The Brooklyn Rail

What did you envision when you first learned of the Underground Railroad?

Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad (2021) is a work of great care, steeped in humanity and blooming with cinematic grandeur. Jenkins’s poetic visual (and auditory) grammar fuses with the fabulist magical realism of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to produce a narrative powered by the pursuit for liberation yet also suffused in a tender attentiveness to Blackness and the Black body. Jenkins’s vision of the literalized station and tracks generates emotional space within the Black quotidian, a realm typically stifled by conditions of the slave narrative and feature filmmaking. In fact, the series works in opposition to the genre’s conventions. The Underground Railroad departs from the overemphasis on realism ascribed to slave narratives that (re)subject Black bodies to gratuitous violence. Instead, the series evolves as a profound epic propelled by Black subjectivity that conjures a historical and cultural memory of Black life, strivings, and joy—amidst the terrors of slavery—underimagined in popular media.

Debuting first as an Amazon Prime Video limited series, Jenkins’s adaptation arrives on physical media as a special edition DVD and Blu-ray release by the Criterion Collection. A film-school-in-a-box set, through and through, the release features commentary tracks for all ten episodes, deleted scenes, a brief piece on building the in-camera subterranean railroad, and seven teasers created by Jenkins. There is also The Gaze (2021), a companion film set to Nicholas Britell’s ethereal score and consisting of portraiture in motion. The film illuminates much of the cast on set, in wardrobe, gazing onto us seeing them. Additionally, the release includes a new graphic novel of “Genesis,” an unfilmed chapter written by Jenkins and Nathan C. Parker and illustrated by Valentine De Landro created specifically for this release, as well as an essay by critic Angelica Jade Bastién. I sat with Jenkins to discuss developing the release with Criterion and what it means to create a release like this for a series originally on a streaming platform. We discuss returning to a project for a Criterion release, access to physical media, the supplemental material in conjunction with the show’s goals, and creating feeling.

Edward Mendez (Rail): How did the Criterion release of The Underground Railroad come about? You have another film, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), in the Criterion Collection. Can you talk about the process for Underground’s release after that one?

Barry Jenkins: It wasn’t a process, but the releases for The Underground Railroad and Medicine for Melancholy did go hand and hand. As we were building the release for Medicine for Melancholy, it just came up. It was like, “The Underground Railroad would be great in the collection.” I was like, “Yeah, yeah—it would.” But my thought was, “Oh, that’s right, streaming titles don’t go into the collection.” Criterion was like, “Yes they do. Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (2020) is coming out right now.” And so it just organically built off of that. It almost feels like I’ve been working with Criterion for the last two-and-a-half years because we went right out of making the Medicine release into The Underground Railroad release. So they went hand in hand.

Rail: It’s pretty neat to just have someone say your limited series should be part of the collection.

Jenkins: It is. It is. And I imagine that’s how it always happens. But I think with the television show, it didn’t seem obvious. So it was really nice because with a television show, and not just a television show but a streaming show, you do wonder about physical media. Because physical media, theoretically, isn’t necessarily forever. Sometimes these formats go out of service and you can’t play them. I don’t know if anybody has Betamax players anymore. You’ve probably never heard of Betamax. But physical media does give the thing a second life. For me, the biggest thing with Criterion releases is libraries all over the country are really big on stocking Criterions. We can’t assume that everyone can afford an Amazon Prime subscription. There are people who consume their media by going to libraries and this release expands the audience for a show to people who maybe couldn’t watch it otherwise.

Rail: Issues surrounding access really speak to the necessity of physical media, right? Particularly for libraries and audiences, like you said, that may not have streaming services. Many people still rely on physical media and are turning back to it, especially in an age where media online is so precarious. And I do know what Betamax is! My dad had a Betamax player. I’ve never seen a LaserDisc player, though.

Jenkins: LaserDisc was awesome! Criterion initially had a really strong LaserDisc offering. There are some titles that only had a Laserdisc release.

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Rail: What has revisiting The Underground Railroad been like? Did you start somewhere specific with this release?

Jenkins: When the process for this release started, we were so deep into making Mufasa: The Lion King (2024). The Underground Railroad was kind of in the past. So we needed to revisit it and say, “Okay, wait—this was, for a while, all of our lives. And now we have this other thing that is all of our lives.” So we had to reacclimate ourselves to it. The deleted scenes and the teasers were a big thing. But there was an episode that we wrote but did not film called “Genesis.” I brought that to Criterion immediately at the beginning of the process to see if there was anything we could do with it. In addition to The Gaze it was the thing that would make the release complet, in a certain way.

Then once it came time to record the commentary, which is always a really important thing for me with physical media. My experience with Criterion started when I was a film student—I would go and get these LaserDiscs and DVDs and watch them and try to listen to the commentary tracks and supplemental features to try to get an understanding for how someone so much greater than me—how they approach making their work so I can maybe be better at approaching my work. Whenever I do a physical release, I try to do the same thing for a young person like myself—or like I was. So for this release, because the show was logistically a nightmare to make, I wanted to do the commentary in the order of making the show. Rather than going from chapter one to two to three to four to five while recording the commentary track, we recorded it in the order that we filmed the show. In that way, it was like going back in time and reliving the experience of making the show chronologically. That kind of opened some things up for explaining the process of making the show.

