Barry Jenkins Quotes

Independent filmmaking burns off a lot of storytelling fat.

My dream is just to make zero-budget movies for the rest of my life, because I love that environment.

The quality of mainstream cinema has changed. A lot of independent voices feel they can leave everything behind and make independent films.

It's nice when you're working in Hollywood and there's a movie you'd like to see that no one is making anymore. You make it yourself.

I tell my students based on my experiences in Hollywood, sure, you can always move to L.A. and try to work with the system, and people do that, but chances are if you want your story in film with characters of color, you will have to make that movie yourself. Find a way to make it yourself. Not just screenwriters, but also producers.

I read an interview where someone said, 'It's a shame that anyone can make a movie now,' and I feel the exact opposite.

I'm a filmmaker; I want to make films. I don't want to sit in a hotel room waiting to make films, and I can control my thing in Denmark; I can make the film I want to make... of course, I have to write a good script, all that, but if I do my job, it will happen.

My knock with filmmaking is the whole bureaucracy around it, so in some ways, staying outside of it is easier for me.

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.

Studios never put pressure. They know the kind of films I want to make.

A lot of producers cookie cut movies one after another, but I'll be a little more careful, and have the opportunity to be, because I have the acting career to subsidize the producing.

You're taught - consciously or sub-consciously - to make an indie so you can get through that terrible process and get to Hollywood. I realized when I got there, 'Oh, no; I think I'm better over here.'

I feel that the smallness of the filmmaking environment is somehow connected to the freedom of creating film.

Let film-makers take a call about what films they want to do.

I'd be fine if there weren't film festivals, and you just made your films and didn't have to do anything from that point on. That would be really great, wouldn't it? I don't know. I'm in kind of an aloof time, where I'm not taking anything too seriously.

I think people are willing to take more of a risk on an indie film, about character, etc...but at the same time, when I work on projects that are substantially bigger, in a way they do feel small. Even though the catering is way better and we actually have someone shooting with real film.... The budgets are bigger but the story still feels small, like an indie film.

All filmmakers want the option to make another film, to have it not always be such an uphill battle - for it to be our life, our working life.

Having been subjected to the pigeonholing of Hollywood myself, I realized that once you become a studio-approved director, your chances of ever making your own film again are zero. You make the films that the studio wants you to make.

I don't want to plan my career. That would be a business plan. Filmmaking is not a business plan.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

I always say that I'm a filmmaker, not a factory. I don't have to churn out films every six months.

Making an independent film is so different.

The fact that technology has developed so much gives you the liberty to tell the stories, which were difficult to say earlier. It allows you to tell it more convincingly, more elaborately and more beautifully.

I like to work with people who want to make films because they are passionate about films and not because they want to sell films and make money. I am not for people who get the most saleable actor and then the most saleable director and sell the film.

Be it acting, writing, directing or producing, I love cinema. I love the art of telling stories and I'm happy doing one of the above or all of the above.