Autumn Durald Arkapaw
-
“We Literally Burned Our Actual Set”: Writer-Director Ryan Coogler and Producers Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian on Sinners
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 […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Apr 24, 2025 -
“Anamorphic’s Biggest Fan”: DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Upon release in 2018, the first Black Panther became the highest grossing standalone super hero movie in history, while achieving a lasting cultural relevance exceedingly rare even among the box office juggernauts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But with the passing of Chadwick Boseman, the actor behind the titular hero, maintaining the status quo in the sequel was an impossibility. For Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the story’s throughline became grief and the narrative center shifted from Boseman’s T’Challa to his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) and mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett, who received an Oscar nomination for the part). That new focus […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Mar 1, 2023 -
“It’s My Job to Make Sure That the Viewer Looks at the Right Thing”: DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw on Loki
With two dozen films since 2008 and 60-odd years of comics, there’s a nearly infinite amount of source material to pull inspiration from when embarking on a new endeavor in the Marvel Universe. But what makes the new Disney+ series Loki such a visual delight is how it derives inspiration from beyond the bounds of that universe. Melding classic sci-fi and midcentury modern design, Loki is “Blade Runner meets Mad Men,” embedding the titular God of Mischief into a dystopian bureaucracy bent to the aesthetic peculiarities of Gilliam, Kubrick and Fincher. With the show’s entire first season now available on […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jul 29, 2021
