Oscar winner Barry Jenkins started the new year the same way he ended the last, with two films – “Mufasa: The Lion King” and “The Fire Inside” – in the top 10 at the box office.
It’s a feat that Jenkins, who co-wrote “The Fire Inside” with Rachel Morrison while editing her 2016 Oscar-winning film “Moonlight,” could never have planned. At first glance, the two films seem to have little in common.
“Mufasa,” Disney’s big-budget release, has a huge cultural footprint thanks to 1994’s “The Lion King,” which became one of the most profitable films of all time with actor legend James Earl Jones giving voice to Mufasa. In contrast, “The Fire Inside,” a biopic about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the first American woman to win a gold medal in boxing, is a decidedly smaller picture.
Jenkins told NBC News that the arc of the main character, “who has to go on this journey to self-actualize,” is what attracted him most to “The Fire Inside” in its early stage of development. It’s a theme, he said, “I realize is very present in my work now.”
As Jenkins continues to grow as a filmmaker while expanding the scope of the stories Hollywood tells and who is at the center of them, his themes explore the journey toward self, as well as the values of community and “family.” found”, even in its global environment. box office success.
What “got it” to Jenkins about Mufasa was that the character was known in the original “Lion King” as “this great leader, this perfect father, the perfect king, and we assume he is that way because of the character traits he inherited. I think decontextualizing that and showing that, like Claressa Shields, or just like the character in ‘Moonlight,’ she came from this other place, and through learning from her community, through a really wonderful upbringing by a woman who is essentially his adoptive mother. .”
