Ryan Coogler: ​‘I’m more con­fi­dent in my film lan­guage than I am in my English’

Oak­land-born direc­tor Ryan Coogler is always con­scious of his roots. With a fil­mog­ra­phy in which each work threads the nee­dle between fran­chise lega­cy and per­son­al strug­gle, his char­ac­ters are usu­al­ly in some kind of com­mu­nion between the past, or with a pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion (or both). One of the most touch­ing moments of 2015’s Creed sees Coogler employ edit­ing to con­vey the spir­it of the main character’s father reach­ing him for a brief moment. 2018’s Black Pan­ther takes things a step fur­ther and fea­tures a tan­gi­ble realm for the protagonist’s deceased ances­tors. His new film, Sin­ners – tech­ni­cal­ly a vam­pire movie, but one that chafes against sim­ple cat­e­gori­sa­tion – is a sort of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with his own fam­i­ly, via its Mis­sis­sip­pi set­ting. The direc­tor spoke about the film’s ori­gins and how it links with his own, as well as his ideas on genre and work­ing with real­ly big cameras.

LWLies: When did you first start think­ing about Sin­ners?

Coogler: A long time ago. I think it was the first fea­ture script I fin­ished. I’ve long since lost it; it’s in a com­put­er some­where. But with this one, I knew I had to make some­thing after Black Pan­ther 2, and I was think­ing about what I would do after­wards. And I know I had to do some­thing fast, because that movie took so long. We got hit with some unspeak­able tragedies, like los­ing Chad­wick [Bose­man], and the glob­al tragedy of the pan­dem­ic. Tish (Leti­cia Wright) was injured, which delayed us quite a bit, and I was like, ​‘I want to be done with this, I want to make some­thing quick and some­thing simple’.

I had an uncle who I was real close with – who was from Mis­sis­sip­pi – pass away while I was in post on Creed. And he was big into blues music, and through him I kin­da fell in love with the genre. When he passed, I would lis­ten to songs to kin­da remind me of him. I was in America’s South, in a city called Byron, Geor­gia, shoot­ing a scene for Pan­ther 2, and a rap­per who I was lis­ten­ing to a ton, named Young Dolph, was mur­dered around the same time. I was think­ing about the genre of rap, and how often I shout out like an artist I’m lis­ten­ing to, who I’m maybe the same age as, who I iden­ti­fy with, would lose their life in a sit­u­a­tion. You can tell their music was haunt­ing them, or they were try­ing to escape. I was like, ​‘I need to take a break from rap for a lit­tle while’. Same with Young Dolph’s killing.

I had a con­ver­sa­tion with a pro­duc­er on my film, Nate Moore. I was lament­ing to him, say­ing, ​‘What kind of music is it where you’re lis­ten­ing to some­body try­ing to escape some­thing, and it ends up tak­ing them away any­way. Music where they’ve got it all fig­ured out and it’s still hap­pen­ing.’ And he said, ​‘Grunge music is like that. All my favourite artists have a lot of music about depres­sion and addic­tion and try­ing to nav­i­gate it, and end up suc­cumb­ing to it any­way.’ So I start­ed lis­ten­ing to grunge around that time. And I was hear­ing a lot of blues riffs in it. It remind­ed me of lis­ten­ing to my uncle, and that was where the seeds of the movie came from. And as I got into writ­ing it, I was real­is­ing there were some ele­ments of this in a movie I was always try­ing to make, so it felt like I made it quickly.

Con­sid­er­ing you had this in mind for a real­ly long time, do you think you could have made this ver­sion of Sin­ners after Fruit­vale Sta­tion?

No [laughs].

I was think­ing about it in the con­text of it being your first film in a while out­side of a pre-exist­ing fran­chise like the Creed and the Black Pan­ther movies, and I was won­der­ing how those had some bear­ing on the process of mak­ing Sin­ners.

I think I couldn’t have exe­cut­ed the film to this qual­i­ty when I was 28 years old, I just wasn’t there yet. Also, I’m just a dif­fer­ent per­son now. I think I made Fruit­vale when I was 27… I’m 38 now and this movie has char­ac­ters in it that… It’s inter­est­ing. Because Creed is what I made right after Fruit­vale, and Creed has char­ac­ters that are my age. And then it has char­ac­ters that are in their ear­ly sev­en­ties, your Stal­lones and your Phyli­cia Rashads, the char­ac­ters they por­tray. And I could do that at that time. This film has char­ac­ters that are my age now. I’m old enough to be mak­ing a movie about some­body in their late thir­ties and say­ing what that means. And also, this movie was hard. A lot of the tech­ni­cal aspects I learned on Creed, on the Pan­ther films, I applied to this one… oth­er­wise I would have been lost in the woods bro [laughs].

