‘Sinners’: How Coogler Reinvented the Vampire Movie
Warner greenlighted Sinners, a $90-million blues-steeped thriller about vampires descending on small Southern town in the 1930s.
In unprecedented agreement with the studio, the film’s copyright will revert to him after 25 years.
He managed to make this movie on a near-impossible timetable, going from pitch to production in 3 months.
When “Sinners” hits theaters on Friday, it’ll be only a year since Imax cameras started rolling in Louisiana.
There’s a surreal scene where Sammie’s musical talents “pierce the veil between life and death,” burning down the house and exposing the revelers inside the juke joint to the devils outside.
Coogler opted for rehearsals where the key players assembled in the physical space to map it out. “You gotta know how big the camera is. You gotta walk through it and find out where your trouble spots are and try to get ahead of them.”
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.
“We are telling stories about people and communities — stories that are often overlooked — and we try to put them on the biggest platform and biggest scale possible,” Zinzi Coogler says.
“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. It’s an often-overlooked piece of our history that we hope will no longer be.”
The movie is the company’s biggest swing yet. Ohanian, who met the Cooglers when they were students at USC, describes it as the “culmination” of everything they’ve been doing. “We’ve always been, as a company, drawn to projects that don’t seem easy to make–pushing the envelope when it comes to storytelling,” he says. “‘Sinners’ was the same goal: give the audience something they haven’t seen before.”
“Sinners” is Coogler’s first time directing 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 like stories about communities, about archetypes. And I love period anything.”
Coogler revealed his plans to make “Sinners” 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.
“It was an impossible task — that he put on himself — to turn in a script that felt like we could share with 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 behind what he writes. Him delivering on time just put us on the task to deliver for him.”
They relied on “unrelenting optimism” and a little backchanneling with their creative partners in secret before they’d officially set up the movie.
“When she first started searching, we didn’t have a script,” 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.”
“I was listening to Blues music nonstop, and the music reminds me of late uncle James, who was from Mississippi. “He wasn’t a musician, but he was a listener. I would listen to it because I missed him, try to bring him back to life.”
A song called “Wang Dang Doodle” is the story of a group in a small community throwing a party, 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.”
“My family threw a lot of parties–and those are my fondest memories,” he says. “I was like, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if I made a one-day movie where it’s this group of people, and everybody who they get together is dangerous.”
The period was ripe for storytelling. “When people think about the 1930s Mississippi, the first thing is segregation, hard times. You don’t think about people actually having a good time, like having a good party.
The story is a complex narrative that touches on myriad themes about community and culture, tensions between religion and secular pleasures, and all types of love (familial, friendly and forbidden), and 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 it’s really the other way around.
“I wanted to make it real. I wanted to pull from things I 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.”
Coogler took those familiar archetypes — the Hoodoo conjurer, the woman who can pass as white, the shop owners, the musical prodigy whose dad is preacher, the old blues musician who is self-soothing, and gave them new depth. There was so much drama to be mined from their relationships with one another: “They’re more family than friends, and that is the reason to make the movie.”
Coogler’s villain is a vampire. But “our vampire had to be in conversation with the concept of family and community. It wasn’t enough for him to just bite someone’s neck.”
