How Barry Jenkins Turned His James Baldwin Obsession Into His Next Movie

This interview contains some mild spoilers for the film If Beale Street Could Talk.

Two years after his paradigm-shifting Oscar success with Moonlight, the director Barry Jenkins is making a triumphant return with If Beale Street Could Talk, a delicate but devastating adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel of the same title. Set in 1970s Harlem, the film stars KiKi Layne and Stephan James as two young lovers named Tish and Fonny, whose relationship is pulled apart after Fonny is falsely accused of rape and imprisoned. Jenkins handles the duo’s connection with the same poeticism and grace he’s displayed in his other work. He translates Baldwin’s prose with an ease that’s surprising, given that this is the first fictional film based on one of the author’s novels.

Ahead of the movie’s release, The Atlantic spoke with Jenkins about why this film was so much harder to make than Moonlight, how he brought the particular lushness of Harlem to life, and why he thinks of Beale Street as Baldwin’s take on a Law & Order episode. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

David Sims: I know you’ve loved the novel for a long time, but when did it occur to you that it’d be possible to adapt it?

I think because I never expected that we’d actually get to make it, a lot of the more pressure-filled aspects of it weren’t there. At literally the same time that , I wrote this. Back in 2011, 2012, I was in this thing I called “filmmaker therapy.” I had been at a program in New York City—this company called Cinereach does this thing called the . So I would come out from San Francisco every two months, sit on the couch at Cinereach, and spill my