NEW YORK (AP) — Over the four years he’s spent working on “Mufasa: The Lion King,” Barry Jenkins estimates that he’s been asked why he wanted to make it at least 400 times.
The question of why Jenkins, the filmmaker of “Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “The Underground Railroad,” would want to jump into the big-budget, photorealistic animated Disney world of lions and tigers has bedeviled much of a film world that reveres him.
Countless other directors had made leaps into CGI-heavy blockbuster-making before. But Jenkins’ decision was uniquely analyzed – perhaps because there’s no more heralded, or trusted, filmmaker today under the age of 50 than Jenkins.
“It just thought it was something I could not deny,” Jenkins says. “I had to do it.”
“Mufasa,” which opens in theaters Friday, brings together movie worlds that ordinarily stay very far apart. On the one hand, you have the Oscar-winning, 45-year-old director of some of the most luminous and lyrical films of the past decade. On the other, you have the intellectual property imperatives of today’s Hollywood. What happens when they collide?
The result in “Mufasa,” about the lion cub’s orphaned upbringing set both before and after the events of Jon Favreau’s 2019 remake of “The Lion King,” is an uncommonly textured and thoughtfully rendered spectacle that, Jenkins maintained in a recent interview, has more in common with “Moonlight” than you’d think. Made with virtual filmmaking tools, “Mufasa” essentially plopped one of the most groundbreaking filmmakers working today into an all-digital playground, with a budget more than a hundred times that of “Moonlight.”
Often in “Mufasa,” you can feel Jenkins’ sensibility warming and enhancing what can, in other less sensitively commanded films, feel soulless. With songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Mufasa” works as a big-movie entertainment and, even more surprisingly, as a Barry Jenkins film.
“My head was spinning when this started,” Jenkins says. “It actually reminded me of when I first got into filmmaking. This felt oddly enough very similar to that first experience. You can sort of run away from that newness and be intimidated by it, or you can embrace it, learn the things you don’t know and then start to bend it.”
It’s also an experience that has quite evidently changed Jenkins, exponentially expanding his filmmaking tool kit while opening his eyes to new ways of making movies. “It was almost like learning a new language,” Jenkins says of the process. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.