Photo Courtesy Strikeanywhere Films; Photo Credit David Bornfriend.

Barry Jenkins pounds his hands on the table, a left, right-handed drum roll, a gesture, meaning to all of us in our film class, that something is good. Even during the worst afternoon dregs of production classes, there is some joyous quality about this habit that sparks all twenty-eight of us out of exhaustion and boredom. It’s a sound I come to love, an unruly living memory of our film school years.

Although I’d met Barry in early Fall 2001 during my freshman year at Florida State University, I wouldn’t speak with him until much later, on a sunny, warm Tallahassee afternoon as I sat outside pouring through the Old Testament.

”You’re a reader, mama.”

He stood beside me looking like some brilliant coffee house poet, and I noted how oddly displaced he seemed, how oddly in fact many of my artsy classmates seemed, standing outside the football stadium, the building the film school shares its housing with.

”Not much of one.” I said. “I’m stuck in the begats. I don’t think I’ll make it through them.”

”But, you’re always reading. I always see you reading.”

As the next two years would unfold in all their epic bitterness, I’d find myself progressively less surprised by Barry’s attention to detail. His writer’s eye, honed first as a creative writing major and then later among our class’ resident poet screenwriters, cataloged this minutia, always catching fragments of being as they seemed ready to vanish, so insignificant were they in the grander scheme of things.

It was also not surprising then that when Barry should make his own films, the shorts My Josephine and Little Brown Boy, they should be filled with like amount of detail, that they should be crafted with the same amount of attention and the same amount of love.

So many days of the week, I’d walk into the now defunct Javaheads, grab my Chai Latte and see sitting on the couch, Barry to one side and our mutual best friend Christi Leftwich sitting on the other. Each would have an American Cinematographer or a Sight & Sound opened, the pages already worn with reading, and even from a distance, I would feel that something great was happening at that exact moment in both of their thoughts, some enlightenment about their cinematic visions that I could have absolutely no comprehension of.

Some of this enlightenment I could intrinsically understand via the ‘bandry’ label that cropped up early on in the film school days. As the story has been told to me many times over, Barry and a handful of others were sitting in class when editing professor Steve Chase stumbled on his wordage. He was talking about the importance of filmmakers to push the boundaries of the medium, though ‘boundaries,’ as Chase would mispronounce, were ‘bandries.’ From that point on Barry as well as classmates James Laxton and Alejandro Cruz would be the bandry boys, who lived in the bandry house and made bandry films that, with little exception, put the rest of us to shame.

I’d never attempted to define the term for myself. I always thought of it more as a feeling, as a way this particular group of filmmakers saw their environments. It was as if they wore similar spectacles and viewed life in their own blend of focus. It was a feeling of, “Oh, yeah, that’s bandry.” Somehow, without nailing it down into a one sentence explainer, the label, or mini-movement as I came to think of it, made sense, and the comforting thing about it, at least for me, was that unlike other movements, there was no shame in not being a part of it. Bandry was just bandry, and in one way or another, you were, or you just weren’t. You saw that way, or you just didn’t. Fortunately, it didn’t matter either way. There was no judgment. We were all just there to make films together.

The bandry label would, however, elucidate for me on some unconscious level notes about the importance of Barry’s aesthetic leanings—the poetic sprawl of the scripting, the penchant for cinematographic playfulness, the preoccupation with lyricism in editing. All of these elements were mesmerizing in his hands, at once further molding the bandry label while also having derived from it. In a way, the bandry-film relationship conundrum was similar to a chicken and the egg question.

As for Barry himself, I tend to remember one particular afternoon, his hands flying into exaggerated movements, as if he was erratically attempting to signal a plane landing. He’d gotten on a kick about the imminent, global coup of people of color.

“All the darker skin folks of the world are going to get with the lighter skinned folks, and everybody is going to get darker,” he said. His logic, at least in his own mind, was flawless.

“Everyone is going to look lighter too. The babies will be a medium color, and so everyone is going to get darker, and everyone is going to get lighter. Everyone is just going to look tan, like in the Middle East.”

“But, the babies will still be darker,” he repeated triumphantly, so sure of his argument’s point .

The conversation, between Barry and an amused group of us during lunch break on a 14-hour production work day, sticks with me as representative, in the very best of ways, of Barry’s passion for whatever he talks about or casts his eye upon. There is a certain dogged passion to everything he creates, this sense that it is always born out of inspiration. With all his easy charm, fiery excitement and gently expressed command of his material, Barry’s just that filmmaker that you want to be around—because of his love for the medium, because he wants to say beautiful things with it and because he makes you believe that he can. His is a very quiet seduction and not in the least calculated.

I’d say, I’m sure he’d say, there are always stumbles in filmmaking, and it’s not as if his shorts are immune to those in my mind. There’s such a technically lyrical quality, such romance and such sadness to both My Josephine and Little Brown Boy that each risks losing its narrative, and in fact, criticism charged that both pieces fall in love with a mood to the detriment of a clear arc is not in the least misplaced. Yet, what magic! What moving loveliness! To refrain from further Whitmanesque description, I can merely sum up the experience of seeing Barry’s work as of falling in love. I’ll explain this all to him later.

