Family usually guides Ryan Coogler to his movies. The director came to Philadelphia a decade ago to revive "Rocky" with "Creed" thanks to his father's love of the franchise. He had already filmed his debut "Fruitvale Station" in his hometown of Oakland, California, with his star Michael B. Jordan years earlier. Now, for his new movie "Sinners," opening Friday, Coogler reached back into the past, using his relatives from the South for inspiration.
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"I got some family ties to Mississippi specifically through the men in my family," he said. "One, I never got a chance to meet. My mom's dad, he died about a year before I was born. But my uncle James lived to a ripe old age. He was there for all of my childhood life and a good portion of my adult life. We were really close and he loved blues music."
"Sinners" is set in a place James would've recognized. The horror movie unfolds over the course of a single day in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi. It once again features Jordan, this time as twin brothers setting up a juke joint in town. Their scheme draws in their cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton), a preacher's kid and aspiring blues guitarist, along with the twins' former flames (Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku), a Chinese-American couple (Li Jun Li, Yao), a sharecropper (Omar Benson Miller), an alcoholic musician (Delroy Lindo) and a flirtatious married woman (Jayme Lawson).
Oh, and a bunch of vampires.
Through these mythical monsters and their prey, Coogler tells a very real story of anti-Black racism in America, music as a transcendental cultural link and the cost of making art. The Mississippi Delta setting was key to conveying this message.
"There's the narrative of the South, specifically the '30s, it is a narrative that's very hard for people to look at," Coogler said. "A lot of shame associated with it, a lot of struggle. But I think the danger of not looking at it is you can't see it for what it was.
"The only thing fake in this movie is the vampires."
Minor spoilers for "Sinners" below.
"Sinners" is ambitious in both its storytelling and genre-bending, but Coogler said it began with just the "seed of an idea." He grew it by hitting the books. As he researched the Mississippi Delta and the people who lived there during the 1930s, he unearthed connections between blues music, a genre pioneered by Black Southerners, and other communities. Chinese, Choctaw and Irish people "all had a hand and influence," he said, and all of them appear in "Sinners."
"It is very easy to flatten the Jim Crow South, just because them signs had colored and white on them that you think that's all the people that was there," he said. "But that wasn't the case."
While Jordan's twin brothers, nicknamed Smoke and Stack, kickstart the plot with their return to town after a vague, but almost certainly criminal, sojourn in Al Capone's Chicago, their young cousin Sammie drives the action. His musical talent is so ferocious that he "pierces the veil" between the past, present and future, drawing in long dead African dancers and hip-hop artists who haven't been born yet. He also, unfortunately, attracts undead vampires.
Coogler saw Sammie's double-edged gift as a comment on his own artistry.
"It takes me a long time to make the things that I know how to make at this point," he said. "And it's a beautiful job. I get to do the thing that I love, but it comes with a cost. It comes with great cost to my physical well-being and mental health, to my family. I miss a lot of things."
One of the toughest losses was more time with his uncle James, who inspired "Sinners." As Coogler recalled, he was sick and dying while "Creed" was in production, leaving only a few days to visit and no opportunity to rush to his bedside when he passed.
"I often have to reckon with the price of even the best things," Coogler said.
The "spiritual richness" of the American South is also portrayed in "Sinners." Sammie's father believes only Christianity can save him — a notion complicated by Coogler's vampires, who can recite "Our Father" back to the humans fending them off. Hoodoo practices like mojo bags afford them some protection, as does the age-old vampire repellant of garlic. (Coogler presents his take on the classic blood test scene from "The Thing" when he has his remaining survivors pass around a jar of garlic and each eat a clove.)
Another interesting wrinkle in "Sinners" is the villain's identity. The main vampire cons a couple involved in the Ku Klu Klan into letting him into their home by playing on their prejudices — he casts himself as the innocent victim of the Native Americans on his tail. Later, the trio poses as a troupe of progressive white musicians looking to join the juke joint's performances. When they are turned away, they sing traditional Irish tunes like "Wild Mountain Thyme" outside and kick up their heels in a jig.
"I love the spectacle of Africans in motion listening to African music, and Irish culture rivals that," Coogler said. "What's funny is, as African Americans, we recognize that. Me and my homies love watching the Irish step."
Coogler wanted to acknowledge the "deep, deep" commonality between Black and Irish folk music, as well as the shared histories of oppression, with this choice. But he's also playing with the irony that immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Italy "had to forget about the parallels between them and Black people" to become white in America.
"I was like, well, what if we had this centuries-old vampire who presents like a young white person but has the memory of all of that time?" Coogler said. "If he stumbled upon the Mississippi Delta, who would he want to hang out with? Who would he wanna spend time with? Something about that to me was really funny and fascinating and emotional, if this guy who's terrifying on the surface could make a convincing argument.
"I love a villain that knows something that you don't."
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