Barry Jenkins almost didn’t make it into the Disney family.
The Oscar winner told Vulture that he assumed he would turn down directing “The Lion King” prequel “Mufasa.” Yet, it was the strength of screenwriter Jeff Nathanson’s script that inspired Jenkins to helm his first (and most likely, only) virtual production.
“My thought was, ‘Oh, I’ll just give this a few days and I’ll call my agent and tell them I’ve read it and I’m not going to do this project,’” Jenkins said about receiving the offer to direct in 2020. However, after reading the first 50 pages of the script, Jenkins said to his partner, fellow director Lulu Wang, “Holy shit, this is good.”
And then came the backlash to the esteemed auteur turning to Disney.
“On what planet do I, Mr. ‘Moonlight,’ make a prequel to ‘The Lion King’? When I took this job, the idea was ‘What does Barry Jenkins know about visual effects? Why the hell would he do this movie?’ In addition to ‘Why would he be making The Lion King?’” Jenkins said. “I think part of that I found very invigorating. People make these things, you know, with computers. So anybody should be able to do this. Anybody, right? There’s nothing physically that says I am incapable of doing this.”
Jenkins’ longtime producer Adele Romanski added that the IP film “just didn’t feel like our kind of filmmaking, so there was a large forum for talking about the ways we were going to push it forward if we were going to do it.”
Romanski continued, “Had any of us done a virtual film, a franchise film, a Disney film, a Disney legacy film? No! But isn’t it kind of boring to do the same thing over and over again?”
After “Mufasa,” though, Jenkins is ready to return to his indie roots. The director said that all-digital filmmaking is just “not my thing.”
“I want to work the other way again, where I want to physically get everything there,” Jenkins said. “I always believe that what is here is enough, and let me just figure out what is the chemistry to make alchemy? How can these people, this light, this environment, come together to create an image that is moving, that is beautiful, that creates a text that is deep enough, dense enough, rich enough to speak to someone?”
His Alvin Ailey biopic is still in the works at Fox Searchlight since 2019, according to producer Romanski. And that feature will not have as big of a blockbuster budget as “Mufasa,” despite also being within the Disney/Fox conglomerate. Romanski said the film is “not going to be a $250 million movie, right? So we’re going to have to go back to embracing a much more limited tool set on that film.”
