NEW YORK >> Over the four years he’s spent working on “Mufasa: The Lion King,” Barry Jenkins estimates that he’s been asked why he wanted to make it at least 400 times.

The question of why Jenkins, the filmmaker of “Moonlight,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “The Underground Railroad,” would want to jump into the big-budget, photorealistic animated Disney world of lions and tigers has bedeviled much of a film world that reveres him.

“I just thought it was something I could not deny,” Jenkins says. “I had to do it.”

“Mufasa,” which opens in theaters Friday, brings together movie worlds that ordinarily stay very far apart. On the one hand, you have the Oscar-winning, 45-year-old director of some of the most luminous and lyrical films of the past decade. On the other, you have the intellectual property imperatives of today’s Hollywood. What happens when they collide?

The result in “Mufasa,” about the lion cub’s orphaned upbringing set both before and after the events of Jon Favreau’s 2019 remake of “The Lion King,” is an uncommonly textured and thoughtfully rendered spectacle that, Jenkins maintained in a recent interview, has more in common with “Moonlight” than you’d think. Made with virtual filmmaking tools, “Mufasa” essentially plopped one of the most groundbreaking filmmakers working today into an all-digital playground, with a budget more than a hundred times that of “Moonlight.”

“My head was spinning when this started,” Jenkins says. “It actually reminded me of when I first got into filmmaking.”

It’s also an experience that has evidently changed Jenkins.

“It was almost like learning a new language,” he says of the process.

Q How many times have you been asked why you did this movie?

A At least 400 times. But it came down to the spirit and the warmth of Jeff Nathanson’s script and also the spirit and the warmth I always found in the story. I came to “The Lion King” by babysitting my nephews way, way back in the 1990s.

Q Had you been seeking something lighter after those projects?

A Maybe warmer, lighter but still just as deep, just as spiritual. This idea of family legacy, of finding your place in the world, those are things that are very present in “Moonlight” and “The Underground Railroad.” If I was telling you, “I’m going to make this film about this kid who has this almost biblical experience involving water and a parent figure that he then gets displaced from, and has to find his place in the world, I could be talking about “Moonlight” or I could be talking about “Mufasa.”

Q Were you motivated by expanding yourself as a filmmaker?

A It wasn’t about the notions of who people thought I was. But I was looking to expand just the kind of filmmaking I was doing at that point. This came right in the thick of pretty much a seven-year cycle, from beginning “Moonlight” to being in post on “The Underground Railroad,” the way this movie is made, with this virtual production, it’s just a very new way of making films.

Q Did you find you could carry your sensibility into virtual filmmaking?

A I did. We evolved this process to the point where we could create so much of all the world and the movement in virtual space, and we could then take our virtual cameras into virtual production. We evolved the animation to the point where we could create the light, we could create the set, we could create the environment. (Cinematographer) James (Laxton) would be there and I would be there, and we’re blasting the voices of the actors into the room and the animators are moving through and I’m directing the blocking, and the camera is responding to the blocking in real time.

Q It seemed like you were putting particular emphasis on close-ups. In the virtual space, were you playing with where to put the camera?

A Absolutely. Look, I’m a filmmaker who was on set with “Moonlight,” I’ve got 25 days and the sun is going down. Yeah, you’re trying to find a place for the camera, you have ideas, but those ideas aren’t practically achievable. In this sense, the camera could be anywhere. It could be everywhere. It’s sort of the same questions but the possibility of answering is so immediate and direct.

Q Do you see “Mufasa” more as part of a continuum for you personally?

A I’ve learned so many other ways of making a film that I just could not learn making something like “The Underground Railroad.” What I love now is the overlap between the two of them. When I began this process, I talked to Matt Reeves because I had heard he had used some of these tools to pre-vis “The Batman.” He said, “Do you know that shot where the Penguin is in his car and Batman is walking upside down? I discovered that in the volume.” I said, “Of course you did.” I was like, Oh my God, we could have pre-vised “Moonlight” with this technology.