Barry Jenkins explains how making Mufasa changed him as a filmmaker

Over the four years he’s spent working on “Mufasa: The Lion King”, Barry Jenkins estimates that he’s been asked why he wanted to make it at least 400 times.
The question of why Jenkins, the filmmaker of “Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “The Underground Railroad”, would want to jump into the big-budget, photorealistic animated Disney world of lions and tigers has bedeviled much of a film world that reveres him.
Countless other directors had made leaps into CGI-heavy blockbuster-making before. But Jenkins’ decision was uniquely analysed – perhaps because there’s no more heralded, or trusted, filmmaker today under the age of 50 than Jenkins.
“It just thought it was something I could not deny,” Jenkins says. “I had to do it.” “Mufasa”, which opens in theatres Friday, brings together movie worlds that ordinarily stay very far apart.
Made with virtual filmmaking tools, “Mufasa” essentially plopped one of the most groundbreaking filmmakers working today into an all-digital playground, with a budget more than a hundred times that of “Moonlight.” Often in “Mufasa”, you can feel Jenkins’ sensibility warming and enhancing what can, in other less sensitively commanded films, feel soulless. With songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Mufasa” works as a big-movie entertainment and, even more surprisingly, as a Barry Jenkins film.
(AP)