Disney’s “Mufasa” is one of the last remaining Hollywood tentpoles of the year, and it might be director Barry Jenkins‘ first and last time making an all-digital movie. Jenkins is the Oscar winner behind acclaimed dramas such as “Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and he said in an interview with Vulture that he knows what everyone is thinking: “On what planet do I, Mr. ‘Moonlight,’ make a prequel to ‘The Lion King?’”
“I can’t tweet about the Super Bowl without somebody reminding me that I’m making this fucking film,” he added. “I can’t … When I took this job, the idea was ‘What does Barry Jenkins know about visual effects? Why the hell would he do this movie?’ I think part of that I found very invigorating. People make these things, you know, with computers. So anybody should be able to do this. Anybody, right? There’s nothing physically that says I am incapable of doing this.”
Vulture has an extensive breakdown of the three years Jenkins spent making “Mufasa” using all-virtual production tools, just as director Jon Favreau did before him on 2019’s “The Lion King.” The new film serves as a prequel to that story. Jenkins spent 147 days shooting “Mufasa,” but there was never any physical set. He doesn’t sound too keen on repeating this kind of filmmaking, at least not any time soon.
“It is not my thing,” Jenkins said of all-digital filmmaking. “It is not my thing. I want to work the other way again, where I want to physically get everything there. I always believe that what is here is enough, and let me just figure out what is the chemistry to make alchemy? How can these people, this light, this environment, come together to create an image that is moving, that is beautiful, that creates a text that is deep enough, dense enough, rich enough to speak to someone?”
The director’s longtime producer Adele Romanski told Vulture that he might direct an Alvin Ailey biopic for Searchlight Pictures next. Whatever Jenkins chooses to do, it is “not going to be a $250 million movie, right? So we’re going to have to go back to embracing a much more limited tool set.”
Even though he had to work in an all virtual space, Vulture reports that Jenkins tried his hardest to ensure “Mufasa” remained a movie with his trademark flourishes. The publication notes the film has “many long, gliding, unbroken takes that float gracefully toward and around the characters, evoking not the typical Disney-cartoon visual grammar but techniques perfected by so-called slow-cinema masters like Béla Tarr, Jia Zhangke and Gus Van Sant. Jenkins got a note from the parent company worrying that one of the long takes played a little ‘slow,’ but there was no indication that he was required to implement it.”
“We were trying to do these scenes in as few shots as possible,” Jenkins explained, “even though we didn’t have to think that way.”
“Mufasa” opens in theaters Dec. 19 from Disney.
