This idea, this very simple idea that the faces, the souls, the images of people who look like me are beautiful and very worth exploring and excavating and cataloging and documenting and dramatizing and rhapsodizing, that's always been a driving force.

Hello and welcome back to the Directors Cut, brought to you by the Directors Guild of America.

Today's episode features the DGA Special Projects Committee's recent event, the craft of

the director, Barry Jenkins.

This series of conversations with master filmmakers features an in-depth discussion about the

directing process from pre-production

through post. Mr. Jenkins' 2016 feature, Moonlight, garnered a DGA Award nomination

for outstanding directorial achievement in feature film, earned eight Academy Award nominations,

and won Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.

His other directorial credits include the feature films, if Beale Street could talk, and Medicine for Melancholy, an episode of Dear White People, and the limited series The Underground Railroad.

Please enjoy the conversation between Mr. Jenkins and DGA President Thomas Schlamy.

In front of a virtual audience, they discussed Mr. Jenkins' early short films, his termite-like

desire to search for unconventional shots on a project, and how he sought to connect the

Underground Railroad to today's America.

So before we start, though, I just want to be a little effusive, and then I promise I'll

step away from that, and I won't embarrass you too much.

But, you know, it's been an enormous pleasure the last couple of weeks to be sort of living

in your work and sort of really revisiting that that I knew,

which was Moonlight and Beale Street. But then having the enormous good fortune to experience

Underground Railroad, and I really mean good fortune, as difficult as it was sometimes,

I just feel enormously blessed that I had that

experience. And I hope everyone else does too. We're going to talk quite a bit about it. So I hope

...