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“We Literally Burned Our Actual Set”: Writer-Director Ryan Coogler and Producers Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian on Sinners
Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler on the set of Sinners (Photo by Eli Adé) Even before its smashing opening weekend theatrical success, Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s first original directorial outing since his 2013 indie hit Fruitvale Station, was knocking loud on the box office doors. Early reviews praised the film’s unique genre-bending vision, weaving vampire lore and Irish songs into a 1932-set horror-musical dramatic thriller about identical Black twin brothers leaving behind their Chicago gangster lives to return to their sharecropper roots in the Mississippi Delta and start their own juke joint—that is, before the vampires come a-seducing. Before that, Smoke and Stack, twins played by Michael B. Jordan in a bravura dual performance, throw a party about which less said, the better—go experience it in theaters—other than to extol Ludwig Göransson’s (Black Panther) score.
DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw (who also shot Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) used 15-perforation 65mm IMAX cameras alongside anamorphic Ultra Panavision 70 cameras to achieve aspect ratios as divergent as 1.43:1 and 2.76:1, a fact Coogler geeked about in an explainer video where he urged audiences to seek the best nearby large-format screen they could. The sorceries employed to accomplish MBJ’s twin feat included the actor himself donning a ten-camera “Halo Rig” to record his facial expressions. At its non-technical core, though, Sinners is a resplendent ode to the blues and a document of intersectional histories, such as those of the Choctaw and of Southern Chinese immigrant grocers, as much as a blockbuster.
Heading into the second weekend, Coogler, along with producers Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian, the co-founders of Proximity Media (Judas and the Black Messiah)—and respectively, his spouse and his USC film school collaborator—spoke to me in an emotion-forward conversation about how buoyant and overwhelmingly grateful they felt as audience responses poured in, detailing production heroics and sharing the imperative behind making the film in a record time span.
Filmmaker: Ryan, I know this script is extremely personal to you. It is inspired by your relationship to family members from Mississippi—in particular, your uncle James, whom you lost during the making of Creed and to whom you’ve dedicated the film. A lot of your writing process was from memory. How much are you thinking about audiences—and in particular international audiences—during the writing process, even as you’re writing from a personal place? For example, some audiences may be less familiar with the specifics of vampire lore, others with the Black history you’re referencing.
Ryan Coogler: I mean, constantly. Zinzi’s mom was born in the Philippines [and] moved to the States in her twenties. Sev’s parents were born in Iran; they’re Armenian, and Sev was born in Germany. Both Zinzi and Sev are first generation; Zinzi’s dad’s family has been here for centuries. Our company is made up of a lot of folks from different backgrounds, so I think we have a good instinct for what’s giving us what’s gonna give us the biggest shot. To have your film open internationally at our age, bro—it’s my fifth one. The global audience has shown up for my movies, so I gotta keep them in mind.
At the same time, you just gotta make it true, man. Take a filmmaker like Bong [Joon Ho]. I’ll argue that Parasite is his most Korean movie. It’s the one that connected with global audiences. In this day and age, everybody on the same Internet, we’re so connected that I think it’s almost more important to make it as specific as possible, and make sure that you have a diverse group of filmmakers on it, so that if something pops up somebody can say something. Because English is his second language, Sev is great at being in the mix and saying, “I don’t know if I understand that.” And it’s like, “All right, how can we get this more clear?” Zinzi was a full time ASL sign language interpreter. She’s got hard-of-hearing family members. So, for her it’s advocacy to make sure that we put in closed captions in cinemas. Listening to the dubs, the translations, supervising the subtitles, we’re all over that.
Filmmaker: Were there any instances of story adjustments you made for the global audience?
Ryan Coogler: I can’t think of any.
Zinzi Coogler: I think that’s what makes his films resonate—they’re so specific, so rooted and grounded in his perspective, with a ton of furious research about whatever subject matter he’s diving into and having the courage to explore. Because of that specificity, there’s so much that people can connect to within the breadth of characters that end up on screen. With Sinners, that’s no different.
There’s a story Ryan likes to tell about the global reach of blues music. Back in the ’60s, Ludwig Göransson’s [Sinners’ composer] father went to a concert to listen to Albert King in Sweden, and that inspired him to pursue a career as a musician. Later, after his son Ludwig was six years old, he put an acoustic guitar in his hands and taught him the blues. That path led [Ryan and Ludwig, who were roommates at USC] to create all of the stories that they’ve been able to create together, culminating in this blues story. That speaks to just how global this story is, [and] also the connections between Sinners’ Irish characters, [West African] griot and the Fili, and how in those stories, though very ancient, there are still similarities in history that people can see themselves in.
