a filmmaker born and raised in
Miami, FL. As much as I enjoy making films, I sometimes think I enjoy
writing and talking about them even more. Film critic. That’s my dream job.

The Marma Spot:
How has your day been so far? What was the best thing that has
happened to you today?

Barry Jenkins:
My day’s been good, man. Been chipping away at this writer’s block and every day I find myself gettin’ a bit more done. Like taking a chisel to a glacier to make an ice sculpture, cause in the end that’s how right in form a script needs to be to work, an ice sculpture. Best thing that happened to me today happened just now. I’m sitting in the window of this coffee shop and just now a young woman walked by, she saw me through the glass and she stopped, she came into the cafe, tapped me on the shoulder and said hello. Said she’d seen the film and wanted to thank me for making it, for inspiring her to create something. That’d be the best thing that’d happen to me any day. When I was sittin’ around hoping and wanting  to make a film, that’s the kind of feeling I got from watching films of the people I admire, folks like Claire Denis and Lynne Ramsay. To have someone say that to you, man that’s love. ‘Cause it’s all a cycle, you put in your work, someone takes it in, gets a feeling and then they create there’s and the cycle keeps goin’.

The Marma Spot:
I learned about your film “Medicine for Melancholy” a short time before it was to be released in select theaters across America. I live in Milwaukee, WI and the movie wasn’t playing in any theater here but early this year it showed up for rent on my cable box. Could you talk a little about how providing it as a cable rental came to be?

Barry Jenkins:
IFC Films, the company that bought the film, has the day and date model ingrained in their business strategy for the exact reason you stated. The movie was on the big screen in New York, but even a cat in Milwaukee can download it On Demand in the comfort of their living room. This does two things, one, when the movie generates good press in a larger market like New York,
that fresh buzz can instantly pay off anywhere folks want to see the film. Without day and date, you may have to wait six months for the film to reach Milwaukee, at which point any buzz generated by a NY release has been lost. The more practical and relevant rationale goes to the indie music model: placing the movie On Demand erases the need to press a physical copy of the film, cutting costs for the distributor. For me, it’s ideal for folks to see the flick on the big screen with an audience but at the end of the day the most important is to get it seen however possible. Quiet as kept though, the movie is finally gonna screen in Milwaukee June 12th as part of the Bike-In Film Series. I wish I could make it out but a good friend of mine is getting married in Denver that weekend.

The Marma Spot:
I am interested in what the process was from your initial thoughts about the film to shooting the first scene?

Barry Jenkins:
It happened pretty fast. I wrote the script in April and we shot it in October. The time in between was all spent getting things together, organizing ourselves to be able to pull it off. As we got closer to the shooting date,
the responsibility ramped up, it got to the point where we’d put enough of ourselves into the process that not making the film would be more difficult than abandoning it.

The Marma Spot:
I know you went to the Film School of Florida State University and I was wondering what your fondest memory was?

Barry Jenkins:
Film school is like family. It’s damn close to being a blood relative the things you go through, the thirty-six hours with no-sleep to help your homeboy make a short film dealing with the death of his kid sister. Things like that bond you like family. My fondest memory is writing my first short film, My Josephine. The script was due the next day and I hadn’t even begun it, so I decided to lock myself in the computer lab for a night and make it happen. I had this image of two people in a laundrymat at night. Twelve hours later, I had the script for what ultimately convinced me I could indeed pursue this craft,
that I could realistically develop some skill at it.

The Marma Spot:
What is really interesting to me is the passion you had to get this project done. You guys made this movie with basically no budget. Could you talk
to us a bit about how you guys kept your costs so low?

Barry Jenkins:
We did everything ourselves. We cast the film, found the locations, built the website, designed the poster and the press kit, the trailer for the film, all of it was in house amongst friends. We couldn’t afford to hire anybody to take it on and IFC didn’t buy the film until after we’d begun to play festivals, so all of it we had to handle ourselves. When you’re doing everything on your own and not paying yourself, costs become pretty damn low!

The Marma Spot:
I am a firm believer that it’s not how much money you spend on getting a project done but it’s the passion you have while creating it and the commitment you have to keeping the idea or concept as true to your initial vision as possible. With that said, how close to the original script is the final cut of Medicine for Melancholy and how long did it take, start to finish,
to complete?

