Ryan Coogler is explaining how he pulled off a magic trick.
He’s not talking about convincing Warner Bros. to greenlight “Sinners,” a $90-million blues-steeped thriller about vampires descending on a small Southern town in the 1930s. Nor is he referencing the nearly unprecedented agreement with the studio that will see the copyright of the film revert to him after 25 years. He’s explaining how they managed to make this movie at all — and on a near-impossible timetable, going from pitch to production in three months. When “Sinners” hits theaters on Friday, it’ll be nearly a year to the day since Imax cameras started rolling on location in Louisiana.
“All our projects are like crazy needles that need to be threaded. We’ve become addicted to that,” Ryan Coogler tells Variety, sitting next to his wife and Proximity Media co-founder Zinzi Coogler. (Their partner Sev Ohanian is in another corner of the Zoom screen.)
“It all comes down to relationships,” he says, explaining how they pull it off time and again. It’s the stable of creatives that continue to work with him, including Oscar winners like composer Ludwig Göransson (who is also part of the Proximity team), costume designer Ruth E. Carter and production designer Hannah Beachler, plus “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw. They’re more like family than a movie crew. “The code name of this was ‘Grilled Cheese.’ This was our most home-cooked meal,” Coogler says. “So, we brought in all the best cooks. We know people are comfortable in our kitchen.”
“Sinners,” which takes place over one day and night, centers on the Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan). They’re World War I veterans who return home to the Mississippi Delta after a stint working for Al Capone in Chicago. The Prohibition era is winding down, and the brothers have plans to open a juke joint that night. So, they enlist their young cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton), the son of a preacher who yearns to become a blues musician, for the evening’s entertainment, as well as a cast of local characters to work the party.
We’re discussing a surreal scene that’s previewed in the film’s trailers, where Sammie’s musical talents “pierce the veil between life and death,” literally burning down the house and exposing the revelers inside the juke joint to the devils outside for a moment.
“Everybody would have reactions when they read that [scene], and that, to me, was like ‘OK, maybe I’ve got something,’” Coogler says. But translating it from script to screen was tricky. “From a production standpoint, we had a lot of work to do. Every department was involved; it took a lot of coordination,” he notes. “I’ve got a couple of scenes like this in every movie, where as you’re getting closer to production, you realize, ‘We’re going to need a lot more planning than we thought.’”
©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Instead of using pre-vis technology to map out the sequence, Coogler opted for Sidney Lumet-style rehearsals where the key players on the production assembled in the physical space to map it out. “You gotta know how big the camera is. You gotta have the person who’s gonna hold the camera here,” he explains. “You gotta walk through it and find out where your trouble spots are and try to get ahead of them. We had to know what people were wearing, and we had to find, Jesus Christ….”
Coogler shakes his head. He seems to be transported right back to the Louisiana set for a second, as the crew attempts to conjure his vision. He continues the list. “We had to find the right musicians; we had to find dancers who could do these cultural dances. These are highly specialized individuals,” he says, pointing out that choreographer Aakomon Jones (“Black Panther”) was working on Usher’s Super Bowl performance simultaneously. Not to mention that Ludwig Göransson and his wife Serena Göransson scored the scene live on set.
Ohanian chimes in: “People come to this movie for the thrills, for the scares, for Michael B. Jordan times two, for the storytelling. They don’t know that they’re also going to be getting that montage. That sequence has always felt like that’s what people are going to talk about. That made those weekends we’re doing these rehearsals so much more worth it, because we had a feeling it was going to be impactful.”
When we log on for this interview, the Cooglers have just landed in Mexico City to begin the film’s global press tour; Ohanian is on his way to the airport to join them. Coogler recently finished doing quality control on the print; the cast and crew have seen the film, plus some critics and journalists, and the feedback has been positive so far. Coogler seems confident about the work — not at all cocky, even though he really could be. (The movie has since been rated 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, becoming Coogler’s best-reviewed film yet.)
Coogler’s films have grossed more than $2.4 billion at the worldwide box office — and those are just the four he directed: “Fruitvale Station,” “Creed,” “Black Panther” and its sequel “Wakanda Forever.” Proximity is also responsible for producing “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which won two Oscars from six nominations; the next two installments of the “Creed” franchise, including the Jordan-directed “Creed III”; and the upcoming Marvel shows “Ironheart” and the animated “Eyes of Wakanda” for Disney+.
“Everything we do at Proximity is in the hopes of telling stories about people and communities — stories that are often overlooked — and we try to put them on the biggest platform and the biggest scale possible,” Zinzi Coogler says. About “Sinners,” she adds: “On the surface, a story set in 1932 Delta Mississippi might feel small, but so much has come out of that place. Blues has shaped global pop culture as we know it today. It’s an often-overlooked piece of our history that we hope will no longer be.”
The movie is also the company’s biggest swing yet. Ohanian, who met the Cooglers when they were students at USC’s School of Dramatic Arts, describes it as the “culmination” of everything they’ve been doing in the dozen years since then. “We’ve always been, as a company, drawn to projects that don’t seem easy to make — not necessarily technically, but rather pushing the envelope when it comes to storytelling,” he says. “‘Sinners’ was the same goal: give the audience something they haven’t seen before.”
Ryan Coogler, left, Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian at the European premiere of “Sinners” in London.
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures
“Sinners” is, as has been well-publicized, Ryan Coogler’s first time directing a purely original story: “Fruitvale Station” is based on a real-life tragedy; the “Black Panther” movies adapt the Marvel comic books; and “Creed” puts a spin on the “Rocky” movie franchise. Coogler says that as a filmmaker, it was thrilling to make something so personal.