Filmmaker: While I was watching Sammie’s [aka Preacher Boy, played by newcomer Miles Caton] song in the film’s centerpiece sequence inside the Juke Joint, I was reminded of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, and of how I didn’t want the feeling of being in that room to end. At the same time, I had a visceral feeling that if you don’t show everything that you’re showing in the song—all the intersectionality, the Afrofuturism, the ancestors—if you don’t show that right now, then, due to something about our culture, it’s all going to disappear.
Ryan Coogler: Wow, that’s a really interesting take! Look, I had an urgency on me to make this movie, and this was before any of the political events of the past few months. For me, it was about making Wakanda Forever and having a lot of misfortune that delayed that process. Shortly after putting that movie out, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild strikes happened. Us being a company where two out of three founders are WGA members, we were not crossing the picket line to go into our offices in LA, and I was not writing, in solidarity with the Union. Something about understanding the backlog that would create made me say, “We’ve got to run at getting something out fast.”
And… us getting older. We are all around 40 and having kids. I could feel our lives changing to the point that, in six months, a year, two years, three years, you can’t just call everybody up and say, “Hey, let’s move to Louisiana and make this crazy movie.” Our careers are getting too big, too—Nolan movies, Star Wars movies, the type of projects that come across our desk at Proximity are pinch-yourself projects. I got scared, you know? I got scared that I’ll miss the chance to do this. Before the [decision to shoot with] IMAX cameras, it just felt personally important. What’s happened in the world since that decision has been totally a coincidence.
Filmmaker: One of the things I’m always interested in as a genre fan—personally, I watch more zombie films—is the rules of the world with creatures. You’re also trusting the audience to do the same, but there’s also this character, the conjurer Annie [played by Wunmi Mosaku], explaining the rules. So I was wondering, was it fun tinkering with the rules of vampire lore while making this?
Ryan Coogler: A lot of fun! Specifically, around the community at the base of this movie, how community is built and is reinforced. This was a time of apartheid, also known as Jim Crow, also known as segregation. This was people being putting into places and punished if they stepped out of them. When you find those things, you always find violence—sanctioned by the state, but also vigilante violence that’s unofficially sanctioned.
For me, the vampires had to have some of that in their structure, too. That’s where the hive mind came from, this desire to be wanted. How do the vampires tick in this world? What would make them scary? But also, they can only be in this movie. The vampire exists in our shared global consciousness. You mentioned zombies; zombies come from Haiti. A lot of these things that have been co-opted and are part of our pop culture have very specific cultural origins. They tend to be cautionary tales, warnings. One day Zinzi could show up as a vampire, and I’m fucked. You know what I’m saying? She’s gonna say, “Hey, man, what’s going on? Let me come in.” I’ll open that door right up. [Zinzi laughs.] That concept to me is so much more frightening than [feigning scary voice] “I want to suck your blood.” In a movie that’s about community, you see these people love on each other. They’ve known each other since they were kids, and they can’t wait to get into a space that they own. It’s all about family and community, because that’s all they fucking got. Everything else has been stripped away, and now this supernatural thing is coming for that too. That for me was, “All right. Now we got something.”
Filmmaker: That is truly scary. On top of that, watching these vampires seeking permission to enter felt very unnerving.
Ryan Coogler: Yeah, [seeking permission to enter is] very popular in vampire lore. There hasn’t been a vampire movie as consequential to the industry as Let The Right One In, the Swedish film by Tomas Alfredson. The film put its cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, on the map. Without Hoyte, I don’t know that shooting this movie in IMAX, without his work and his advocacy for the craft, [would have happened]. [Let The Right One In] was all about the fact that [the main character] had to be invited into these spaces. The vampire is such a great, supernatural creature because of the limitations. Like garlic—everybody cooks with that. It’s not like kryptonite—where are you going to find some of that? Garlic is right there in your kitchen. Holy water’s right there in your church.
Filmmaker: Sev and Zinzi, can you talk about how you divided your responsibilities as Proximity Media producers on this film?