Barry Jenkins:
The original script is about 90% faithful to the final cut of Medicine For Melancholy. The divergences from one to the other have mostly to do with locations — writing for one place but adjusting the shoot to the availability of another — and performance: Wyatt and Tracey brought some wonderfully subtle details to the characters impossible to capture in a script. I wrote the film in April, we shot in October/November and the version you saw was more or less edited by New Years. That’s a hell of a turn around, we shot fifteen days and cut the movie in forty. When you’re moving that fast, the final product has to be faithful to the scripted version, there just isn’t time to contemplate and “find the movie in the post” as happens with more loosely scripted, adlibbed fare. We’re extremely proud of that aspect of the film, bringing the picture in as professionally as our resources would allow without losing any of the passion or thematic intent that led me write it. Regardless of the percieved quality of the film, which is anyone’s opinion, we’re damn proud of that.

The Marma Spot:
It’s funny to me that the male lead in the movie, Wyatt Cenac who played the role of Micah, is a standup comedian because while he did have comical points in the film he was also fairly serious. I mean compared to Tracey Heggins who played Jo, I’d peg him the “comic relief” but still he was serious. Since the film was written before you landed Wyatt, did you tone his comedic side down on purpose or was it something that just happened and also, did you add the parts that allow his natural comedic flair to shine after finding him?

Barry Jenkins:
We didn’t change the script at all to suit Wyatt and, at the same time,
we didn’t alter his personality to suit the character either. Wyatt’s a very gifted performer. There’s comedy written into that character and wherever possible, Wyatt took the barest thread of those elements and embellished them,
made them flourish. To me, it was his way of truly getting “into” the character, identifying with this aspect of a man who uses humor as a tool…in this case to crack the surface of our female character Jo’. Finding Wyatt was a wonderful accident, it is a serious role and thus I’d never considered casting a comedian. Once we saw Wyatt read though — and after seeing dozens of “real” actors — it became clear that he was far and away the best man for this part.

The Marma Spot:
It’s been a while since I saw the film so I might be a little rusty on this,
but there was a point in the film, I believe it was when they were walking through the museum, where Jo stopped and looked at or picked up a card
that had a Goethe quote on it. I have my own ideas about why that it there but I’d like to hear from you what the importance of that quote being placed there was?

Barry Jenkins:
That was first and foremost personal. That quote means a lot to me both as an individual as an artist which, of course, are one in the same. There were a lot of events leading to the making of this film, and one of them stemmed directly from finding that quote, using it as a directive to “be” what I wanted to be instead of “wanting” to be. Ultimately, these characters are parts of myself and as such I wanted to give them the same experience I felt I needed in the journey of realizing myself, becoming empowered with the aide of this quote.
I go back and forth because as a filmmaker, I think it’s formally soft-headed to cut to that quote. For me, if the moment played in the wide where we see Jo’ pick up the card but the information is hers and we never cut to the actual quote, that’s a formally rigorous way of handling that moment. But as a person, I walked into that museum after deciding to write this script and,
sure enough, I turned to the counter, picked up that card and there it was, this quote that had led me on this journey (I’d become familiar with the quote long before moving to San Francisco). Formalism be damned, finding the quote again in this museum so many years later at such a critical point in my life…as a human being I had to share this moment. This is why the quote
is there.

The Marma Spot:
I know you probably get asked this one a lot but as a graphic designer I was attracted to this film on multiple levels. The color and saturation created a feeling that worked so well with the content being handled that I can’t help but ask. Was it your intent to make the impact of the visuals match the impact of the content?

Barry Jenkins:
The idea was to conjure a way to visually communicate the characters’ emotional relation to the city, this “melancholy” mentioned in the title. In a way, it was just as much a critique on the cinematic representations of San Francisco, on the warm and sunny depictions of the Golden Gate Bridge so cliche of the films set here. In shooting the film, we super-saturated the images to capture as much color as possible. Then in post-production,
we systematically drew nearly all of it out. In her review, critic Karina Longworth posited that the film was 93 percent desaturated to reflect the city’s 7 percent African American population, an extraordinary assessment to make by eye! The truth is, the desaturation fluctuates slightly depending on the character’s interactions, but for the most part, the film is indeed 93 percent desaturated. Now, as much as we’d like to, we can’t take credit for consciously tinting the film with those stats in mind. Yet in the end,
the synergy of the ideas we were attempting and the reality they reflect amounted to a relationship between film and reality that brings thematic import to an aesthetic technique.