For now, we start here, in a conversation held the after day South By Southwest announced its 2008 feature lineup, Barry’s debut Medicine for Melancholy on that list. The story of two lost, wandering San Francisco-ites, Micah and Jo’, on the day after a one night stand, Medicine for Melancholy explores issues involving romance, race, class and gentrification without flinching at any of the arguments. It’s a story than when I read the script, I wrote to Barry, something like, “I just never think about these things. I just never have to, and it made me sad, but that’s what I liked about it.” It’s a story that when I saw the film, I immediately wanted to watch again, to consume it part by part and understand it in a purely emotional way. It’s a film, all said, that made me want to fall in love and also directly made me fall in love with it.

Although we share in common our best friend Christi, Barry and I for many years had rarely spoken, not out of purposeful neglect, of course, just out of time and distance. When he came on as a SM staff writer last summer, we did spend more time in communication but this always of a business nature, and so to my memory at least, the following is the first 'real' conversation we’ll ever have had:

SM: Can you give me an idea of the background of how it is that you started writing and then how you decided to make the transition into film school?

BJ: I just liked writing always. When I first went to college, I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to teach high school English because I didn’t seriously think you could be a writer and make a living. After the first year, I transitioned into the creative writing program, and then on a whim—I was literally, physically walking across campus—I saw that there was a film school, and I applied and got in. It was all really not intellectual, emotional at all. I kind of just happened.

Once I got into film school, I was so deep into the creative writing program that I just decided to finish both and became a writer by necessity, just because I was taking classes that required that I be a writer.

SM:The two mediums are completely different, and yet I think that looking at your work I can see the influence of the writing, the way the written word would react on a screen. That’s not a sense I feel that you get with every director, though I don’t mean this in some stuffed up ‘literary’ sense…With your work I feel as if I’m reading a story. So I was hoping that you could talk to be about the relationship between writing and film for you.

BJ: It’s something I used to think was a problem. I used to think it was a big problem. When I first got into film school, I was always told there was too much prose in my short screenplays that we wrote for class. So it was kind of a struggle…I actually took a year off of film school after the first semester just to get my bearings because it was too much of a rough transition. In that time I read a bunch of screenplays, watched a bunch of films and took a still photography class; it gave me the time to try to come up with and make filmmaking—the nuts and bolts of it, writing the screenplay, a blueprint—in a language that I felt like I could visually translate into a story.

I was in college for three years before I got into film school, and all that time I was pretty much learning how to write. In particular, like any writing student, when I first began writing, I wrote these very long passages of prose, and I had really good professors at FSU, and they just kept hounding me to pare it down, just really capture the essence in as simple a language as I possibly could. I kind of did the same thing with my screenwriting, just really write visually but in metaphors that were not too—I don’t want to say otherworldly but—that were rooted in actual physical spaces and physical movements. When I work with James Laxton—who’s the guy I’ve shot with for everything I’ve done—I think there’s just something between the two of us; the way I’ve managed to get things onto a page and into a screenplay, he and I just have this communication where we just know how to take those things and make them come across physically on the screen.

SM: I’m actually really excited to talk about the relationship between My Josephine, Little Brown Boy and Medicine for Melancholy, particularly with regards to the cinematography.

But, keeping for just a little bit longer on this idea of the story, like you said, the script itself is actually quite concise. It’s 72 pages, and yet in that 72 pages, I really got a sense of its poetry. There’s only one scene in which you get jarred out of that poetry, and it’s actually my favorite scene in the script and, as it turns out, is my favorite scene of the film.

BJ: And, which scene is that? I’m curious.

SM: The housing rights scene…And, the reason I’m drawn to that scene both in the script and in the film is that it could be really jarring, and it could be really didactic, and it’s neither of those things. It just reminds you all of the sudden that whatever is lyrical around you, whatever you can make of the beauty and poetry of life, is affected in a tangible way by realities, the harsh realities of existence.

BJ: I’m glad you said that because that scene was something that I really wanted in the movie, and when I first wrote the script, it was a scene that came out of the mouths of the characters, and it just did not feel right. But, I really wanted to have that in the film because I feel like it’s a really big part of the city. And, so I finally got to a point where I decided, “You know what? I’m just going to put it in the film. I’m going to basically stop the film and just have this moment be in the film, and I’m not going to try to motivate it by the characters, or even have the characters engage with it.”

I did script it, and I did it in a way that I thought was clever, where you had all of these characters, all these real people in a room, having a conversation in three different languages about housing rights, which I thought was a very San Francisco thing. Of course, we were a super low budget film, and so we couldn’t make that happen. So, we literally just found this real housing rights center, and we talked to them two months in advance, and they said they would have all these people, and we got there, and they really only had the heart of their crew—which is the four or five hardcore people who are there sunrise to sundown. We felt it wasn’t enough to make the scene, and I was really upset, but I called a couple of friends, we sat the camera in the corner and we just let it run. Every now and then I would step in the conversation, steer them down a different path, but we just let them talk and recorded it. And, you’re right, it comes out really well in the film, and I think it’s even better than what I scripted.

SM: I’d agree on that too because part of having the three languages in the scripted scene, it was almost like we were—the issues of race are so at the surface of the film anyway, that I felt in reading the scene that it was almost too much for me, especially since the copy of the script I got translated the Chinese into a really odd font, like a Wingdings—

BJ: (laughing)Yeah.

SM: So it was funny reading it with these passages of Wingdings, but I do also like the sense that you were just hanging out with San Francisco-ites. Also the fact that most of the housing rights activists were older, you get the sense that it’s not only young people stuck in this boat. It’s people with experience, people who’ve been around and seen it all happen for a while, people who’ve really should have gotten the gist of all this, they’re just as hoodwinked and confused about the situation.