Rail: That approach also benefits us, going through the show again but in a way that we hadn’t before, going along with the journey of making the show.

Jenkins: Exactly, exactly. Especially if you’re looking at it with the mindset of, “Okay, how did they do this? What was it like to create this?” I think it gives it that quality.

Rail: I remember in your Criterion Closet Picks video you made a remark about “film school in a box.” That’s how I approached Criterion releases when I first learned of them. I worked in the DVD store after high school and started pouring money into buying up releases.

Jenkins: Yeah, yeah. You’re building a library! Here’s the thing about spending that money: films are expensive to make. Very expensive. And so for 20 dollars you own something that costs 2 million, 20 million, 40 million dollars. There are people who spend 20 million to own a work of art that costs maybe 2000 dollars in materials to create. It’s a completely inverted relationship. So there’s something beautiful about that—you can build an entire library filled with filmed works, with that art that you think is the best in the world. It’s your opinion and you own it. You put it in the thing and it plays and you pay no one a fee to do that. It’s a really wonderful thing. As a filmmaker, having something of mine, like Medicine for Melancholy or The Underground Railroad, alongside some of the greatest filmmakers who have ever lived, that’s just really wonderful.

Rail: We’ve talked a little bit about it, but as a filmmaker, and just as someone who loves physical media, loves films, how was it being able to work with Criterion and get to learn about the lengths that they go for these releases?

Jenkins: You typically don’t—this far removed from the project—experience it again at this intimate of a level. To build this release with Criterion, you really had to get in and go back to this thing that was in the past. I haven’t had to go back and study Moonlight (2016) or If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) or even Medicine at the level that I had to for Railroad. It was refreshing to still be proud of the work. Oftentimes you see something you did in the past and it’s like, “Oh, shit. I maybe could have done that or I could have done this.” But with this piece, it just reaffirmed what I felt we were able to manifest out of ourselves to create the show.

Rail: Can we talk about “Genesis”? It seems to be something that you got to work through a new medium with and watch it get developed. How was it seeing the episode come to fruition as a graphic novel?

Jenkins: It was beautiful. When we were in prep for the show, we realized we couldn’t afford to make “Genesis” the way we had intended to. We had hard choices to make, so we cut two episodes. “Genesis” was the first one that we cut, purely because it didn’t involve any of our main characters. It was like a satellite episode. So it felt less essential than all the other episodes. Not less than, just less essential. The “South Carolina” episode was originally divided into two chapters—one from Cora’s perspective, one from Caesar’s perspective. We ended up combining them into one and never got to do anything with “Genesis.”

For me, you know, growing up hearing the words “Underground Railroad,” I imagined Black people on trains underground. And as someone who works in visual storytelling, I wanted to manifest and reclaim that memory, that vision, and present it for someone else to experience. And not getting the opportunity to do that because of this logistical nightmare we found ourselves in, it was heartbreaking. So when the opportunity came to translate it into a different medium, I was over the moon. I mean, the most joyous thing about making this release was getting to create the graphic novel of “Genesis.”

Rail: In addition to the “Genesis” graphic novel, there is a lot of art that is part of this release. For instance, the cover was done by Tony Stella. How did you land on that cover?

Jenkins: The cover is a painted interpretation of a still image taken by our still photographer, Jima (Atsushi Nishijima), who actually won a few awards for his photography on the show from his guild. All of the stills you’ve probably seen of the show were taken by Jima. And that one always stuck out to me. In the first episode, before Cora leaves with Caesar, she goes to the plot and digs up what she says is her legacy. And there was something just very concrete about that image. And the people at Tony Stella just ran with it. We gave them the still and that was the interpretation they came back with.

Rail: It’s a gorgeous cover. Revisiting the show through to the end when Cora is by the tree, she has the okra seeds and, although it’s not the same dress, it looks similar to this image from the beginning of the show. You revisit the image and it kind of bookends the entire show.

Jenkins: To me, that moment is about—you know, Cora and Molly come up out of the Underground Railroad and they’re in this space that, depending on how you view it, could be idyllic or it could be something out of a Andrei Tarkovsky film. They’re in this vast emptiness. But Cora buries the seeds there because if someone comes out of that tunnel behind her in a week, a month, a year, five years, there’ll be something there growing to give them sustenance. It didn’t occur to me that the cover rhymes with that image. To me, that image is all about when she leaves Georgia. But you’re absolutely right, it’s a similar moment.

Rail: I also wanted to ask you about Sam Messer’s mural in one of the stations. I love the mural, along with the design for the Underground’s network of stations, which evolve as the show goes on. Like you said, when you were a kid, imagining the Underground Railroad as an actual underground railroad populated and run by Black people—it’s a fascinating, beautiful idea to visualize. The mural communicates all the history of the Railroad without the show ever needing to say it.

