Barry Jenkins Working on ‘The Intuitionist'

For the longest time, Barry Jenkins has wanted to make “The Intuitionist.” This was before he directed “Moonlight,” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Hell, even before his debut, 2008’s “Medicine for Melancholy.” It’s been a burning passion project of his to adapt Colson Whitehead’s first book.

“I tried to track Colson down way back in the mid-2000s. I didn’t have any money to option the book, and I didn’t have any way to actually get to Colson,” he told Town & Country. “But that was my first attempt.”

Many years later, Jenkins directed “The Underground Railroad,” based on Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, into an acclaimed series for Amazon. However, now Jenkins is back into pursuing “The Intuitionist” and it looks like it might be his next film (after “Mufasa”).

Jenkins tells IndieWire that there is indeed a script already written for his film adaptation, which he calls “awesome,” and that at the moment he is “trying to put it all together.”

It’s my favorite book by him, too, which I tell him all the time. […] He loves the show [Underground Railroad], which is so meaningful to me. But I always tell him, “Hey, we got to get this other one. We got to get this other one. We got to get it.

The Intuitionist takes place in an unknown city, possibly New York, full of skyscrapers and other buildings requiring vertical transportation in the form of elevators. The time, never identified explicitly, is one when black people are called "colored" and integration is a current topic.

The protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector of the "Intuitionist" school. The Intuitionists practice an inspecting method by which they ride in an elevator and intuit the state of the elevator and its related systems. The competing school, the "Empiricists", insists upon traditional instrument-based verification of the condition of the elevator. Watson is the second black inspector and the first black female inspector in the city.

In the meantime, Jenkins is currently putting the finishing touches on Disney’s “Mufasa,” set for December release, a peculiar big studio venture for the filmmaker. Jenkins has been accused of “selling out” after hopping onboard this film, and he’s shot back at his critics, a few times, including most recently on social media (“Bruh, What Kind of Logic is That?").

Jenkins, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the last 10 years, is well-known for his Oscar-winning “Moonlight,” a film that was released at the right place and during the right time, in 2016. I don’t necessarily think it’s that aged well, but I might be in the minority with that opinion.