Oscar winner Barry Jenkins kicked off the new year the way he ended the old, with two films — “Mufasa: The Lion King” and “The Fire Inside” — in the top 10 at the box office.
It’s a feat Jenkins — who co-wrote “The Fire Inside” with Rachel Morrison while editing his 2016 Oscar-winning film “Moonlight” — could never have planned. On the surface, the two films appear to have little in common.
“Mufasa,” the big-budget Disney release, has a huge cultural imprint thanks to 1994’s “The Lion King,” which became one of the most profitable films of all time with acting legend James Earl Jones voicing Mufasa. In contrast, “The Fire Inside,” a biopic about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the first American woman to earn 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 development stage. It’s a theme, he said, “I realize now is so present in my work.”
As Jenkins continues to grow as a filmmaker while also broadening the scope of the stories Hollywood tells and who is at their center, his themes explore the journey to oneself, as well as the values of community and “found family,” even in his global blockbuster.
What “grabbed” 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 that he is that way because of the character traits he inherited. I think decontextualizing that and showing that just like Claressa Shields, or just like the character in ‘Moonlight,’ that he came from this other place, and through learning from his community, through really wonderful nurturing by a woman who is essentially his foster mother.”
