Are you in a competitive creative career? Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins has advice on what it takes to find success

Jenkins’s back-and-forth journey in the film industry reminds us that progress isn’t linear.

Barry Jenkins [Photo: Wikipedia]

It’s a tough time out there for creatives. Whether you’re a writer, director, actor, or artist of any kind, the world is short on opportunities—particularly the kind that pay.

But even Academy Award winners like screenwriter and director Barry Jenkins didn’t have a linear path to success, as he shared in a recent panel about how to sustain a career as a filmmaker.

Jenkins, the writer-director behind Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, was a panelist at “Behind the Chair: Representation and the Business of Filmmaking,” a seminar on the film industry hosted by the Directors Guild of America. In a one-on-one discussion with fellow director Anu Valia (We Strangers), Jenkins advised the audience on how to persevere in a crowded creative field.

“Many of you guys are really, really good. You’re really strong directors, but there’s so many of you that are so strong,” he began. “When I think about what it takes to stay in a career as a director, as a feature film director, it is whatever the hell you need to do.”

For Jenkins, that meant returning to a job in retail even after directing his first feature film. He recalled working on his feature-length debut Medicine for Melancholy, which released in 2008 to critical acclaim, including becoming a New York Times Critics’ Pick.

“I made a movie for $15,000 with friends I went to film school with,” Jenkins said of the film. “I then worked at Banana Republic for three and a half years while I had a deal at Focus Features and an agent at CAA, because having a film on the year-end list at The New York Times doesn’t pay the rent.”

In another ironic example, Jenkins said he was a food worker at one film festival while his work was playing at another: “I literally had a movie screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, and I was the concession stand manager at the Telluride Film Festival,” he shared. “You know why? [. . .] I just wanted to be where cinema was.”

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