The Marma Spot:
Everything seemed to be handled so well. The title sequence, which I believe happens after or during the end of the cab ride, was also appealing to me.
Can you tell us a bit about that and who designed/edited it? Do they have a portfolio site up that you can direct us to?

Barry Jenkins:
The title sequence was meant to unfold over a still image of the city. There’s a shot where Jo’ and Micah walk over a hill and disappear beneath the horizon. That shot rolls for a full two minutes, the idea being to bring the credits up over this image and sound of the city. As we were cutting the film, we realized that while formally this was an intellectually interesting way to handle the sequence, there was also something distancing about it because again,
our two characters have disappeared yet we’re keeping the audience here to watch titles? A few days later as we were looking at the footage of Micah in the cab traveling home, I asked Nat, my film school friend and editor on the flick,
to put a song underneath  the traveling shots. He put that Casiotone song over it and right away, I never touch the keyboard when he’s editing but I literally reached out and hit the stop button, told him to put a random title card over the shot: we had our title sequence. The graphic design elements you mention in all came from Justin Barber, our producer and, again, an old film school friend. We sent him the edit with the music beneath the traveling shots and temp title cards (we were in San Francisco but Justin had gone back to LA after we finished shooting), and he integrated the cards into the enviornment having them spring from the asphalt, wipe into buildings and things like that. Justin built our website, our posters, all the design elements while acting as producer. This is how you keep costs low: find friends with talent who’ll go to hell and back for you. All these things people assume we had professionally done we did ourselves because we had to.

The Marma Spot:
The song that is used on for the trailer was immediately appealing to me because I had never heard it before. What was the process for selecting the soundtrack like? Were the musicians pretty open to you using their music in your film?

Barry Jenkins:
The majority of the music I had in mind while writing the script; I keep a running list of songs by indenpendent artists I think would work well in a film and eighty percent of the songs in the film come directly from that list.
Again, when you’re working with time constraints as we were, knowing the elements you need as far in advance as possible is crucial to getting things done. We didn’t know anyone when we made this film, and when we approached bands about using their music this was an asset. We’d contact bands on MySpace, through their websites, Facebook, however we could get to them. Most of the bands were down from jump when they realized how small we were, six friends from film school making a movie. Whenever they weren’t, we just moved on to another.

The Marma Spot:
Before I ever saw the film I wanted the soundtrack but it was never officially released. Are there any plans to officially release the soundtrack at all and if yes when can we expect it?

Barry Jenkins:
These bands are very savvy, and while they’re more than willing to be included in the film they’re not at all into being released as part of a soundtrack. From a business standpoint, I understand their reasoning,
it usually doesn’t help a band to have what might be their best track available as a stand alone in a package that relieves the need to purchase their album. There won’t ever be a soundtrack released for this film.

The Marma Spot:
When will “Medicine for Melancholy” be available for Purchase and will it be available on Blu-ray Disc as well as regular DVD?

Barry Jenkins:
The movie will finally be out on DVD this September. There definitely won’t be a Blu-Ray disc, we ain’t big tyme like that.

The Marma Spot:
I know you are busy know with the promotion of this movie but do you have any plans for or are you currently working on any other projects at the moment?

Barry Jenkins:
I would’ve gotten this interview done a long time ago if I wasn’t working on four things at once. It’s a blessing, I’ve always wanted to work as much as am right now in the craft I love. It’s a blessing.

The Marma Spot:
Is there anything else you would like to touch on that we haven’t already?

Barry Jenkins:
Not really man, except to state that whatever success the film has had is directly tied to folks like yourself taking an interest, spreading the word via blogs, tweets, Facebook, whatever. Again, it’s like a cypher, people just keep passing it on and we’re forever thankful.

The Marma Spot:
Is there any you would like to shout out?

Barry Jenkins:
Justin Barber, Nat Sanders, James Laxton, Cherie Saulter, Alejandro Cruz, Nikolas Zasimczuk, Wyatt Cenac, Tracey Heggins. That was the entirety of the crew that made this film a reality. It’s impossible to make a film that’s gotten the reach and exposure we’ve attained with so few crew, so small a group of people with no connections or cache. Or so I thought. Much love, thanks and respect to those folks, my friends who didn’t once tell me no when I said I wanted to make this film.

The Marma Spot:
Thanks for taking time out of your day to talk with us. peace+respect.

Barry Jenkins:
The same to you.

The Marma Spot:
Find out more about Barry Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy and other upcoming projects here.