BJ: Really when you walk around the city, those are the people who are most concerned with housing rights, the people who are the most effected, those were the people who were here.

(James) was born and raised here, and he was telling me, “Twelve years ago I was in junior high school, and I would walk around the city, and I could totally imagine myself buying a house in this neighborhood or that neighborhood.” It was a real dream for him. Now, he’s like, “I’m 27, and there’s just no way. That’s impossible.” He just wonders how that happened, how it could happen so quickly.

So, if you’re someone who was 35, 36, 37 when all of those things started happening here in the mid-90s, and then all of the sudden you’re looking forward to the period of your life where you’re going to buy property and settle down with your family, and now you come out on the other side, and it’s 2008, it’s just not a reality. It’s a really hard thing to take. I think a lot of the older people in the city, the baby boomers, the 30-50 year old set really felt it and still really feel it.

SM: In terms of the way you work with James,…I was hoping that you could talk about that working relationship, and from there we’ll go into talking about the timing of the film.

BJ: James is an animal, and that’s the bottom line. He’s an animal. The man is an animal. He’s insane. He’s crazy. And, that’s why I like working with him. There’s nothing I’ve ever asked him to do—even if he rolls his eyes—that he’s not willing to try. He’s always willing to go off the deep end with me.

[With My Josephine] a third of that movie is completely out of focus, completely, ridiculously out of focus, and the only reason that is, is because James and I were sitting at home watching this cooking show called Nigella Bites, and on Nigella Bites they have these transitions where they just throw everything completely out of focus, and you’re totally disoriented, and you have no idea where you are. James and I were sitting at home watching that, and I said, “Man, that’s really cool. What if you do that in the movie?” And, he laughed. He was willing to do it, but he definitely laughed and didn’t take it seriously. Then I thought about it for a few days, and I came up with a reason why it would work in the film. That’s the way James and I work. Even if we’re working off an aesthetic impulse, we both get to a point where the things that we are doing are motivated and work with the story.

It’s funny; there’s this thing that happened where we were in the edit for Medicine for Melancholy, and there are certain scenes where the footage is grey, where the footage is not so grey, and we were trying to pick and choose. Do we edit this scene for performance? Do we use this shot because she’s better in it? Do we use that shot because he’s better in it? It was James, (editor Nat Sanders) and myself all in a room, and we were just bickering about, “Oh, we’ve got to cut for performance,” and James was like, “Everything is performance. The editing is a performance; the camera is a performance. You have to take it all into consideration.” I really like that James as a filmmaker thinks that way…When we get together, at some point, we always come to a language where everything that we’re doing has a purpose. There aren’t any willy nilly decisions, and even if they are, we then take the time to make them work.

SM: As a partnership, I also have to give you both a lot of credit for the amount of trust you share, specifically with the Steadicam work [on all of the films.] I remember Brandon Baker, on the day you came up with the laundry shots for My Josephine, looking at you and saying, “I don’t know what’s going to happen with this shot.” [The laundry shots ran a complete 360, the camera following pieces of clothing as they tumbled in a dryer. The camera itself sat on the Steadicam rigging, but because of the set up, video tap could not be run simultaneously. Essentially the shot was done in the blind.]

It was a lot of trust on Brandon, James and your parts to say, “We’re going to do this shot, and we have no idea what’s going to happen. But, we like the concept, and so we’ll go with it.” Turns out, that was an amazing shot. Or, for that matter, the running shot in Little Brown Boy, where B. Baker fell over with the Steadicam, which is also a great shot.

You had some Steadicam work here as well, and so, how do you learn to suspend that fear, give over that trust and say, “This is our concept, and we’re going to follow this concept even if it might not work,”? How do you as a filmmaker gussy up to that bravery?

BJ: It has to do with being irresponsible. I don’t try to control everything. I think there’s a certain degree of control that there needs to be with everything you do on a film, but sometimes we tend to go overboard. There’s no such thing as a perfect shot.

With this film it was really good that we made the film the way we did it, with these very limited means. The Steadicam in this film, it’s very good for what it is, but it’s not super smooth, really amazing Steadicam. But, when I watch it, I really think that it’s perfect for the movie. I think the fact that going into it, I had that idea, that we’re not trying to make this super smooth, super slick movie—it’s weird because you go into things so loose, so kind of carefree, and in the end, I watch the film and I worry that it’s too slick. A lot of the things that we tried to do, that we probably should not have tried to do, we managed to pull off. It’s crazy. I’m so shocked that some of the things in the movie actually happened—like getting the Steadicam.

SM: Can you tell me some more about these slick look elements, experiments that came out better than you expected?

BJ: For one thing, whenever we’re filming the actors riding bikes, we literally just rented this thing that (producer Justin Barber) called a Whatsit. It’s one of those electric Chrysler cars that you can rent down on the beach for tourists. They zip around the city. That’s just James and I sitting in the car—I’m driving, and he’s sitting in the passenger seat. The car has no walls, so you can shot 360 degrees out of it, and so we’re just following along while they’re riding. I’m like, “Do this. Do that. Do this. Do that.” Then you see it in the film, and they really come off as coordinated sequences.

The same thing for all of the driving shots. That’s literally just us in a car with James shooting out the front windshield or the side window. Those are some of my favorite moments in the film, just because you really get a sense of San Francisco, and this notion that there are all of these different neighborhoods, but they’re all right next to each other. It’s a city you can hold in your hand.

