THR Talks: Barry Jenkins and Nikole Hannah-Jones on the Nuances of Storytelling and Trauma

HANNAH-JONES I don’t know if you saw this TikTok video that went viral a couple of weeks ago of this young man who said, “No more slavery movies. I don’t want to ever see another slavery movie again. I want to see Black wizards.” When I first saw it, I was like, “How disrespectful of our stories,” when I know how poorly we’re taught about this.

But when I thought more about it, what I really think this young man was saying was, he’s tired of seeing movies where we have no agency, right? It’s always about what white people have done to us and us absorbing what white people are doing to us and us having no control. Even in Harriet, she’s mystical. When we’re fighting back in the movie, it’s because she’s having spells — it’s not her own agency and wit and intellect that’s liberating her and other people. You are very intentionally trying to show that agency. So when people say we’ve had enough slavery movies, where do you think that is coming from?

JENKINS I think 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 recontextualizing our ancestors — because they’ve been contextualized.

HANNAH–JONES We have not long been in control of the narrative around slavery and telling the stories. There’s a reason there are hardly any films about slave rebellions, right? There’s a reason we get taught about the French Revolution and not the Haitian Revolution. So many Black people feel demeaned and degraded by the history of slavery, of Jim Crow. But I think they feel that way because they’re taught that we just took it. That we didn’t exercise agency in ways big and small. And there’s so little of our, like, we had joy, we had love. Despite everything that was being done to us, we were fully human, but you rarely see that rendered onscreen.

Let me ask you — can you tell Black stories and somehow pretend that race and racism in America didn’t exist?

JENKINS I think you can, but the story has got to be inside, inside, inside. That’s what I love about making movies. Anything’s possible. You can [tell those stories]. But I think we have to acknowledge that this is in the foundation of the American DNA.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...es-1234950961/