When Moonlight director Barry Jenkins first heard about the Underground Railroad he imagined an actual train. “Yeah,” Jenkins laughs, “as a child, I felt Black people were capable of anything! That they were capable of building trains beneath the feet of the institutions of white supremacy.”
Of course, the reality was that the “railroad” was a series of routes, safe houses, and guides that would help enslaved people escape north to freedom. But when Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad was published in 2016 and told the story of Cora, a young woman who escapes from a plantation in Georgia on a literal underground railroad, this fantastical element connected with Jenkins.
“By taking the Underground Railroad, giving it a literal representation and trains running underground, Colson opens up this Pandora’s Box,” he says. “We are speaking to something authentic, but it’s not a history report.”
Feeling he couldn’t do Whitehead’s novel justice at feature-film length, Jenkins decided instead to make it into a series, tell Cora’s story over 10 hours, and to direct every single episode. The resulting show is filled with some harrowing scenes grounded in the brutal reality enslaved people faced, but there is also Jenkins’ signature radical beauty and exquisite romance. The light sprinkling of the fantastical ties those two elements together. As Jenkins puts it, “By invoking just a light touch of fantasy, it freed us from the burden of making a show that is entirely about just the horrors of American slavery.”
Denne historien er fra May 2021-utgaven av Total Film.
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Denne historien er fra May 2021-utgaven av Total Film.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
RETURN TO OZ
WICKED Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande defy gravity as the Broadway smash reaches cinemas.
GRIN AND BEAR IT
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BAD ROMANCE
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CLOWNING GORY
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He broke out in Beatles jukebox musical Yesterday and has a varied slate of juicy projects on the horizon, including a very different take on a superhero franchise. But, as the everhumble Himesh Patel tells Total Film, he puts a lot of it down to luck...
A BUE ABOVE
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