I think because it’s that way we were able to do all of these traveling things with just the camera and a car. We didn’t need this huge crew and a follow car. It was just five of us, and we just did it.

SM: When did you move to San Fran and start forming a relationship with the city?

BJ: I moved here, I guess, two years ago after spending two years in LA, and oh god did not like LA. I came to really abhor LA, was looking for some place to move to and came to San Francisco first. It was a seven-month trip where I kind of just went all over the country and actually met someone here, kind of fell in love with a girl—very difficult—and, so when the trip was over, I decided to move back here.

SM: And, she’s a lot of the impetus for the story itself. Conversations you two had directly influenced conversations in the film.

BJ: Definitely. And, the relationship did not work, and when the relationship was over, I was just thinking all these crazy, crazy thoughts. I think the character of Micah is just me at the time, just thinking a lot of these crazy thoughts, trying to come up with a reason why this relationship didn’t work. Indirectly. Just saying all these ridiculous things—well, I don’t want to say ridiculous—but just trying to work all these things out.

SM: Knowing you, it’s easy can see those elements, and one of my favorite of those, at least that I find funny, is the “I want my fuckin’ heart sewn back together,” photograph on the MySpace. But, then interestingly, another personal element—that I don’t remember if was written in script or not—is Jo’s attraction to women filmmakers…It was interesting to see that element of you also come into play.

Looking at the characters now, you talk about Micah being a manifestation of you at that period of time, but do you see any of yourself in Jo’ at all?

BJ: They’re two sides of not necessarily an argument but of a conversation that I continue to have with myself, just trying to come to a conclusion on a lot of things—love, race, ethnicity. They’re not saying the same thing, but they are both speaking in my voice, so to speak. It’s weird because going into the film I thought that was a very dangerous thing to do. I thought that neither one of them would seem like truly formed personas. But, in the end, they sort of do, even if you do get from the film the conceit that the filmmaker is pretty much having a dialogue with this character—which is something that you probably don’t want to do, but I had no choice.

SM: Looking at both of those characters, I feel the same way about race. Having grown up in white suburbia, I wasn’t forced to think about those issues very often, but if you’re thinking about the conversation you have to have in your head when you begin to think about race, there has to be that part of you that rallies out against it, in the way that Micah does, and there has to be the part of you that doesn’t necessarily want to deal with it, that part that just wants to look at the progress and wants to move on in the way that Jo’ does. For me that worked, because like you said, these volleying thoughts happen in your own head.

I was watching a few days ago, and it’s also set in San Francisco and also about race relations, which is why I’m thinking of it, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Spencer Tracy’s character in the film mentions that only 12 percent of the city at that point was black American, and this 1967. And, so I was thinking about that film and thinking about this film and wondering what it is about San Francisco that makes issues of race fluster up.

BJ: I honestly cannot say. It’s just one of those things, just something you notice. Obviously, only 6.5 percent of the city is African-American…It’s funny when I was describing the film to someone, I was saying how both of the main characters are African-American, but the film never sets foot in any of the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of the city. I think that’s because the film is more about class than it is about ethnicity. It’s just that Micah is so obsessed with it that that’s what he brings to the story.

I have these conversations a lot where we talk about the middle class, and how in San Francisco there really is no representation of the African-American middle class. And, so a great deal of the African-Americans in the city are living below the poverty line, and they’re wedged into these small sections of the city, and these sections are contained onto themselves. They don’t really get to participate in the city, and I think that’s why for the African-Americans that don’t live in those enclaves, then you really start to notice. You walk around, and you can literally walk twelve blocks and not see another black person. It’s a really interesting thing, and it’s not something you notice until you do it enough times, and you go, “Wow, every day I walk fifteen blocks, and I never see another black person.” It’s just one of those things, slowly, over time, maybe it starts to manifest itself in the back of your head, a certain kind of paranoia that I can’t really describe that I began to feel and that thoroughly got me more and more into the script.

SM: There’s also the issue of diversity, or lack thereof, in the indie scene, and I really like that commentary. It begins implicitly at the beginning of the film with the soundtrack—which I’d also like to talk about—but it becomes progressively prominent as Micah and Jo’ go to the club, and as an audience, we realize that the two are on their own in this place, with others who have the same lifestyle, listen to the same music, but are subject to entirely different social circumstances.

BJ: That was the one limitation of budget that broke all of our hearts. We wanted to do that more; we wanted to do that much, much more. We wanted to put them in places where, and, in most places they were, the only two African-American people within the scene, but we couldn’t afford to actually shoot everyone else that was there. But, I’m really glad you mention that; that’s one of the things we’re trying to do more of in sound design, which we are still doing right now. But, that is definitely, definitely a huge aspect of experiencing the film. It’s just one of those things that when you make a film on this size budget, you really just can’t do that.

SM: Taking about the final soundtrack, I know the script had soundtrack notes, and a lot of those bands didn’t actually end up being the ones in the cut I screened, but I was hoping you could tell me about the song choices you now have.

