Jones explained: “About the time when the underground railroad started, trains had started to crisscross the country, specifically the Baltimore-Ohio line, so abolitionists and freedom seekers found that they could freely talk about movement simply by referring to things in terms of railroad vocabulary. How, then, did this rail metaphor come about? It was all to do with time, place and speaking in code. I don’t want CGI.’ And so we found a private rail network and we built our tunnels above them.” I want real tracks, real trains, real tunnels. The 10-part series’ director, Barry Jenkins, whose credits include the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, recalled at a virtual press conference: “I told Mark Friedberg, our production designer: ‘This can’t be fake. But along with cotton fields, plantations and woods, it is equally persuasive in its depiction of underground steam trains that offer light at the end of the tunnel. The gap between the literal and the metaphorical was explored by The Underground Railroad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel by Colson Whitehead, which reimagined actual trains thundering beneath the soil.Ī big-budget-small-screen adaptation, which is now available on Amazon Prime, delivers a combination of ravishing cinematography and elemental suffering (there was a therapist on set) reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. “The underground railroad was just a metaphor for a movement of people to be able to organise a network of abolitionists and freedom seekers.” “When people hear ‘railroad’, they automatically think it was a train,” Jones adds. It was, in fact, a network of secret routes and safe houses used by thousands of enslaved people to flee from the south to free states and Canada in the early to mid-19th century. Jones notes that the first thing people tend to get wrong about the underground railroad is assuming that a series of subterranean trains, tunnels and platforms branched out like the London Underground or New York subway.
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