Damien Chazelle and Barry Jenkins On That #Oscars Moment

For two relatively new Hollywood directors, the 2017 Oscars couldn't have been any more of a nail biter.

It took directors Damien Chazelle - a director who saw two out of three of his movies make it all the way to the Oscars - and Barry Jenkins, who has only two films under his belt, one of them being the critical darling and eventual Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight - until the morning after the Oscars to process that incredible ending.

“Cool to have another young dude out there,” Jenkins said of Chazelle shortly after they'd touched base at the Telluride Film Festival.

Certainly, Jenkins and Chazelle are two of the youngest Oscar winning directors out there today. Chazelle has the unique distinction of being the youngest winner in the Best Director category of the Oscars, while Jenkins (along with Tarell McCraney, who wrote the original play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue) picked up the prize for Best Adapted Screenplay, along with McCraney. Both were historic wins; Chazelle smashed the 86-year-old record by becoming the youngest director ever to win Best Director, while Moonlight stands as the first LGBTQ-themed, and first movie from a black writer/director, to win Best Picture.

Given the stunning way in which Jenkins' Moonlight picked up Best Picture honors, one might have expected there to be some bad blood between the two directors, but nothing could be further from the truth.

“I will be glad when all these firsts and thirds and fifths are a thing of the past,” Jenkins says. “So it’s bittersweet. But it’s not something you set out to do. I don’t think Damien set out to be the youngest winning director. You kind of just create the work. These things just happen, until they don’t.”

Both men saw each other's films at Telluride, where Jenkins became somewhat homesick for his Los Angeles apartment after seeing the building in La La Land's opening number, and Chazelle admitted to being "floored" by Moonlight. They are also at similar points in their careers, having directed just a few features. Certainly the door for more is set to blast open with the continued successes of La La Land and Moonlight, which is set to hit more theaters in the wake of its Oscar win.

But the stunning way in which Moonlight picked up Best Picture honors is something that still awes Jenkins, who'd had an acceptance speech prepared just in case, but tucked it away when La La Land had initially been announced the winner. His first thought, he said, was to hug La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz, who was among the first to break the energy that arose from La La Land's apparent win to announce that Moonlight had actually won.

What appears to be consistent, though, is a desire by both men to keep their work real and authentic.

"I hope it doesn't change the way I approach the work," Jenkins said.

"We hope it changes things for the better, in the sense that it gives us more freedom," Chazelle said. "But there’s always that fear that it changes things for the worse — that pressures or second-guessing creep in."