BJ: A lot of those songs I’ve just been holding onto for years. You hear little things on college radio or the mp3 blog—or I do—and I just tuck them aside. I have a special folder in my iTunes where I put music that I would love to put in a movie someday…Some of those bands are small bands, like The Changes or Gypsyfile, bands that people pretty much have not heard of, have great songs and I pretty much knew I could get the rights to. Then there are others, like Igor Romanov who loves the Sea and Cake and who I met on a message board like eight years ago. Of course we haven’t met in person, but he makes music on the side. I always tell him, if you make something, give it to me, and he has two songs that ended up in the movie. Then there’s the song that plays during the carousel, which is the Dickon Hinchliffe tune from Clare Denis’ Friday Night, which was the original inspiration for the film way, way back when a long time ago…Most of that music I always thought could work in the film, and there were other songs I felt could have worked a bit better but that were outside the scope of our budget. And so, that’s why some of the ones in the script didn’t end up in the film.

I didn’t want the film to just be jam packed with music. As the characters become more comfortable with one another, the music becomes more and more a part of the film. It’s weird, if you look at the timeline in Final Cut, we had the music down on the bottom tracks, and you’ll see these huge gaps in the first two-thirds of the film for music cues, and as the timeline goes on they get closer and closer because we’re putting more music in.

The version of the film you saw actually has one song too many. We pulled a song out, and I think it makes the movie work a lot better. So, there definitely was a point where I think I went a little bit overboard with the music.

SM: Which song did you pull?

BJ: It’s the very last song that plays when they’re hugging, at the very, very end. We pulled that song because I realized that there was a point where you’re not paying attention to what they’re doing. You’re paying attention to the song. There are some places in the film where I don’t mind that happening, the carousel being one of them. But, at that point, you really need to feel the size of the intimacy between them.

SM: I’m glad you mention the carousel sequence because I love that scene.

BJ: Thanks, man. It’s too long, but we couldn’t cut the song, so we just left it all in.

SM: I love that scene anyway. I didn’t think it was too long.

That was the scene where (Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins) had to pull out no stops because ostensibly there’s not a heck of a lot that they’re doing. It’s a very isolated moment of washing over some of this melancholy each is feeling. There is that sense that if they’re going to be children again, at any point in this film, that the carousel scene is that time for it.

For the most part the script is so imagistic as it is that I’d gotten a good feeling of what the film would visually look like, and what was surprising in the scene was that it came out so much more effecting, so much more moving—

BJ: Can I talk about that for a minute?

SM: Please, please do.

BJ: I was having a conversation with Lena Dunham—who’s a great, great, great filmmaker and who does this show ‘Tight Shots’ on Nerve.com; I’m a big fan of hers. She saw my short films, and when I told her I was making Medicine for Melancholy, the first thing she said was, “Wow, I’m going to be really surprised to see how that aesthetic carries over to a feature-length format.” It kind of scared me because I watch this movie Medicine for Melancholy, and it’s not really the same aesthetic as my short films.

But, there’s a stretch in Medicine for Melancholy when they go to visit the Museum of the African Diaspora, that whole sequence all the way through the carousel, to me it’s like it distilled to this moment. I always felt like there needed to be an “Aha!” moment when the realist, verite aspect of people who don’t know each other, who had a one night stand were awkward with one another, but I slowly just wanted to shove that aside and create this magical, romantic moment. I felt that I needed to fall back on the aesthetic of my short films to make that happen, and I was really worried that it wasn’t going to fit with the rest of the film. When I watch the movie now—and I hope this isn’t a bad thing—it’s my favorite stretch of the movie, from when they walk into the Museum of the African Diaspora to the end of that carousel.

It’s weird. I’m not doing anything different than I did in film school, and it feels really comfortable. It feels really good not to have been afraid to go, “You know what? Yeah, this movie’s kind of stylish, but right now, I’m just going to play it simple.” It’s probably the simplest covered sequence in the movie, but there’s just something about it that really moves me.

SM: There’s actually a great moment within that sequence right in between when they leave the museum and as they’re walking up the bridge, just before Micah looks off the bridge and says, “It kind of looks like LA from here,” and he very slowly goes to grab for her hand. All the sudden, I was very distinctly reminded of the original cut of My Josephine. Actually, I’m still kind of more attached to that original cut than the final cut.

Jenkins belly chuckles. It’s a deep laugh, one that comes out of expecting that person’s opinion before it’s given, that “That’s what I thought you’d say because you’re you,” kind of a laugh.

SM: Am I the only one who’s said that to you?

BJ: It was a little too much, when he took her hand. It was a little too much.

SM: I know,…but I was so happy to have that moment back. It’s the resolution for my lost ending.

I do want to speak more about that relationship between these two films, particularly with timing, which I’d mentioned briefly before. For me, in a lot of ways, Medicine for Melancholy feels like a hybrid of what you were doing with the timing of My Josephine, pulling out that cerulean and red, and then working with the Ilford stock on Little Brown Boy.

When you sat down to figure out the color palette for this film, pinpointing the reds and pinks to come up through the black and white, what were your thoughts?

BJ: That worries me. I worry that I can’t make a movie that’s not a weird, alternate take on the way we see colors. This is my third film, and none of them have been in “real color.”

I was not in a good mood when I wrote this film. It’s funny; you have that story in ShortEnd Magazine ‘Americano Thursday', and that’s pretty much the mindset I was in when I wrote this film. That’s how I saw the city, just in this monochrome, this muted color palette.

We did a camera test way back in May, James and I did. We just wanted to see how desaturated we could make the image without going completely black and white, because it’s not completely black and white. When we did, the one color that would really stand out was red, and it’s funny, that sequence on the footbridge, that’s where we did the camera test. We were there, and we just happened to notice that those flowers popped out. That’s when we knew that we were on the right track and that’s what we were going to do.

