MIAMI — It had just finished raining, in that swift and furious Miami way, and the director Barry Jenkins and the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney were heading through the Liberty Square housing projects.
The two men strolled past crumpled snack wrappers and empty Olde English beer cans, broken toys and charcoal-colored rat traps. Then Mr. Jenkins stepped onto the patchy grass of the courtyard that sits between a grouping of desperate-looking buildings, low-slung and austere, the type of stingy architecture we’ve come to equate with housing for the poor. He stopped, raised his arms and spread them wide.
“This is the world of ‘Moonlight,’” he said, smiling, referring to their widely acclaimed film. “It’s beautiful, right? When the sun comes …show more content…
But amid the heavily wired windows and dingy facades, some families wrapped their doors with Christmas paper and bows, and holiday lights blinked along window frames. Clothes hung from lines flapped and danced in the wind. Little girls with brightly colored barrettes in their hair skipped along the sidewalk.
This is the neighborhood where the two men were raised, coming of age during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s. The men did not meet until they were adults, but when Mr. McCraney, 36, and Mr. Jenkins, 37, teamed up to make “Moonlight,” they saw the story — about a boy with an addicted mother, who grows up struggling to understand what it means to be gay — through the same eyes.
Barry Jenkins is compact, bald, bespectacled and bookishly handsome. Tarell Alvin McCraney is much taller, with an immaculately groomed beard and stylish green Adidas sneakers — handsome, too, but in a more striking way. Mr. Jenkins is straight; Mr. McCraney said he considers himself
The two men strolled past crumpled snack wrappers and empty Olde English beer cans, broken toys and charcoal-colored rat traps. Then Mr. Jenkins stepped onto the patchy grass of the courtyard that sits between a grouping of desperate-looking buildings, low-slung and austere, the type of stingy architecture we’ve come to equate with housing for the poor. He stopped, raised his arms and spread them wide.
“This is the world of ‘Moonlight,’” he said, smiling, referring to their widely acclaimed film. “It’s beautiful, right? When the sun comes …show more content…
But amid the heavily wired windows and dingy facades, some families wrapped their doors with Christmas paper and bows, and holiday lights blinked along window frames. Clothes hung from lines flapped and danced in the wind. Little girls with brightly colored barrettes in their hair skipped along the sidewalk.
This is the neighborhood where the two men were raised, coming of age during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s. The men did not meet until they were adults, but when Mr. McCraney, 36, and Mr. Jenkins, 37, teamed up to make “Moonlight,” they saw the story — about a boy with an addicted mother, who grows up struggling to understand what it means to be gay — through the same eyes.
Barry Jenkins is compact, bald, bespectacled and bookishly handsome. Tarell Alvin McCraney is much taller, with an immaculately groomed beard and stylish green Adidas sneakers — handsome, too, but in a more striking way. Mr. Jenkins is straight; Mr. McCraney said he considers himself