How Barry Jenkins and Colson Whitehead Made The Underground Railroad
Barry Jenkins wanted The Intuitionist first. This was before he directed Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk and became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after filmmakers. Even before he made his first feature, 2008’s Medicine for Melancholy, the director wanted to make a movie of Colson Whitehead’s first book. “I tried to track Colson down way back in the mid-2000s. I didn’t have any money to option the book, and I didn’t have any way to actually get to Colson,” he says. “But that was my first attempt.”
It took a decade—during which Jenkins, 41, became an Oscar winner and was hired to direct Disney’s Lion King prequel, and Whitehead, 51, won two Pulitzers and landed on the Time 100, for which Oprah Winfrey wrote, “Colson has a vision about what it means to make art”—for Jenkins to get his hands on The Underground Railroad, Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book about an escaped slave named Cora making her way to freedom on a literal railroad. Their collaboration is worth the wait.
Jenkins has turned the novel into a searing, emotional epic. It’s his version of a road movie, stretched across five states and 10 episodes (it premieres on Amazon Prime May 14). There are striking departures from (and additions to) the novel, but Whitehead, whose next book, Harlem Shuffle, will be published later this year, seems to delight in a new reading of his work.
The Underground Railroad is an epic meeting of two artistic minds. Jenkins is effusive in his praise for Whitehead, who’s an executive producer on the series and who visited the Georgia set where his book’s world was made real. “This is gold!” Jenkins exclaims of the novel’s rich details. “It was all there [in the book]. It was all in there.” Whitehead was just as moved when he visited the set. “I spent the last few years not thinking about [The Underground Railroad]. When I came back into that world, I was confronted with the fact that there’s this beautiful version of my book coming out. It’s really astounding and moving in so many different ways.”
Here, the men discuss the adaptation, finding themselves in the work, and—despite their mutual admiration—the one idea to which Whitehead said no.
I’d like to start with how you two were introduced, and how your first conversation about The Underground Railroad went.
COLSON WHITEHEAD: When the novel came out, in August 2016, it was making the rounds; a few people were interested, and Barry was one of them. It was a month before Moonlight hit the festivals, so I hadn’t seen it yet. When I did, it was so great and lovely. I immediately wanted to talk to him. I had never interviewed a director, because no one was interested in my work before. I didn’t know what to ask. I remember specifically being like, “Are there any slave movies or TV shows that you would use as a model?” And Barry was like, “Slave movies? No, I was thinking There Will Be Blood and The Master, by Paul Thomas Anderson.” I was just like, “Okay, sounds good.”
BARRY JENKINS: I remember being really nervous, because I had explored The Intuitionist so many years ago and didn’t get any traction. I also realized that a lot of people were probably talking to Colson about The Underground Railroad. I remember being pretty straightforward, saying, “I don’t want to make this as a feature film. I want to do it as a limited series. I think that’s the best way in terms of conveying the scope of the book to the screen.” I think Colson appreciated me being upfront in that way. Because there’s a version of that conversation where, as a director, I’m trying to woo you and figure out what you want, so I can then understand how to say back to you everything you want.
I have this idea that you both gave this work long gestation periods. Colson, you had the idea for the book in 2000 but didn’t write it until 2015. Barry, you optioned this before Moonlight opened, and made a whole other movie in the middle.
CW: I had the idea in the spring of 2000 of making the Underground Railroad real, but I was 30 years old and didn’t think I was mature enough to write about slavery in the way that it needed to be treated. It took 14 years before I felt that I could do it, but I was still scared. I think that fear, for me, is good quality control.
BJ: It was a much shorter gestation period for me. Once Moonlight premiered and all the talking happened, this became a reality. I talked to a few other directors, Steven Soderbergh and Cary Fukunaga, and they both told me, “This is going to kick your ass. And there are going to be moments when it seems literally impossible.” And yet, I knew that having this on the horizon was the best thing for me, because it scared the shit out of me. And having those dudes, both of whose work I respect, tell me, “No matter how hard you prepare for this, you can never prepare for this.” There was something very energizing about that.
How much of yourselves, if any, did both of you see in Cora?
CW: There’s the least amount of me in Cora, which is probably why it’s my most popular book. I think when I’m pushed to make characters who have no resemblance to me, it’s a little bit harder, and I think they come out better, frankly. I can’t imagine what it was like to cast her.