Now that we’re doing the color timing, we’re actually doing something different where, as the film goes on, we’re letting a little bit more color come into the story. As they get more comfortable with one another. And, it kind of peaks right there on that footbridge.

SM: I keep asking about the visual side, but we keep hitting on the editing, on its rhythm, and so I was hoping you could tell me a bit about your work with Nat.

BJ: You know, I keep talking about how fast we made the film, and a lot of our ability to do that had to do with Nat, our editor, basically shuttering his life, moving to San Francisco and drowning himself in this film from day one. I mean, he was literally cutting the first day's footage while we shot the second day's. We wrapped production November 15th, and by December 2nd he had a very decent rough cut ready for me to see. I can't harp enough on how great he was.

I mean the club scene? We literally dumped that footage in his lap, went back to shooting, and he sewed it all together, made it feel so much bigger than should have been possible. That sequence, in the finished film, is probably 90 percent just as it was on his first pass, and really that's attributable to him being so completely on the same page as me with this film, which is strange, 'cause we're both real particular dudes so you'd think there'd be some sort of communication hiccups, you know? Natty Ice, hell of an editor.

SM: And then, since I’ve neglected to do so thus far, I’d like to ask about working with Wyatt and Tracey…How did you work with them, and how did the casting go?

BJ: I should start out by saying that it was not easy for either one of them to do this film. We had no rehearsal, absolutely none. They got here the night before, twelve hours before we shot the first scene, which is the first scene in the film. So it was really intense because every time we did a scene, we were literally doing it together for the first time.

Tracey and Wyatt are both from LA. We tried really hard to find actors here in San Francisco, but for one reason or another, we literally could not find African-American actors to come in and read. We tried really hard, and we could not find anybody here in the Bay area. So, we went down to LA, and because we didn’t have any money, we didn’t have a casting director. We were just putting flyers up on all of these Websites.

We didn’t see that many people. We may have seen 30 men and 30 women, and Tracey was actually the first woman we saw. She was great on tape, and we brought her in a few more times…We never found a guy; none of the guys we read were good for the part.

Months before we started casting, Justin, I thought on a whim, sent me an episode of this show I think it was called ‘Accepted TV.’ It was this show on VH1 where these comedians, like on MadTV, they would do these 8-minute pilots of different sitcoms as a joke. He sent me this one that’s called ‘My Best Black Friend,’ and it was a spoof on reality TV where this white guy has a competition and invites all these black guys to his house to compete to be his best friend. Wyatt was on that show, and he had a really small part, just a couple of lines, and then at the very end, they line all the guys up to choose which one, and the camera pans across him, and Justin sent me that clip on YouTube. I watched it and didn’t think anything of it. Then, months later, I’m in LA, we’re casting, we’ve seen the last guy, and I’m not happy. And, Justin goes, “Did you ever watch that thing that I sent you from ‘Accepted TV’?” I was like, “Yeah, I watched it,” and I was like, “Yeah, there was one guy who looked kind of interesting.” He was like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s why I sent it to you.” (laughing) I’m like, “Oh!” Amy Seimetz, our good friend who just finished directing her first feature City on a Hill, she was in the room because she was helping us with the casting at that point, and she was like, “Oh, you’re talking about Wyatt. I know that guy.” So, literally, and this is in LA, and I was scheduled to come back to San Francisco the next day, we made a few phone calls, got Wyatt to come over, he read with a friend of ours Gian McMillion, and he was amazing. He was perfect. He was absolutely perfect.

Fast forward to the shoot up here, and he was just great. They were both great. They really understood the characters, and I think that’s why we got by without having rehearsal. There was a real kind of rawness to the scenes when we shot them because they didn’t have the study you work out in rehearsal.

There are some times when Wyatt’s really funny because he’s a comedian, he’s a really funny guy, and because we didn’t have rehearsal, I wanted him to be comfortable. For him, the comfort zone was being this guy who’s goofy, but he’s charming, and he’s nice, and he just has these problems that he hasn’t reconciled. And, since Tracey is there, he’s really trying his best to work them out and have her make him feel secure, not be completely aware of these things and help him work them out.

Tracey, for her part, has a much tougher arc in the film than Wyatt does. (Jo’s) life outside the film is very clear—she has this boyfriend—and so there are a lot of times when it almost seems like she’s not playing the character, when really she’s playing a lot of it in her head. There are things that she’s doing that have nothing to do with Micah, and so there are times that it seems like she’s not paying attention to him. And, it’s not that she’s not paying attention to him; she’s paying attention to herself. I think it’s a really, really good performance, and it was really tough. I thought she did a great job with it; they both did. They were awesome. They made me look good.

SM: It was specifically interesting, Tracey’s choice of using the sweater, and it really struck me that her preoccupation with it was an externalization of discomfort, very calm-like. Progressively, this lessens as they become much easier with each other.

BJ: She had to do a lot that’s not in the script on camera, and I implicate myself a little bit. I think the externalization with the sweater, it’s a good thing, and I think I drove that a little too hard. I think she could have externalized those feelings without doing that as much, but that was my direction.

It was really tough because they literally just walked into the characters, and we shot the film basically in sequence. So, it was tough to communicate all of these things in the first fifteen minutes of this film when the back story needed to be told right away so that we can settle down into this real time thing that happens once he comes back to her house with the purse.

SM: I’ve never crewed one of your films…How do you work with actors on set? How do you work with your crew?