“This film is very much me,” Coogler says. “I love anything supernatural. I’m in. I like stories about communities, about neighborhoods, about archetypes. And I love period anything. So, when you layer those things together, that does it for me.”
For Proximity, Coogler describes “Sinners” as an opportunity to make good on the “promise of the company’s inception.” He explains: “We were gonna make movies for people to watch in theaters with strangers. Movies that make you feel like you’re on a roller coaster. I would argue, there’s nothing better than watching a scary movie in a crowd, not knowing what’s gonna happen next and who’s gonna make it. And it was my first chance to direct something with these two as my producers in a long time — the first time officially, when it comes to Zinzi — so I liked the feeling of that pressure.”
Coogler revealed his plans to make “Sinners” his next project at Proximity’s company retreat in October 2023. “Once I said it to them, I had to go write the thing, because I don’t want to be full of shit with my partners and employees,” he laughs. “So, I had it finished by Christmas.” Zinzi Coogler and Ohanian were surprised — and impressed — by the quick turn. (“I’m not good with a deadline,” he admits.)
“It was an impossible task — that he put on himself — to turn in a script that felt like we could share with potential studio partners in less than two months,” Zinzi Coogler recalls. “It’s challenging for any writer, let alone someone like Ryan, who really puts a lot of thought and care and intention behind what he writes. Him delivering on time just put us on the task to deliver for him.”
They relied on “unrelenting optimism” to get it done, she says, plus a little backchanneling with their creative partners in secret before they’d officially set up the movie. “During our retreat, I was sneaking out to pitch Ruth this movie,” Zinzi Coogler recalls. “She was on a project at the time, so we were just hoping that [her schedule] would clear up for us.
The team also hired unit production manager Will Greenfield (who is also billed as an executive producer) to start putting budgets together and explore different states to shoot, as well as casting director Francine Maisler, who was tasked with finding an actor to play Sammie.
“When she first started searching, we didn’t have a script,” Ryan Coogler recalls. “I had to write a logline — which is when I came up with that line about ‘dancing with the devil’ — and a character description, because he was gonna take forever to find.” (Ultimately, Maisler discovered Caton, a musical prodigy who, coincidentally, is the grandson of a preacher.)
When they pitched studios at WME’s offices last January, the production wheels were in motion. A bidding war ensued, and by early February, Warner Bros. landed the rights. Cameras rolled at the top of April with plans to turn the project around for a spring 2025 release.
“The timeline we were aiming to make the film in was so tight, it was almost literally impossible,” Ohanian recalls. “Early on, we had the conversation, like, ‘Hey, this may not be possible.’ I remember, Ryan, you said, ‘Even if it is impossible, let’s pretend it’s not until it is.’”
Warner Bros.
So, how did Coogler come up with the premise?
After an emotional press tour for “Wakanda Forever” in late 2022, Coogler spent time at home with his family decompressing. “I was listening to Blues music nonstop. Like, I couldn’t get enough of it,” he recalls. The music reminds him of his late uncle James, who was from Mississippi. “Blues music was like his life. He wasn’t a musician, but he was a listener. So that’s how I came to know the medium. I would listen to it because I missed him; I’d listen to it to try to bring him back to life, so to speak.”
One day, a song called “Wang Dang Doodle,” came on. “The song is the story of a group of people in a small community throwing a party, Coogler says, detailing the specifics about the track written by Howlin’ Wolf and famously covered by Koko Taylor. “They all have nicknames that imply that they’re gangsters — Razor-Toting Jim, Butcher Knife-Toting Annie, Fast-Talking Freddie — he’s saying this party is going to be crazy. We’re gonna bust all the windows. It’s gonna be fish grease in the air.”
“My family threw a lot of parties — that was what we would do where I’m from — and those are some of my fondest memories,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I made a one-day movie — which is more my favorite type of movie — where it’s this group of people, and everybody who they get together is dangerous, but they meet something that’s more dangerous than they could ever imagine.”
The period was ripe for storytelling, too. “When people think about the 1930s Mississippi, the first thing that comes to mind is segregation. Hard times. You don’t think about people dealing with all that actually having a good time, like having a party so good you wish you could go to it. I was like, “Oh yeah, we might have a movie here.’ And not just a movie, but a movie for our time now.”
He pitched the idea to Zinzi, who is always the first person to hear what he’s mulling over. “I had to convince her a little bit, but it’s always like that. She stress tests the pitch,” Ryan Coogler says. (Zinzi smiles knowingly.) “I know it’s good when she’s like, ‘Alright, now, you can talk to someone else about it.’ But for a while, she was like, ‘I don’t know about this…’”
The story ultimately became a complex narrative that touches on myriad themes about community and culture, the tensions between religion and secular pleasures, and all types of love (familial, friendly and forbidden), plus the way music weaves them all together. Asked why he decided to use the vampire genre as a Trojan horse to explore all these other ideas, Coogler says that it’s really the other way around.
“I wanted to make it real. I wanted to pull from things I know and have experienced,” he explains. “It’s a little bit of me and all of these characters, and it’s a lot of people that I know in all of these characters.”
So, Coogler took those familiar archetypes — the Hoodoo conjurer, the woman who can pass as white, the shop owners, the musical prodigy whose dad is a preacher, the old blues musician who is constantly self-soothing, and even the Smokestack twins — and gave them new depth. Plus, there was so much drama to be mined from their relationships with one another, he says, “They’re more family than friends, and that is the most interesting thing. That is the reason to make the movie.”
From there, Coogler could develop a villain: in this case, a vampire. But “our vampire had to be in conversation with those themes: the concept of family and community,” he says. “It wasn’t enough for him to just want to bite someone’s neck.”