Sev Ohanian: With producing, there’s a lot of overlap. Sometimes you want to divide and conquer and keep each other posted, and sometimes we want to throw everything we have at the problem and tackle it ourselves. On the movie, one of us would always try and be with Ryan, no matter what, while the other one would go put out a fire. Often it would be Zinzi with Ryan. I think there’s nobody in the world that probably knows how Ryan thinks more so than Zinzi, even ignoring that she’s his spouse. She understands his creative mind better than anyone.
We did this movie in a record amount of a time. Ryan had the script in my and Zinzi’s inbox in mid-December [2023]. We were out to market less than a month after that. We did a very quick round of notes with him, got a line producer on and just kept moving. We were landing in Louisiana to start prep in February.
Filmmaker: That’s incredible!
Sev Ohanian: Sometimes they joke that a production was building the tracks while they were going. By necessity, we were building the train and the tracks while we were going, and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Zinzi, because she has that rare quality where she could just look at anything and know instinctively how to make it even more elevated.
Zinzi Coogler: Honestly, this is a trio, and I am so grateful that we have such a bond between ourselves that allows us to be understanding of what we’re balancing as a whole, and when and how much support we need from each other. On this film it’s heightened even more, especially because we had to relocate our families to New Orleans. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Sev’s wizardry with Excel [laughs]. I’m sure there are competitions, and I would nominate him for any of them. When we screenshare, and he’s working through a spreadsheet, it’s kind of mind blowing!
Ryan Coogler: Sev’s great with story too, as good as he is with spreadsheets. He has a lot of producing experience, which makes him a great story tactician. He’s a good salesman, a great pitcher. He can identify pressure points and gives great script notes. He knows what to advocate for if there are a bunch of options in front of him.
Filmmaker: What’s an example of a helpful script note that you received from either Sev or Zinzi on this movie?
Ryan Coogler: When Remmick [the main vampire character played by Jack O’Connell] is at the door for the first time, Sev advocated for Sammie to be there as well. That was a great note. With Zinzi, one of my favorite notes was [spoiler alert] Sammie collapsing [at the end]. That wasn’t a screenplay note, but Zinzi is right next to me when I’m directing. She was watching the shot after the climax and was like, “Sammie should just collapse.” A great physical storytelling note, reminding the audience that this dude was a kid. He’s probably running on pure terror-fueled adrenaline. Once the obvious threat is gone, he’ll probably just pass the fuck off out from all he just witnessed. [spoilers end]
The best note Zinzi ever gave me was actually on Black Panther, where she gave a note on the last T’Challa—Killmonger conversation. She said that Killmonger should say “So you can take me to jail” to give verbiage to his fear of being incarcerated. She said he should make it plain that he knows that’s what T’Challa has planned for him. That was an incredibly grounding note for the next line, which is one of the more known lines in that movie.
Filmmaker: Can you talk about finding the locations and building the sets for this film? Did you have some locations locked when you reached Louisiana in February 2024?
Sev Ohanian: Hannah Beachler, our production designer—who has worked with Ryan since Fruitvale Station and won the Oscar for Black Panther—was very passionate about building our sets from scratch. So, the church set that you’re seeing [in the opening] did not exist there; she built that from scratch so that she was able to age it properly. Another good example is the scene when we first meet Remmick; when he goes to Joan and Bert’s house, that’s another complete build from the ground up, which we needed to ensure we had the viewpoint from the front door to the robe that Remmick sees. Most importantly, we designed a surreal long hallway for Joan to say the line calling out Bert. That’s a tiny house, but when she’s walking, we wanted to have a little bit of a turn. You want to get a glimpse of the outside. So, all of that location scout was Ryan, Autumn and Hannah looking at a compass and asking, “What direction? Where will the sun be when it’s almost dusk? Okay, we’ll be there, so we should make sure the hallway’s facing this direction.”
The train station was a challenging one. We really we looked far and wide to find a place where we could do the station sequence safely [and] authentically sell that period. [As for the juke joint], we built the juke on a soundstage in the heart of New Orleans, and that’s where we would work most of the shoot. When you go outside of the door, you’re basically seeing blue screen, because when you look out, there’s not much. Then, forty minutes away in Braithwaite, we built the exterior shell of the juke, almost identical to what we had on the stage. That one, the inside was empty. There’s a lot of scenes that take place in doorways, for obvious reasons: it’s a vampire movie. So, any scene that we were filming in the doorway, whenever the camera was facing into the juke, we were filming that on our soundstage. Our team would stand against the door, talking to Remmick, camera pointing in, and behind the camera, there’s crew, gear. And when we’d be shooting towards Remmick, two weeks later, we would be in the swamp essentially, camera behind our actors, facing out into the exterior dust. So, it was very complex. That [Braithwaite] location was very much real. We were right next to this body of water. Literally at one point we had an alligator show up on set. We had to have our wranglers essentially arrest this alligator and stop it from attacking our crew. But we did it humanely, so nobody got hurt, especially the alligator.
