La La Land-Moonlight directors recall Oscars Best Picture disaster: 'It's messy, but kind of gorgeous'

The filmmakers met up to talk about the blunder with Variety

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Damien Chazelle and Barry Jenkins - the directors whose films were caught up in the Best Picture snafu at this year's Oscars ceremony - have joined forces for a touching 'morning after' interview detailing their experience of the bizarre turn of events.

“It’s messy, but it’s kind of gorgeous,” Moonlight's writer-director Jenkins told Variety, revealing that he first watched the moment back on his phone at 3am on Monday morning.

The moment in question saw Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty wrongly announce La La Land as Best Picture after being handed the wrong envelope by PricewaterhouseCooper accountant Brian Cullinan; Moonlight had, in fact, won.

Jenkins continued: “You have these two groups of people who came together for a second. There’s a picture with me hugging Jordan [Horowitz, La La Land producer], and Adele [Romanski, Moonlight producer] has her arm on his shoulder. That’s what the moment was.”

“Everything looked so energised, I at first thought there was some kind of prank going on,” said La La Land's Chazelle who won the evening's Best Director award.

Chazelle went on to reveal how he and Jenkins spoke about the way the moment permitted the rivalry created bya wards season to come crumbling down around them.

He said: “It’s weird to be friendly with someone but to feel like there’s a mano-a-mano thing, which I guess is the nature of the Oscars. So it was nice to explode that myth a little bit on a big stage.”

Jenkins confessed that everything he had planned for a potential winning moment “went completely out the window” following the blunder.

“I’ve been saying that [co-writer] Tarell [Alvin McCraney] and I are that kid in the film, and that kid does not grow up to make a piece of art that gets eight Academy Award nominations,” he recalls. “It’s a dream I never allowed myself to have. When we were sitting there, and that dream of winning didn’t come true, I took it off the table. But then I had to very quickly get back into that place. And my first thought was to get to the stage to give Jordan a hug as quickly as possible.”

A London cinema admirably used the moment to troll an audience who had paid to watch Moonlight by 'mistakenly' playing 20 seconds of La La Land.