NEW YORK, NY.- By his own rough count, filmmaker Barry Jenkins has seen the 1994 animated movie “The Lion King” around 155 times, many of those viewings with two young nephews and a well-worn VHS tape.
So when he was asked to direct the latest installment of the franchise, “Mufasa: The Lion King,” he was already pretty familiar with the story.
Who isn’t? “When anybody takes their baby and holds it up like this” — he paused to raise his arms overhead, cupping his hands as if presenting a small but celebrated cub — “you know it’s ‘The Lion King,’” he said. “There are very few things that have that level of cultural penetration.”
Familiarity aside, very few things in Jenkins’ career would seem to point to a big Disney animated feature. The director, 44, broke out in 2016 with “Moonlight,” a small-budget coming-of-age film set in Miami at the height of the crack epidemic. It went on to win three Oscars, including one for best picture that, notoriously, was announced only when a “La La Land” producer realized onstage that the wrong movie (his) had been called. Jenkins followed that up in 2018 with “If Beale Street Could Talk,” a romantic drama based on the 1974 James Baldwin novel about childhood sweethearts confronting a nightmare when the young man is unjustly accused of rape.
And then Jenkins directed the 10-episode 2021 miniseries “The Underground Railroad,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which imagines the abolitionist-era network of escape routes as a literal railway system. “In terms of emotional scope and just the practical logistics of filmmaking, that was by far the most massive thing I’d done,” he said.
“Mufasa,” at least in terms of its fandom and the accompanying scrutiny, is likely to be even bigger. Disney is planning a December release for the film, which tells the story of how Mufasa grew up and came to power before siring Simba. It will serve as a prequel to three previous “Lion King” iterations: the original movie from 1994, the 2019 remake and the long-running Tony Award-winning musical. “I don’t know if pressure is the right word,” Jenkins said, “but you do go, OK, I have to live up to this standard that was set by these people who made these films before me.”
In a video interview from West Hollywood, California, Jenkins talked about why he wanted to take on the movie after the string of years he spent on “Moonlight,” “Beale Street” and “Underground Railroad”; the perhaps not-so-surprising pushback to an indie filmmaker working with Disney; and what he loves and has learned from the original. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: Why did you want to make this film?
A: I found the story incredibly moving. There’s this character who we know of as inherently great or inherently royal, and we get to really go in and explore how this person came to be. We’re also looking at what makes some people good and others evil, and how people aren’t fundamentally one or the other.
But then the other part of it is, I came off eight or nine consecutive years of working in the same mode, on material that was of sort of the same tone. I just really wanted to do something different, and this was the most different thing I could do.
Q: I think I’ve seen ‘The Lion King’ maybe three times. What do you see on the 155th viewing?
A: For one, what it takes to make a really great song.
Q: Do you have a favorite?
A: “Hakuna Matata,” of course. “Hakuna Matata’”s awesome, man. But then, “Circle of Life” is “Circle of Life.”
Q: Disney fans are a different breed. Were you concerned about coming to such a beloved franchise and getting grief from superfans?
A: I wasn’t, and maybe naively so. To me, this is a character like any other, although you have to acknowledge that, yes, this character is beloved. People still show the 1994 animated film to their kids. Every week, the Broadway show is sold out. When I booked this gig, I’d never seen the Broadway musical, and it is just beyond moving to sit in a room full of kids on a Sunday matinee and to hear the hush that falls over the crowd as the performers come out on stilts for the opening number.
Q: When word got out that you were directing this film, you got some heat about it. Can you tell me about that?
A: I was up very early in the morning, and a young person, because I have all these followers on my Twitter who are young filmmakers, young film fans, made a comment. I responded, thought nothing of it, got on a work call, and then realized that all these people had taken up my response.
Q: Did you know the person?
A: No, it was just one of my followers. A young follower.
Q: In response, you posted some previous films that you had worked on, one featuring kids starring in a scary movie that the students had produced themselves, another with kids sending wedding greetings to a beloved instructor.
A: I’ve always done these little things, little side projects with youth groups, especially when I was living in the Bay Area before I moved back to LA to make “Moonlight.” And I got a really wonderful energy out of those things. If anything, they were probably the primary sort of probing ground for what I might end up doing on “Mufasa: The Lion King.” And so it just felt like making this film wasn’t my first time working with something that was specifically engineered toward a younger audience. I wanted to show that and illustrate it.
Q: Was it nice to have an excuse to show those again?
A: I think in a sense it was useful. Some of those pieces I hadn’t seen in a while, and I think they’re really beautiful. There’s this one where a friend of mine was teaching a class in Philadelphia of primarily African American students, and I did an interview where they sent me questions and I responded to them, and she filmed them watching the answers. It was really powerful for me to see how someone in my position, speaking these children’s names and taking their questions seriously, how meaningful that could be.
Q: There seems to be a run of creative indie film directors doing big Hollywood projects: Chloé Zhao doing “Eternals,” Lee Isaac Chung doing “Twisters,” Greta Gerwig and “Barbie,” and now you. Is this a trend?
A: I don’t think it’s a trend. I mean, we don’t all get together in a room and decide that we’ve got to make these movies. But I did speak to Ryan Coogler, who’s a friend of mine, before I took this film, and with Chloé to get their read on what doing a film like this would be like. One thing I’ll say is, our generation of filmmakers grew up with these stories. I watched “The Lion King” 155 times. Chloé Zhao grew up reading these comics. Same thing for Ryan Coogler. Lee Isaac Chung, who did “Twisters,” grew up in the Midwest. I think sometimes you could succumb to the expectation of, oh, a filmmaker who made this type of film doesn’t make that type of film, or shouldn’t. But if that’s the only reason you’re not making a film, and something in your instinct or your gut or just your appetite tells you that you should or that you’re ready to or that you want to, you should go and do it.
Q: Why do you think studios are coming to indie filmmakers to do these big-budget pictures?
A: Maybe they feel like the spectacle is not enough, and they wish that their films could be more emotional, or wish the drama felt more real, or that audiences cared about the characters in a more intense way. So maybe it’s smart to go get people like Chloé and Lee Isaac, who’ve proven they can do those things, and have them learn the skills to do this other thing, because maybe the studios feel it’s more difficult to do one than the other. But I don’t know. I’m not the studio.
Q: Well, I’m glad I asked you. You’re probably right.
A: I just took the job! I didn’t create it.
Q: Do you have a favorite scene in the original movie?
A: The aftermath of the stampede. It’s amazing to see something that is so intensely, acutely filled with grief, but it’s very safe for children to engage with, to really explore those emotions. It’s like a magic trick that the film was capable of doing that.
Q: That scene often makes lists of the most traumatizing scenes from Disney movies.
A: But there’s also all these videos on TikTok and Instagram of parents filming their children watching that scene, and then immediately the child turns to the parent, and it’s clear they’re waiting for an explanation for what they just saw. So even though it’s a traumatizing scene — I’m using your word — it’s a very intense scene. It’s a scene that they can share with their parents, and then their parents can talk about it with them and help them through it.
We’re all going to lose people. We’re all going to experience sadness, heartbreak, betrayal. We’re also going to experience success and joy and accomplishment. I think doing so within a story format that you can share with friends, with family, with your parents, is really powerful. Especially now, with life being so fractured, we’re all looking for these common places where we can experience something communally and hopefully learn and grow from it.
Q: Well, I’ll use your word. Is there a similarly intense moment like that in your film?
A: Of course! Of course. We live in the legacy of “The Lion King.” Of course there is.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