Could you tell me a bit about what those tech­ni­cal aspects were? Espe­cial­ly shoot­ing on IMAX.

It’s fun­ny, when we were gear­ing up, the biggest thing talked about with the IMAX cam­eras was the weight. But it’s actu­al­ly a lighter cam­era than the oth­er cam­era that we used. The IMAX cam­era is 20, 30 pounds lighter than the [Panav­i­sion] Sys­tem 65 cam­eras – those were our sync sound cam­eras, our tra­di­tion­al movie cam­eras. Those cam­eras you can’t hand­hold, you can’t put on a Steadicam. They have to be stu­dio mode – crane, sticks, dol­ly on the ground. And to go back to Fruit­vale, it was a hand­held movie. We had an ARRI 416, and the only scene we shot stu­dio-style was a flash­back. In all of my movies, I swing the cam­era round every­where, so it was a mas­sive learn­ing curve to say, ​‘Alright, we’re gonna walk over here,’ and we’re not [laughs]. Which is to say, those cam­eras are a hun­dred pounds, so you’re not walk­ing nowhere.

I imag­ine that com­pli­cates plan­ning things a bit. 

The real issues are two things: rip­ping film through 15 per­fo­ra­tions a sec­ond, so the roll is only live for some­where between two and two-and-a-half min­utes (if you’re shoot­ing 24 frames a sec­ond). So you’ve got very short rolls, and if you shoot long takes, like I do often, you’re reload­ing quite often. And that takes time. We had an incred­i­ble crew, so they were doing it quick­ly, but it’s the wait­ing time.

I won­dered if you could talk about how Sin­ners is tak­ing a bit of a dif­fer­ent approach to the vam­pire, and your desire to not nec­es­sar­i­ly lean on their cin­e­mat­ic iconography.

I think that the film is play­ing back to this about gen­res, right? A big part of com­mod­i­fy­ing things, a big part of human nature is to clas­si­fy things. ​‘This is orig­i­nal,’ or, ​‘this is a fran­chise’, this is based on IP, this is not based on it… and when you real­ly inter­ro­gate that con­cept, it becomes a lit­tle strange. Yeah there’s vam­pires in this movie, there’ve been vam­pires in a mil­lion movies. And yeah, you can be orig­i­nal all day, but also you have this ele­ment as a part of the movie that has been part of our human con­scious­ness. In dif­fer­ent cul­tures, for a while. And we were real­ly excit­ed to put our unique stamp on it, but at the same time, still make sure that peo­ple recog­nise what a vam­pire is. There are some visu­al things that are unique about these vam­pires in our movie, but I think more than any­thing these vam­pires fit into the themes of the film. You might not be able to take them out of Sin­ners and drop them into anoth­er vam­pire movie, they wouldn’t make sense there.

I remem­ber your com­pos­er Lud­wig Görans­son describ­ing using envi­ron­men­tal sounds on the Fruit­vale Sta­tion sound­track, and I was think­ing about his work on Oppen­heimer which played with time sig­na­tures. Is there a par­tic­u­lar ingre­di­ent which you were play­ing with for the score for Sin­ners? Espe­cial­ly with what you said about blues shap­ing the film.

Lud­wig and I are old friends, we met while we were at film school. He was in a com­pos­er school, and I didn’t know jack shit about any­thing. So I asked him, ​‘Are you a mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist?’ And if you know him, he fucks around a lot – he’s got a real unique sense of humour. I hadn’t known him well at the time, but his answer to me was, ​‘No’, which was a lie (laughs). He said, ​‘I don’t play a lot of instru­ments but I do play the gui­tar very well.’ And that was truth­ful. The real­i­ty of Lud­wig is, he can’t play any­thing that requires you to breathe, but the only instru­ment he will claim to play is the gui­tar, because he’s that good at it. And this movie, it’s about a lot of shit but at its heart it’s about a guitarist.