BJ: The one thing I do, which I didn’t even realize I did until we made this film, is I always like to let the actor go first. I very rarely direct the first take, and that’s what I began to tell Tracey and Wyatt more and more. I was like, “Do the first take. Do what you feel. Then we’ll see what you have, and we’ll work from there.” I think that worked really well on this film because I always had an idea of what I wanted, but every now and then if I didn’t tell them what my idea was, they would come up with something that was much, much, much better.

It’s hard for me directing actors because I feel that I was so insecure physically with filmmaking when I got to film school, like the nuts and bolts—I didn’t know you needed a light to expose film; that’s why I took a year off, to learn those things. I almost feel like I overcompensate by having a film that technically proficient. So, it’s a danger with me with actors that sometimes I’m not paying enough attention because I’m worried about how this shot will cut with that shot, or this frame with that frame.

It was really scary to direct a feature film because I’d never shot anything that required more than a three day shoot, but I think that working on Their Eyes Were Watching God with Darnell Martin—who definitely is a mentor of mine; she is great with actors, absolutely amazing; box office, Oscar awards, all that means nothing. There are people like Darnell Martin who work primarily in television, who haven’t made these really huge films, who are amazing, amazing with actors. I’ve never seen anyone direct actors as well as Darnell Martin. I was able to take a little bit of what Darnell does—because she is way more intense than I am—and apply it to making this film.

Then when I’m working with James we usually have an idea of how we’re going to do things before we get to set, although this film is probably 50-50. There were times when we’d get to set, and we’d have Tracey and Wyatt do the scene, and then James and I would walk into a corner, and we’d figure it out, how we were going to do it.

I’m a very open to communication sort of director. So, we’re all there, only seven of us in a room at any given time. There were never more than seven, including us and the two actors. So, it was cool to just have everyone be vocally involved in making the scenes.

I’ve never wanted to have feedback on my films, or I’ve never really thought about how my films will be received, just because that shit scares, scares me to death. To know that potentially there are going to be people who don’t like this movie and who think I’m a shitty director. But, with this film I’m really curious to see if there are young men and young women out there of color who feel like, “You know what? That movie. I can relate to that.” There aren’t enough films being made right now that give people the opportunity to really be able to say that, “That movie, I can relate to that.” And, that’s not even just [one group], women, there just aren’t enough films that everybody can relate to. Even if this film fills just a really small niche, I’m very glad that we were able to shack up and go ahead and make it, regardless of the potential for recouping our meager, meager investment.

SM: You’d just mentioned films for women, and we’d mentioned earlier Jo’s character trait of silk screening women film director’s last names unto shirts. I remember in school your passion about Lynne Ramsay’s work, and obviously now there’s Claire Denis’ work too. I was hoping you could talk about women filmmakers particularly who influence you, although obviously there’s the influence of the French New Wave as well in the work.

BJ: I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but I’ve always felt like I can tell the difference when I’m watching a film directed by a woman. I just feel like the metaphors are more eloquent, by which I mean, they don’t shout as much. Even for myself, when I try to make a movie with a message, it’s clear I’m trying to make a movie with a message, whereas when I watch a Lynne Ramsay film or a Claire Denis film, it’s the metaphors you can feel—Lucrecia Martel, especially. They’re made with these nuts and bolts moments. It’s the whole show versus tell thing. Women show and men tell as far as filmmaking goes. Obviously not every woman film director is as gifted as Claire Denis, Lynne Ramsay or Lucrecia Martel. That’s the same as not every male director is as gifted as—I can’t even pull male directors out of my head like that.

But, they really have influenced me, particularly Lynne Ramsay and Claire Denis. That’s why it was so hard for me to have so much music in the film. That’s why I like that sequence between the museum and the carousel so much. That’s one of the stretches when I’m filmmaking, and it’s all showing. I’m not really telling anything, and there’s this really by this time nuts and bolts feeling. A Claire Denis movie is nuts and bolts, but man, it is so thick with metaphor. I’ve been trying to put that into my aesthetic, and it’s tough because I’ve only made three movies, two of which are shorts.

I think it’s one thing to think about making a movie and another to go out and make one. Because I’ve always thought that my next film, after making those two shorts, I thought, “Oh, I’m going to make a film like Claire Denis,” and I watch this film, and it’s nothing like a Claire Denis film—which is fine; your influences don’t have to become your work.

The other thing is it really made me sensitive to the way Jo’ was portrayed in the film, and I’m not sure if that is or isn’t in the original script, the thing with the t-shirts. I’m pretty sure that’s something I came to as I was on a train to Telluride, and I was writing this really dense background packet on the character for Tracey. In writing it, and this is literally seven pages written by hand on a legal pad, I came upon this thing where I thought, “You know, I need to give this woman something to do, something she’s passionate about.” One of those things was that she was a student in the film criticism department at Berkeley, and she was also interested in art but in a very practical way. So, indirectly I came up with this thing where she makes these t-shirts, and it’s not about money, these things that she says in the film, that it really means a lot to her. It was something really simple, that literally she just wears those shirts for two-thirds of the movie before she explains it to Micah, and even then she doesn’t explain it in this way that’s anywhere near as heavy as when he explains about the aquarium. It’s not her whole life, even though it’s important to her. That’s a long-winded way for me to nervously say that I was really trying to be conscious of how I portrayed Jo’.

