ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Every week, a famous guest draws a card from our wild card deck and answers a big question about their life. Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker best known for "If Beale Street Could Talk" and "Moonlight." His latest project is Disney's "Mufasa: The Lion King." It may seem like a big shift, but he says the new film allows him to explore the complicated themes he loves.
BARRY JENKINS: You have this great starting point with audiences anywhere, especially with these built-in notions of good and evil. And we get to sort of add what I think is all these really amazing layers of complexity. You know, 2024 is a much more complex world than 1994 was, and so I relish the opportunity to unpack what I think are some really amazing and knotty issues.
SHAPIRO: Jenkins shared a memory from his childhood with Wild Card host Rachel Martin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
One, two or three?
JENKINS: Two.
MARTIN: Two. Right in the middle. Where would you go to feel safe as a kid?
JENKINS: Where would I go to feel safe as a kid? You know, I grew up - you know, I actually know the answer to this. I grew up very poor, in the world that you see dramatized in "Moonlight," and I lived in this housing project that had been around, probably a postwar sort of housing project. I think it was built as barracks, probably, for soldiers, and then became public housing. And...
MARTIN: This is in Miami, we should say.
JENKINS: This is in Miami, exactly. And in the middle of this complex there was an old, like, laundromat. It was like a washhouse. And it was this one-story, maybe, like, 20-by-10 foot thing, the structure, but it had this flat roof, and there was this massive tree above it. And I remember as a child, if things were too heavy or there was too much going on, I would go and I would find a way using the window. And this place is dilapidated, like, in disrepute. Like, it's not being used. I would climb up in the window to get onto the roof, and then I would jump onto the tree, and I would squirrel up into the very top of this tree, like, so high that if someone was walking by, they would never know someone was up there. And I would just go up into this tree, and I would just sort of - just, like, listen to the sounds of the day. I would kind of just clear my head. And I think I would just stay up there until I felt like I was ready to sort of reenter the world or reenter my life. I haven't thought of that in a very, very long time.
MARTIN: Wow.
JENKINS: 'Cause the idea of me climbing trees is crazy.
MARTIN: (Laughter) Not a thing you do now.
JENKINS: Yeah. That's what I would do. And it's interesting. Later in life, I would sometimes go on these long walks as a teenager, and I would find these empty houses that had fruit trees in the back yard. You know, it's Florida. It's Miami.
MARTIN: Yeah.
JENKINS: Great fruit trees, avocado trees. And I guess I'd climb trees a lot. I would climb trees, like...
MARTIN: It sounds like it was a little, yeah, on the regular.
JENKINS: I would climb trees to go feel safe.
MARTIN: And to get perspective, probably. I mean, there's something about getting high above the din of life and the hard things and...
JENKINS: Yeah, it's weird. There's a version of it that maybe is you're trying to avoid all these different things. But I think solitude can be very fortifying as well, and to sort of recenter yourself before you reenter the rigors, the demands of everyday life, especially that life, 'cause it was a lot for a child to process.
SHAPIRO: Barry Jenkins' latest movie is "Mufasa: The Lion King." For more from that conversation, follow the Wild Card podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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