Ryan Coogler’s memories of hanging out with his uncle, who grew up in Mississippi, while listening to the blues in their Oakland home partly inspired his most personal and ambitious film yet, “Sinners.” It opens April 18.
The acclaimed director and screenwriter from the East Bay recalls soaking up the music, the mood and the stories he heard from his Uncle James and others within his family’s Oakland home, built by his maternal grandfather.
“(My uncle) came West and worked at a steel factory and we’d listen to blues records,” Coogler recalled in a Zoom conversation. “That was like his pasttime. That, and he was a San Francisco Giants fan. We’d watch games on TV and if they weren’t on TV we’d listen to them on the radio. It was Giants and blues music and Old Taylor Whiskey.”
Uncle James died while Coogler was in post-production on “Creed,” the 2015 boxing movie, but his spirit lives on in “Sinners.”
It’s those Southern familial bloodlines and the strong family-like connections that the 38-year-old Coogler fosters on sets that fuel his audacious fifth feature.
“Sinners” is an R-rated epic spun around a 24-hour period when two flashy twins (Michael B. Jordan) from Chicago and their cousin, a preacher boy named Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton in an explosive debut), prep and then put on a hell of a sexy blues bash at a Deep South 1932 juke joint. The party takes a wrong turn when some uninvited folks come knocking at the door.
Even though the film thrums to a supernatural beat, the genre-defiant story itself sprung from deeply personal places for the famed filmmaker of 2013’s Oscar Grant drama “Fruitvale Station” — also framed around a critical 24-hour period — 2018’s superhero blockbuster “Black Panther,” its 2022 sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Creed.”
What he gleaned from his two aunts — both twins on his maternal side — also helped Coogler authentically depict Smoke and Stack, the twins played by Jordan. Coogler wanted to ensure that neither of those characters would turn into caricatures, and had Jordan work with a dialect coach to aid in that and even asked twin filmmakers Logan and Noah Miller to consult on the film, helping him on the screenplay too.
Since “Sinners” is Coogler’s most personal — and boldest — film, he wanted to surround himself with people whom he respected and had collaborated on with before, including Jordan, who has appeared in all of his feature films.
“I wanted to make something great and I felt like I was running out of time to be able to give myself so completely (over) to a project that was so personal,” he said. “I felt like all my collaborators were getting older and…our lives were becoming more complicated and I just had this instinct that now was the time. It was like now or never. Like (making) something this bold and crazy with all the people I loved and trusted.”
In addition to Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter, director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw, production designer Hannah Beachler and editor Michael P. Shawver, another one of those trusted behind-the-scenes colleagues is composer and executive producer Ludwig Göransson, a two-time Oscar winner (“Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer.”)
“I jumped on this immediately obviously because of working with Ryan,” he said. That the music is so integral to the film also appealed to him.
“I thought it was such an exciting opportunity for me to get into this music world and see how we can really bring this out on a huge-scale movie.”
The duo both attended USC’s film school. The Swiss-born Göransson scored Coogler’s debut feature “Fruitvale Station,” chronicling the final day in the life of Oscar Grant. To accurately capture the breadth of the sound, he even used BART sound recordings.
Göransson gets brought in early on a Coogler project, since the filmmaker gives the person composing the film’s score a finished screenplay for them to then create from. Coogler doesn’t use temporary music to fill in the gap so it’s essential the music’s ready the first day of the shoot.
For “Sinners,” a big challenge came in being authentic to the 1930s era since, as Göransson points out in production notes, there was a dearth of quality recordings of African American performers from that time.
The solution? A Blues Trail road trip with Coogler, Göransson and Göransson’s dad, a blues guitar player and a huge blues aficionado, riding along through Tennessee and Mississippi.
“One of the first things that Ryan and I did was go on (that trip) to do some research and get some inspiration and meet some real musicians,” Göransson said.
They stopped in at Royal Studios in Memphis where many icons recorded, including Buddy Guy (who has a key part in “Sinners”). They also toured the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi.
Coogler realized that the smaller film that he aspired to make was starting to shape into something grander.
“The catch was when I got into the research, I realized it was a lot bigger than I thought it was,” Coogler said. “It deserved to be portrayed on an epic scale.”
The story itself demanded a larger film since it addressed complex issues beyond music, including the supernatural, hoodoo, religion and racism.
“The movie was a lot of things, but it was also an interrogation of the concept of genre,” he said. “If you study the history of the music industry, it’s a racist concept. …They would call music made by Black people … a ‘race record.’ That was the genre for a long time. So that meant like if a white guy sings a song they’ll call that bluegrass. Black guy sings a song that’s (a) race record.”
Coogler finds that it can produce a ripple effect.
“I work in a film industry where people call (me) ‘hey, man, genre filmmaker.’ I’m like, man, are movies the same way? Should this be a thing we talk about?… Should a movie just be a movie? Should music just be music?”
In one key sequence — a highlight in the film — an Irish song gets sung and performed. It fits in with what Coogler wants to say about shattering established, archaic and damaging genre conventions while showing audiences a really good time.
“It’s all people singing about their lives and their struggles and what’s important to them and it’s all really great,” he said. “I wanted to interrogate all of it and play with the audience’s expectations. I had so much fun writing it.”