And the score that he’s made is unbe­liev­able. There’s been a few times dur­ing record­ing the score where his engi­neer turns to look at me, and he’s like, ​‘This is the first time anybody’s ever done this.’ I’m real­ly proud of what he’s done with this. The real­i­ty is Ludwig’s a gui­tarist because his father is a gui­tar teacher – that’s why he is what he is. And his father is a gui­tarist because he fell in love with Amer­i­can blues music. And he fell in love with it live, when those artists weren’t real­ly allowed to tour in the Unit­ed States, and they start­ed to tour in Europe first. That’s when Ludwig’s dad saw those guys. He would tape them and learn how to play like them. And he taught his son how to play like them. So this is a per­son­al movie for him too.

You talked about the per­son­al con­nec­tion – what did you want to evoke about those con­nec­tions through Sin­ners?

Each movie for me is like an exer­cise in look­ing inter­nal­ly, to myself as a per­son, and find­ing a way to make that inter­nal look cin­e­mat­ic and uni­ver­sal. Movies have enabled me to trav­el. Like, I didn’t have a pass­port until I went to film school. Foot­ball took me all over the coun­try; that’s how I was able to trav­el. My par­ents weren’t trav­el­ling, we didn’t have the mon­ey for that. Film­mak­ing allowed me to see the world. I got my pass­port for my first film fes­ti­val in Cannes when I was in film school, and got a chance to trav­el to the UK to pro­mote Fruit­vale for the first time. And Pan­ther, that meant trav­el­ling to Africa, which I have an ances­tral con­nec­tion to.

But tru­ly, I’d been all over the world, but I’d nev­er been to Mis­sis­sip­pi, which is where I men­tioned my uncle was from, but also, my mater­nal grand­fa­ther was born and raised there before he moved to Oak­land. So this place was so con­nect­ed to my his­to­ry. And with this film that would be the goal, in study­ing this era of my country’s his­to­ry, that’s very glossed over. For me, the film very quick­ly became an oppor­tu­ni­ty to make some­thing real­ly enter­tain­ing, and fun and cin­e­mat­ic and the­atri­cal, but also it became a vehi­cle for reaf­firm­ing the human­i­ty of the peo­ple at that time. Because that’s what they were doing when they invent­ed this music. It was an affir­ma­tion of human­i­ty at a time when that was being denied. And there’s obvi­ous­ly a sad­ness in that, but also an incred­i­ble beauty.

I’d like to men­tion Nick­el Boys.

Oh yeah, beau­ti­ful movie. 

There’s been a con­ver­sa­tion around it cre­at­ing a new Black film gram­mar, with an expe­ri­en­tial per­spec­tive. What you’ve said about Sin­ners, and search­ing for that human­i­ty, made me won­der what your per­spec­tive might be on what a ​‘Black film grammar’.

Boy, was I blown away. Not only by what the film said, but also hear­ing RaMell [Ross] talk about it; he’s a great com­mu­ni­ca­tor. The deci­sions are made when com­mu­ni­cat­ing some­thing through film lan­guage. And for me, it is a lan­guage and I’m flu­ent in it; that’s why I have a job, right? And folks can debate how well or not I speak it or whether they like what I say with it, but And truth­ful­ly, I’m actu­al­ly more con­fi­dent in my film lan­guage than I am in my Eng­lish. I’m relieved when I have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a movie because I think that I do that bet­ter than I can describe. But that being said, this con­cept of Black film gram­mar… I have a dou­ble con­scious­ness about it.

How so?

Because I know that you can make a very con­vinc­ing argu­ment that gen­res are a sen­ti­men­tal func­tion of racism. It wasn’t that long ago where two musi­cians could sing the same song and one would be called a ​‘race record’, and one would be called ​‘blue­grass’. There is a part of me that wants to claim what RaMell is doing for my own cul­ture, absolute­ly; that’s us, that’s a Black film, a Black film­mak­er, a hun­dred per­cent. And at the same time, both things can be true: that’s a film­mak­er; that’s film lan­guage; that’s some­thing mon­u­men­tal. I think every­body can take some­thing from that, because it worked for us. And that’s how things have always been. But now we have the abil­i­ty to be able to say where it start­ed, and maybe demand equity.

I think there’s a ten­sion between want­i­ng to devel­op a voice to say some­thing in par­tic­u­lar, but also not want­i­ng to be strict­ly defined as any one thing, I get that. 

Yeah, and I think that ten­sion is a big part of why art from Black artists can be so trans­for­ma­tive. Because that’s a ten­sion that we’re nav­i­gat­ing constantly.