Amazon pairs with Oscar winner Jenkins

Amazon is developing an original drama written and directed by Barry Jenkins, director of this year’s winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, Moonlight.

Barry Jenkins

The Underground Railroad is based on Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name and will be written and directed by Jenkins, with Brad Pitt’s Plan B set to executive produce.

It will also be exec produced by Pastel, the film and TV company founded by Jenkins alongside Adele Romanski and Sara Murphy.

Set in the antebellum South of the US, the book follows a young girl after she escapes her Georgia plantation for the rumoured ‘underground railroad,’ a secret network of routes and safe houses leading to freedom in the north.

“It’s a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation’s history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way,” said Jenkins.

“Preserving the sweep and grandeur of a story like this requires bold, innovative thinking and in Amazon we’ve found a partner whose reverence for storytelling and freeness of form is wholly in line with our vision.”

Joe Lewis, head of comedy, drama and virtual reality at Amazon Studios, described the book as “a sweeping, character-driven, boundary-destroying epic.”