Barry Jenkins wanted to become a filmmaker after watching ‘Die Hard’.
The 40-year-old director revealed that he was "moved" after seeing the 1988 action flick and that it had convinced him to see cinema as an art form.
In an interview with Empire magazine, Jenkins said: "I remember watching ‘Die Hard’ for the first time and that moved me. I was like, ‘Wow, this is really fun, but it’s also art.’
"The same thing for ‘Aliens’. I didn’t take cinema seriously in the way that maybe is useful for this interview until I was well into film school."
Jenkins helmed the acclaimed coming-of-drama ‘Moonlight’ in 2016, which won Best Picture at the following year’s Oscars, and admits he was taken aback by the movie’s success.
He explained: "To me, before anyone saw ‘Moonlight’, and after … it’s the same film, but there’s no doubt that the feeling of it is completely different.
"I thought that it would be like a postcard I would send to my closest friends and relatives. And then it became this huge f***ing billboard that was projected up into the sky for all the world to see."
The ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ director admits that success can be a bad thing for some filmmakers as it restricts their imagination.
Jenkins said: "It’s not that the world is changing, it’s that the world is altering to them."
Jenkins also explained how he learned to direct by spending time in video stories and doubts he would be the same filmmaker if he was brought up in the modern era.
He said: "If I came up in this era right now, I probably wouldn’t be the same filmmaker, because I learned how to make movies by spending time in video stores."
Barry Jenkins was inspired to direct after watching Die Hard
