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

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—particuarly 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.”

By all accounts, Jenkins is a runaway success story. He’s achieved many filmmakers’ dreams, having won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for his 2016 film Moonlight, which was also named that year’s Best Picture, and being nominated twice more as a director and screenwriter. He’s gone the blockbuster route too, directing Mufasa: The Lion King for Disney in 2024, which was the sixth-highest-grossing film of that year with $723 million at the box office.

To hear that someone as successful as Jenkins still had to balance his creative career with other work to get by hit home for many aspiring artists, who expressed on social media how his advice is both reassuring and sobering.

One user wrote that hearing Jenkins’ story while at their own survival job was “kinda life affirming.” Another echoed that sentiment: “Seeing this after getting home from the Day Job . . . was needed,” they wrote.

Another user praised Jenkins for “openly speaking about the most elusive topic in filmmaking”: where their money actually comes from. “People are mum about it. He’s brave,” they added.

Check out Jenkins’ full conversation below.

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