BJ: Cora is me in the sense that I went through the first 24 years of my life not understanding why my relationship with my mom was the way it was. From all the Moonlight press, people know my mom was addicted to drugs and we never lived together. For the longest time I thought it was something deficient in me or something I had done. I learned, when I was 24, the story of my mom living with my father for the 10 years before I was born, and the two of them separating because of a supposed act of infidelity. And this broken heart was the thing that sort of fractured our family.
I remember getting to the end of the book and finally learning the story of [Cora’s mother] Mabel and understanding that Cora had been on this journey, and been driven by this animus, this hurt. The hurt wasn’t misplaced, because she was right to feel abandoned, but the abandonment was caused by something that was beyond any of their control. And I was like, “Holy shit, this is me.” That’s when everything just clicked.
What opportunities did you have to collaborate on the series? Colson, how involved did you want to be?
CW: Barry would talk to me about once a year. [Television is] a different skill, and I respect that. I’m not just going to walk in as a novelist and say, “This is how you do an adaptation.” I don’t think about the book in that way. I’m used to working alone. I couldn’t imagine the collaboration it would take to pull off an incredibly huge enterprise like this. I’d rather just write my books, and then keep my fingers crossed that, if they are made into movies, they are in good hands. And from the first conversation I knew the book was in good hands.
BJ: In the early going we had a writers room, and I would ping Colson to check that we weren’t straying too far from this or too far from that. There was one terrible idea that Colson wisely shot down. I had been staffed in the writers room of season two of [the HBO series] The Leftovers, but I didn’t write anything. One of the writers I met there was a woman named Jacqui Hoyt, and she came with me to The Underground Railroad. I’d wanted Colson to be in the room too, but he was writing another book [2019’s The Nickel Boys] that won a Pulitzer Prize! We had a very short, eight-week room; it was myself and four other writers. It was very intense. We tried to cover a lot of ground. We pitched the show to Amazon twice in eight weeks, front to back. The book is so good, the map was there; it was just about me as a director working with other writers figuring out where this story can go and what was filmable. It was mostly the latter. Colson’s a genius, and so the starting point was just really great. But I do like breaking things, so I was like, “Where are the points where we can break this and figure out what’s interesting in the detritus?”
How did you find those breaking points? And, Colson, how did you feel watching them? There are a handful of really interesting additions, and they make the novel and the series complementary, in a way.
BJ: What I loved about what you did in the book, Colson, is that typically when you read a story like this it’s all about the central character. I just love that there were so many of these stories happening around Cora.
CW: Well, it’s funny that I’m watching and I’m like, “Oh, that’s a new avenue. It’s different from the book. Is it going to work?” And it always worked. The word rescue keeps coming to mind, because you rescued different characters. Like Jasper. Jasper is only there for a couple of pages. He becomes this really beautiful person [in the series]. You give him more time onstage, and he really blossoms differently than I ever envisioned. [And the character] Ridgeway’s childhood is recast in a way that makes it work. It was not in my head, and the seeds are barely on the page, but…
BJ: I don’t think that’s true! It was all in the book. I’m curious, because when I read a book it’s sometimes hard for me to see a face. Did you see faces as you were writing these characters? And then how did the faces we cast line up? I know it’s your interview, Hunter, but I’m sorry, I want to ask.
CW: The sad thing is I see everything except faces and bodies. It’s startling to see Cora for the first time.
The book is so realistic about slavery, but there is a sense of wonder in those little breaks from reality. The first time we see the real railroad feels like a big reveal, for us and for Cora.
BJ: We filmed this initially in the state of Georgia, and filming on train tracks anywhere in this country right now is very difficult, as it should be. I wanted the trains and tunnel to be real. I didn’t want CGI trains. We found a rail museum in South Carolina, and we built the tunnels over these train tracks. Instead of a big, sweeping shot, she gets down and starts banging on the tracks. I wanted to channel everything through Cora’s experience. The reason I wanted to adapt this book is because when I was a kid they used to say, “the Underground Railway Road,” and I imagined Black folks underground riding trains. It was cool, man. Thank you for giving me that gift. You’ve got to go through hell to get to it, but you gave me back my childhood.
I want to go back to the idea that Colson shot down immediately. What was it?
BJ: I’m not going to say. It was so bad, I’m not going to say. Less is more. You were absolutely right, my friend. It was also the quickest reply I have ever gotten from you.
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