Filmmaker: Did you shoot day-for-nights or were all the night scenes shot at night?
Sev Ohanian: We definitely shot all of our night scenes at night, unless they were interior scenes, then we would do them on stage during daytime hours, as if it was night.
[Mild Spoiler Alert] We had the one night to film Remmick’s dance, and it was complicated—crazy dance moves, special effects, make-up blood, complicated music, staging and camera work, and we were chasing the sun. You know, the 1st AD’s job on a movie is to keep you on schedule, but the best 1st AD is the sun, because if that sun comes up, then you’re done. I remember we barely made that day work, and I think the energy that we all felt was so appropriate for what we were filming. When we got the last shot, everyone was hugging Remmick because he did it. The whole crew jumped into euphoria. We had worked such a long day, long night, but Ryan, Zinzi, Ludwig, Serena, myself, a number of crew members, all went and got breakfast. We should have been fast asleep, but we were like “No, we got to go celebrate.”
Filmmaker: Can you talk how you pulled off the literal barnburner centerpiece sequence inside the Juke Joint, when Sammie sings “I Lied to You”? I’m going to remember that scene for a long, long time, and I am so glad I didn’t know anything about it when I watched the film for the first time. Did you also shoot it in one day?
Sev Ohanian: That scene is probably to this day, and probably will be even going into the future, the most complicated piece of artistic filmmaking I’ve ever witnessed in my life. By the nature of what that scene is, it’s meant to be a oner. We definitely shot it in one day. Ryan is known for doing really fun oners in his movies, and he does them with a lot of thoughtfulness. This one was no different. It was a sequence that demanded every department to be working at their highest possible level, from the actors down to the special effects team.
Think about what the sequence is doing. We have our IMAX cameras. These magazines are so short, because the film is so large that it can only fit so much before it mags out. That means we have to find creative ways to hide the edit points. We had to have a guy on Steadicam managing this extremely difficult camera within complicated dance moves. Our dance choreographer, Aakomon Jones, had to choreograph not only 1930s-appropriate dancing, but every form of dancing ranging from hundreds of years ago to the 1990s hip hop scene, which all had to all happen in the same space.
Ludwig and Serena [Göransson], our composer and executive music producer, were on set with us for weeks while we’d be rehearsing the sequence and editing the music in real time, because sometimes the camera move would take longer than we anticipated and we needed more music to fill in the scene. [Ludwig], with his headphones on, would tweak things. If we needed to introduce a new ancestor to the shot, he had to add music specific to the ancestor and have it still flow with the rest of the song.
Believe it or not, we literally burned our actual set. The very last piece of film that we rolled on this movie, right before we all got on our planes to go back to LA or wherever we’re from—it was kind of symbolic—we burned our actual set so that it would look realistic when the fire is spreading. Obviously the visual effects team helped with it, but that was all real fire, real special effects. It was insane, man, and props to the AD department, all the PAs, for the level of coordination we needed. It was beautiful!
Filmmaker: Ryan, it was so great that you negotiated the deal with Warner Brothers for the rights to the film to revert to you in 25 years. Can you talk about that?
Ryan Coogler: I was trying to make the best movie I could, and I wanted to find a studio that valued me and valued us as a company. We’ve worked really hard and earned a lot of goodwill for how we’ve been able to deliver for folks, and we wanted a deal that would reflect that. This movie was based on my family, inspired by my relationships that were affected by lost time making these other movies [referring to the Black Panther films and Creed], making these companies all this money. These are not altruistic people, they’re business people. I’m so glad that Warner Brothers stepped up.
Zinzi Coogler: And just a small add: it’s not the first or only deal of its kind. We were advocating for something that is not unique. We’re just grateful, like Ryan said, that we were able to find this film a home who could support us through the finish line. Our ultimate goal every day was to think about the theatrical experience and hope people just share in our joy, and have a raucous and rolling good time.
Ryan Coogler: Hopefully, knock on wood, I’m around in 25 years. [Laughs] [Until then] for me, I want to thrill the global film audience, who has shown up for me so many times, on a big giant screen, in a room full of strangers.
