From Black Panther to Creed, Ryan Coogler has helped shape some of the biggest movie franchises around. With his next film, Sinners, he dipped his toe into the world of horror for the first time – though, by the sounds of things, it was more of a dive-in head-first situation…
In a Q&A attended by GamesRadar+, which celebrated the flick’s new trailer dropping online, the filmmaker got candid as to why it’s “maybe more exciting” than his previous works.
“I feel like I’m the luckiest guy in the business in terms of the casts that I’ve been able to work with, but this one is up there with the best ones,” the writer-director gushed in the Q&A. “Because it wasn’t based on any pre-existing material, I think all the actors took ownership of their characters. That was so amazing.
“This cast reminds me of the [Black] Panther films, but in a way that’s maybe more exciting in that, when audiences watch this, this is gonna be the first time they see these people – there’s no comic books on it. They really made a community when we were filming down in the South, they really looked out for each other.”
Set in 1930s Mississippi, Sinners sees Michael B. Jordan mark his sixth collaboration with Coogler as troubled twin brothers Elijah and Elias Smoke, who find themselves facing off against a great evil when they return to their hometown looking for a fresh start – and it’s not only vampires that are wreaking bloody havoc. Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Omar Benson Miller, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, and Hailee Steinfeld round out the cast.
“It’s very personal. It’s interesting, too, because every time I’ve been blessed enough to make something, it’d been the most personal thing that I made up to date and this one’s no different,” said Coogler. “The film, for me, was a reclamation of a time and a place that my family doesn’t talk about much, because there’s a lot of feelings associated with our history there. We go there [in this].”
“My maternal grandfather was from Mississippi and my Uncle James, who passed away when I was finishing up Creed, is also [from there], and it was a place that I had never been,” noted the California-born filmmaker. “My grandfather passed before I was born but we grew up in the house that he built in Oakland, and I was really, really close with my uncle. The seed of this movie started with that relationship.
“He would listen to blues music all the time, and he would only talk about Mississippi when he was listening to that,” he went on. “He had a profound effect on my life and I got a chance to dig into my own ancestral history with this film, and it was super rewarding. It was so much fun.”
A self-confessed scary movie nut, Coogler also revealed what made him what to try his hand at terrifying audiences, claiming that it’s “the genre that comes up when people talk about great pieces of art.” He said: “I think that’s because it feels ancient – you know, the first stories we probably told one another around the fire were horror stories – but it always feels fresh, somehow.
“My wife, Zinzi [Evans], who is my producer on this… On set, I’m close to the actors, I like to get close with the camera, and on certain days, we just got covered in blood…”
Sinners releases in theaters on April 18. For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.