A Barry Jenkins method breakdown

Barry Jenkins' pre-production process is a course in how to protect performance at the script stage, and it is worth breaking down in specific terms because it is unusually documented and unusually replicable. What Jenkins does in the weeks before principal photography — with his cast, with his DP James Laxton, with his editor Joi McMillon — is more disciplined than most contemporary American directors, and the results on screen are the direct product of that discipline.

The most-cited part of his method is the actor-DP rehearsal. Jenkins runs full-length rehearsals of scenes before shooting begins, with Laxton in the room, and uses those rehearsals to determine both blocking and lighting in a single pass. That collapses two decisions that are usually made separately, and it means the camera is composed for the specific way the actors have inhabited the scene rather than for a generic version of it. The result is a distinctive kind of tenderness in the coverage.

The second piece is the editor as pre-production presence. McMillon is involved in scene-level decisions before shooting, which means the coverage list on each scene is designed around the cut Jenkins already imagines. That inverts the standard American workflow, where the editor discovers the film after principal photography and works with whatever coverage the director thought to shoot. Jenkins' method sacrifices some coverage flexibility for a much stronger sense of the film's rhythm going into the edit.

The third piece is the score integration. Nicholas Britell scores to picture, but Jenkins consults with him on the tonal register of scenes during pre-production, which means the music has been thought about before the shooting begins rather than added at the end. This is not unique to Jenkins, but it is unusually consistent in his practice, and it accounts for some of the tonal precision of his films.

The critique of the Jenkins method is that it is expensive in time and requires unusually generous collaborators, and that most directors do not have the industry standing to demand the pre-production runway he gets. Fair enough. But the method is not, in principle, restricted to his budget level, and younger filmmakers who have adopted even parts of it — the actor-DP rehearsal in particular — have produced noticeably stronger first features than they would have without. Method is transferable when it is broken down honestly. Jenkins deserves credit for how much of his he has made public.