Barry Jenkins hasn’t made a movie in eight years, a fact about which he doesn’t need to be reminded. He has felt the weight of each passing year. Modest, cerebral but funny, described by even his closest friends as “very private” and “guarded,” Jenkins will be 37 in November. He always assumed he would have made more films by this point in his life. There have been moments over the course of the past eight years — desperate stretches of days or months — when he feared he would never make a movie again. He sometimes managed to convince himself he could be happy doing something else: writing for television, directing commercials. But the feeling inevitably passed. And the question kept coming, Where’s the next film, Barry? Each time it was asked — by producers, well-meaning friends, baristas — it stung, and he felt it in his gut, and he thought to himself, Motherfucker. He had to make another movie.

On a Sunday morning in August, Jenkins is brewing coffee in his loft on the 16th floor of a high-rise in Downtown L.A., the room brightly illuminated by the windows he refuses to cover with anything but the sheerest possible fabric, to prevent himself from oversleeping. The floors and most other available surfaces are stacked high with neat piles of DVDs and art magazines and novels. A blue neon sign depicting the cursive word “black” hangs on one wall, opposite a portrait of James Baldwin painted by one of Jenkins’s former co-workers at a Bay Area Banana Republic.

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Beside his bed, in a place of prominence, is a poster for his 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, a lyrical and ambiguous film about a one-night-stand starring The Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac. Jenkins made the movie on a shoestring budget of $15,000 — a loan from an old film-school friend, who had earned the sum doing digital effects for a Hollywood blockbuster — and had been surprised but gratified to see it embraced by film festival audiences and critics around the world. Jenkins soon found himself championed as an important new voice by the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Ta-Nehisi Coates. A.O. Scott included the film in his end-of-the-year best-of list for the New York Times, alongside Avatar and The Hurt Locker. Almost immediately, Jenkins began to field questions about his follow-up.

“I knew it would be a process,” he tells me now, measuring coffee beans with the careful precision of a research chemist, “but I thought for sure within the next two years I would be on set making my next film.” Having measured the beans — “always by weight, not by size,” he explains — he pauses to grind them, a mechanical roar that makes us both flinch. “And when it didn’t happen,” he continues, “I thought, Shit, there must be something wrong with me.”

There were, of course, other projects. In the aftermath of Medicine’s success, he wrote and developed a manic-sounding epic about “Stevie Wonder and time travel,” involving a mysterious mansion in Harlem and a vintage Moog synthesizer with magical, spacetime-altering properties. “My life was all about Stevie Wonder for like two years,” he says. Jenkins was working on the film with Focus Features, but it never panned out. For this, he blames only himself. “I think I just didn’t write a good enough script,” he says. “And after that didn’t work, I just needed to make a living.”

