Writer/director Ryan Coogler understands that, just as every language has words that are untranslatable or very hard to express any other way, there are things that cinema can say like nothing else.
Such was the case with a sequence from the earliest drafts of “Sinners.” Coogler wrote what he initially referred to as the “surreal montage.” It was a musical sequence set in the film’s fictional rural Mississippi juke joint, where a live performance by young bluesman Sammie (Miles Caton) conjures the spirit of Black musicians past and present, ranging from West African drumming to hip hop.
Only cinema — its specific combination of movement, composition, color, choreography, music, rhythm, on top of speech, writing, and expression — can really pull off the connection across time and space that Coogler intended for audiences to feel in that moment: a reflection of how important Mississippi blues had been to the history of music, and the ripple effect it’s had throughout multiple generations and cultures.
As Coogler explained when he was a guest on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, if audiences were down for vampires to show up and take chunks out of people’s jugulars, there’s no reason why he couldn’t use film language to weave different strands of Black music history together and create a sense of immorality that wasn’t vampire-related.
“[It’s about] that feeling of being at a live performance of any art,” said Coogler of creating the scene. “When you see a virtuoso perform, and you’re in the presence of a group of people who also appreciate the art form, but also know the context of it and know where the artist is coming from, they relate to what’s being portrayed, and the feeling of euphoria becomes like a storm system. It’s feedback happening and rippling. I’ve had a few of those moments [in my life], and you feel immortal, like you are outside of space and time for [a moment], like there’s another presence there with you.”
At each step of the sharing the script — first with his Proximity producing partners Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian, then the “Sinners” team at Warner Bros. — the response was overwhelmingly positive. “ It was a scene that all of my department heads were the most excited about,” Coogler said. But it was the director’s long-time composing partner, Ludwig Göransson, who made him think he might be onto something special.
“[Ludwig] is a relatively even-keeled guy,” said Coogler. “And he was so excited about this, I hadn’t seen him that excited about something maybe ever. So that was kind of when I knew that I had something.”
Göransson was the first of many of Coogler’s filmmaking collaborators who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the scene. “I read the script and I was just blown away,” cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw told IndieWire. “The visuals just jumped off the page, and I could already see in my head how layered and textured the light would be for the scenes that [Coogler] wrote.”
The filmmaking team had a single shooting day to capture the oner where Caton’s performance of “I Lied to You” summons both his musical ancestors and descendants to come, and Durald Arkapaw and her team using the 80-pound IMAX camera on a steadicam, which winds its way around the juke in two sections — although when the camera reveals that the juke joint is on fire, that was stitched in by VFX from a separate plate shot of the burning roof.
“It was a beautiful scene that Ryan wrote, and it had many layers to it,” Durald Arkapaw said. Those layers required extensive planning, previs, and rehearsals to nail down, but the sequence demonstrates one of the reasons that Durald Arkapaw and Coogler were drawn to IMAX for “Sinners.”
“The IMAX frame is so different because your eye needs to be able to scan the image, whereas traditional films allow you to see the image without moving your eyes across the screen,” Durald Arkapaw said. That scanning process allows the importance of connections across musicians from different times to build and build, as the surreal montage unfolds and the camera swirls like the turning of a magic cauldron.
“[The surreal montage] grew to something bigger when we shot it. Everyone was very inspired by it ’cause it had so much meaning,” Durald Arkapaw said. “It’s all departments working together on a very high level. All of these cultures woven together.”
Göransson told IndieWire that part of the magic of the surreal montage came from the immediacy of live performance.
“It took months of prep before shooting the scene, every department working together, mapping it out. And then I had a rough video of the take, and I wrote music to that video. We went back on the stage, and we had one day of shooting this,” Göransson told IndieWire. “You had little pieces of musical histories coming at you, depending on where the camera is, and it was all happening live the moment we created it.”
Wunmi Mosaku, who plays Annie, told IndieWire that for as intricately planned as the sequence was, there were moments that were just beautiful to witness. “I really remember a moment with Papa Toto and Miles just talking in between takes,” Mosaku told IndieWire. “What Papa Toto was saying to Miles was almost a transcript of what Delta Slim [Delroy Lindo] says to Sammie, and that’s an ancestor and the future ancestor and these two people, in sharing ancestors in the present moment onscreen and off the screen… That’s a moment I really treasure — when you know that you’re in the right place at the right time doing the right thing and everything just makes sense.”
It was Göransson’s charge to make that community of once and future ancestors all sound coherent. The cue for the montage, appropriately titled “Magic What We Do,” and based on his collaboration with Grammy-winning songwriter Raphael Saadiq on “I Lied to You,” needed to create solos for each style of music and connective tissue that strings them together with Caton’s vocals.
Göransson did some of this by turning to original instruments, from an original 1932 Dobro Cyclops slide guitar to the original drum machine beat that became the beginning of hip-hop. But a key part of how Göransson connected the musical pieces was through the mix itself. “We could really play with the [Dolby] Atmos of music panning around you. It was also very much using modern technologies,” Göransson said.
The genius of the surreal montage is the way in which all of that technology and craft is used to express something ineffable about the blues, about the characters in the film, and about how we use stories to relate to history.
“You’re watching a movie through the most beautiful of lenses, and then when you step into the IMAX world, it almost feels like a look behind the curtain and into the soul of the character. This pulls you deeper in, and it becomes an experience,” Durald Arkapaw said.
“Sinners” is now playing in theaters. Marcus Jones contributed reporting.