Jenkins: The mural was our first attempt at saving “Genesis.” I have to shout out our production designer Mark Friedberg who was just monumental in making the show happen. The Underground stations—it was very important to me that they were photorealistic and not CGI. So they are not CGI. They are actual real stations that we built above train tracks. We couldn’t dig subterranean tunnels, so we built the stations above the tracks. We wanted to tell a story with those stations: the further north you get the nicer the stations get, but also the individual station conductors bring their own personalities to them. When Cora leaves Tennessee she’s going to Indiana, which is a refuge of sorts, so we felt like that station could be just, to put it simply, nicer. So the mural—Mark Friedberg and I, alongside James Laxton, our cinematographer, we had this idea that there was a way to communicate, in very simple language, something from the episode of “Genesis.” In the mural, there are so many people who actually worked on the show depicted. There’s even one of the producer’s dogs in that mural. It became our depiction. So it was a way of saving a piece of “Genesis,” but also honoring the people who helped us create this thing.

Rail: That’s beautiful. It’s also very much emblematic of how The Gaze came about. In your intro to The Gaze for the release, you talk about Ms. Wendy—how she had never really been seen in a way that you felt she deserved. So you put her on camera. It reminds me of the mural: a reflection of everybody that is working on this and the people that we don’t see.

Jenkins: Ms. Wendy is a great jumping off point. This woman has probably been on so many film sets, you know, helping people like me tell these stories as accurately as possible. She’s doing this service not just to us the filmmakers but to our collective ancestors. That service was so great, so beautiful and profound that it deserved to be manifested in an image.

Oftentimes, even when I am working—you mentioned the mural. I haven’t thought about the mural in so long. I never think of the mural or get to describe the mural in the way of its meaning for me, because that meaning doesn’t amount to something intellectual for the viewer. It’s just a feeling. I’m just trying to put as much feeling into all these things as possible. One of those feelings was “this woman [Ms. Wendy] is just so deep.” There’s so many deep wells of experience, a feeling of spirituality that will come through if audiences just see her. I really felt like in all the work she had done aiding people like me, she had not been seen. And I spoke to her, I spoke to all the people who appear in The Gaze, and I explained to them what I wanted to do because I never want to take someone’s image. I wanted to see what they were willing to offer. So that’s why my direction was always “show me yourself.”

Hopefully, over the course of the show, as you go through, enough of it builds and compounds that at the end you’ve finished the show and you just have this feeling. I am trying to use these very expensive tools and all these fantastically brilliant people to manifest a feeling. And this release is the most concentrated form of that feeling: you’ve got the show, The Gaze, the teasers, “Genesis,” the wonderful essay by Angelica J. Bastién—you have all these different things that compound into this, I hope, very potent feeling.

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Rail: Thinking about The Gaze, as well as the concept of the gaze throughout the show—like how many of your oners reflect back onto people gazing upon actions in the narrative—bell hooks and the oppositional gaze comes to mind. There is a kind of reclamation of the gaze happening, particularly in relation to seeing Black bodies. It seems to be something at the forefront of your work.

Jenkins: I try not to be prescriptive about it. We typically don’t know when we’re gonna do those shots. We’re working and something happens and you feel like, “Now is the moment.” I remember filming the scene between Royal and Cora in the second Indiana chapter, when “Clair de Lune” is playing and they are sitting on the bed. This moment is possibly the first time this woman is going to willingly share herself physically with someone. She’s going to make love for the first time, and it just felt like the audience needs to know what she feels like, you know? It’s such an intimate, intense thing. And so we asked the actors if they would do it. Now, doing The Underground Railroad versus Moonlight, they know at some point this is coming. Anybody who works with me now is expecting that. But I always love when it arises out of a shared energy. With The Underground Railroad, the bodies—I’m gonna use your term—that we’re filming, they’re the actors portraying characters that existed pre-photography, to a certain degree. My ancestors lived in a time free of photography and, even if they had lived in a time of photography, mass photography, their images were likely not going to be the ones captured. So working with someone like Ms. Wendy who’s so diligent, trying to get things just right, or Mark Friedberg, putting all his energy into getting things just right—it felt like this is something outside the narrative, outside the plot of telling a story. These images are being created right now and need to be captured—captured in a way that we’re not trying to take their images, not trying to take their bodies. We are presenting a vessel for them to offer themselves to and reflect them in a way that they’re uncorrupted and done so with care and thoughtfulness and empathy.

Rail: It’s a real way of working with care.

Jenkins: Did you say working with kin?

Rail: No, working with care. Though—

Jenkins: I thought you said working with kin. Because that’s a beautiful expression, and that is what it felt like making the show. In a certain way, because the show is about Black folks and Blackness, that was one level of kin. But also too the crew that made the show just fused so deeply and so organically that it felt like this other kind of kin—all this energy compounding to hopefully manifest something. It was moving.