In My Josephine there’s a way that Adele, or Josephine, comes across in a way that I don’t think many people got in the film. That the character of Aadid, the guy who’s doing the voice-over, it’s not that he’s oppressing her, but he has this idea of her that she does not fit at all. The film is really kind of rhapsodic and romantic, and it’s really fantastical, the way the camera moves and how pretty the images are, but in the end, there’s this guy who doesn’t understand this woman. She really together, that character in that short film, and I really don’t think that people got that I was trying to say that it’s not necessarily tragic, but it wasn’t the right situation for her to be with this guy because he doesn’t understand her at all, he’s not trying to understand her. He’s just telling her who he thinks she is. And so, I really wanted Jo’ in this film to be aware of herself. Even though she’s not talking nearly as much as Micah is, I feel like when she does talk, she makes a hell of a lot more sense. I feel like the two biggest conversations of the film, the conversation they have after they smoke the joint and the argument they have on the street, I feel like there are no winners, but she definitely wins those two arguments. She makes the most sense. Maybe that’s me overcompensating, and maybe I didn’t get it right. But, it’s probably because I admire those filmmakers that those are the things I was trying to be really sensitive to.

SM: For my part, I do think Jo’ is more logical, but I didn’t necessarily see there as being a winner in either of the arguments. She’s definitely the voice of change, the voice of progress—

BJ: I like that. I’ll roll with that. (laughing) She’s the voice of progress.

SM: And, she’s the one who leaves the situation. She’s the one who leaves the melancholy, but you get the sense with the last shot that she leaves him with a bit of hope.

BJ: Definitely.

SM: With that said, I feel like she is aware, she’s not so naïve that she could possibly win that argument. There’s an idealistic, optimistic quality to her, but Micah obviously represents a reality that she has to face. I do think that throughout the film she becomes stronger via being with someone who has that perspective…So, I guess I see the winner ultimately as being the audience. These are perspectives they haven’t heard voiced on screen in a while, if ever.

…That [feel of the audience winning] has always been very powerful for me about your work—and, I remember the first time Meg Robertson snuck me into the post hall to see that original cut of My Josephine. I remember leaving that room seven to seven and a half minutes later and thinking, “I want to be in love with something.” That’s the reaction I’ve always had to your filmmaking, I feel like I need to be in love with something, or I need to love things more. I need to see the beauty in things more.

It makes me wonder: If you have this sort of lyrical vision of film, do you carry that lyrical vision into the world? Do you see things that way?

BJ: I definitely feel that way sometimes, and I’m glad you said that because I don’t think I could have articulated that myself.

If I had to say one thing to Wyatt when he was saying, “I don’t get this guy Micah,” that would be the thing that I would say. I would say, “This guy needs to be in love with something, and right now, he’s not—until he runs into this girl, and he’s convinced himself that he needs to be in love with her, and he needs to have her be in love with him.”

Man, you stumped me, Nora…Sometimes I don’t even know why I write things. I don’t know why the hell that carousel took on such significance for me, but it just felt right. But, yeah, it would be nice to be in love with something all the time. It would be.

SM: Although I know the derivations of bandry, I didn’t spend too much time at the bandry house, not nearly as much time as a lot of others, and I was hoping you could talk to me about the bandry house and also how the bandry concept has changed over the last four years or so.

BJ: Bandry is just this thing that we all kind of latched onto…It was just three lonely guys [Barry, James and Medicine for Melancholy First AC Alejandro Cruz] who were in film school and who really were obsessed with filmmaking and wanted filmmaking to have not necessarily this importance but wanted it to be enough. The whole idea was to have it be a situation where you had this opinion of filmmaking where it was enough to sustain you, to the point that you would treat it with such importance that you wouldn’t do anything that would bastardize the process. That’s it more or less in a nutshell.

In a way, aesthetically, we wanted to do things that weren’t necessarily against the grain but that weren’t the norm or that weren’t accepted. We felt like everything was acceptable, and everything was fair game when you’re making a film or telling a story.

…The three of us lived in that house together, and we always talked about making movies and how awesome it was and how it’d be great to always be able to do.

SM:…(Bandry) always was that nebulous idea out in the ethos that meant a lot, I think, to all of us. That was the funny thing; it wasn’t just like it was the three of you who believed in it, who bought into the idea of it. It was all 28 of us.

BJ: It meant a lot, but in a way, it was kind of sad. It was three lonely dudes, who maybe didn’t have girlfriends and weren’t in clubs. It was like three nerdy guys who go off and play Dungeons & Dragons while they’re in elementary school, and they start a D&D club and declare themselves cooler than everybody else because they know Dungeons & Dragons is awesome and nobody else does. To me, that really is what bandry is…If I was from the outside looking in, I wouldn’t want to be a part of that. But, it worked because it gave us a place to work from.

When we started this conversation, you were asking about how James and I work together, and we say ‘bandry’ all the time when we’re on set. “Is that a bandry shot?” If it’s not, then we’re doing the wrong shot. It’s kind of a reference point. It’s kind of like to always be doing what the fuck you want to do. Don’t worry about the outcome, or don’t worry about how the outcome is going to be perceived. Do what the fuck you want to do and what you have to do to make your film. To me, that’s bandry.

Medicine for Melancholy plays Sun. March 9th 2:30pm, Tues. March 11th 5:00pm, Wed. March 12th 2:30pm at the Alamo Ritz 2 during SXSW. For more information on the film visit http://www.strikeanywherefilms.com.