Moonlight, a drama about the coming of age of a young, black, gay man, was named best picture of 2016 after some confusion when the wrong winner, LaLa Land, was announced. Moonlight had garnered eight Oscar nominations, walking away also with Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor wins. The critically acclaimed film by writer-director Barry Jenkins is the first LGBTQ film to take the top prize at the Academy Awards and only the second black-themed film to win Best Picture–12 Years a Slave captured that honor in 2014.
Moonlight’s highly cinematic story is told in three distinct acts, with three different actors playing the main character named Chiron. It is based on the semi-autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. McCraney, 36, is the incoming chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, effective July 1, 2017. BlackEnterprise.com caught up with him to discuss his Academy Award winning inspired story.
What is the origin behind Moonlight?
The original script In The Moonlight Black
How much is Chiron’s story similar to your life story?
It is probably one of the few pieces that I have written that has a great deal of my life in it. To that end, the film is definitely a hybrid between Barry and myself [Jenkins is straight, McCraney is gay]. A good two-thirds of it are actual events that happened to me. Barry constructed an incredible third act that is really powerful. Both of us grew up with mothers addicted to crack Cocaine. Both of us dealt with the kind of poverty and rough neighborhood [depicted in the film].
Was Juan, the drug dealer and surrogate father to Chiron, based on someone in your life?
Yes, the character Juan is based on a man named Blue
Was bullying a big part of your story and did you ever have to defend against an attacker?
You always have that moment where you have to figure out is it smarter to fight back or to run. When you do fight back oftentimes the systems are not put in place to ensure that entire narrative is being shared. [Teachers and administrators] are not watching who has been bullied for how long and for what. They are mostly just looking at who is fighting when [it happens] and not the thread. This is LBGTQ students for sure, but kids in general are dealing with this kind of excessive bullying that leads to retaliation. We see what happens to Chiron when he stands up to bullies and the toll it takes on his life.
What were you hoping audiences walked away with from this film?
We are having some incredible conversations now. This is a piece that I think allows us to start the journey towards some healing but we have talk about real important and heavy [issues] around masculinity, femininity, misogyny, sexual assault on women, drug addiction, femmephobia, intersection of poverty, stigmatizing and the oppression of LGBT people of color.