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Barry Jenkins participated in a new profile with Vulture this week, aimed at answering the question basically the entire world has been asking him ever since he signed on for his last paying gig: Why the fuck is the director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk making a photorealistic CGI lion movie for Disney? It speaks to the co*plexity of the question that, several hundred words, interviews, and technical innovations later, the answer to why Jenkins is making this winter's Mufasa is still a sort of shrugging "Wouldn't know I didn't like it if I didn't try it" kind of thing—co*plete with Jenkins straight-up admitting, three years later, that making an all-digital film like this is "not my thing."

More than anything, the profile reads like Jenkins and his dedicated team (all of whom seem to have been game, but unenthused, to take this trip into Virtual World with their leader) desperately searching for creativity in a deliberately sterile universe; there are lots of conversations about Jenkins "wandering off" to find odd little details in the film's digital sets while the crew toured them in virtual reality, or fighting to keep in moments where the operator of the film's virtual camera stumbled a bit, providing a sense of realistic motion to the proceedings. (If you're just fascinated by the idea of this kind of virtual movie-making, this is also a pretty solid read; some of this tech is genuinely neat, even if we aren't huge fans of the end result.)

Jenkins (who, it's noted more than once, was co*ing off of the extremely chaotic making of his TV series The Underground Railroad when he decided to go Disney for a minute) is funny and self-aware about the whole thing, and there's a repeated focus on his attempts to make a "Barry Jenkins movie" that operates inside these technical walls, rather than let them shape his end product. Even so, he also sounds pretty exhausted by the whole thing. "I can’t tweet about the Super Bowl without somebody reminding me that I’m making this fucking film," he states at one point. And as for digital production: "It is not my thing. It is not my thing. I want to work the other way again, where I want to physically get everything there. I always believe that what is here is enough, and let me just figure out what is the chemistry to make alchemy? How can these people, this light, this environment, co*e together to create an image that is moving, that is beautiful, that creates a text that is deep enough, dense enough, rich enough to speak to someone?" (That being said, he also then immediately starts getting starry-eyed about the idea of using the Mufasa tech to make a Muppets movie, so maybe the infection really and truly has set in.)

Mufasa opens in theaters on December 20.