Though Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is crawling with vampires and steeped in supernatural mythology, the film’s monsters are far from the most magical thing about it. Those aspects of Sinners’ story are exciting, and they help illustrate many of its ideas about the US’ legacy of racism. But in terms of showing you both the beauty and the agony of Black life in the 1930s South, there are few things in Sinners that are more powerful than its wide, majestic shots of the Mississippi Delta.
Those shots — of dirt roads that seem to stretch into infinity and sprawling cotton fields being worked by sharecroppers under the blistering sun — are part of how Sinners shows you the world its characters come from, and they’re especially breathtaking when you see them on the big screen. But from each shot, you can also get a sense of the backbreaking misery that came with cultivating that land. When Coogler first reached out to Sinners’ cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw (The Sun Is Also a Star, The Last Showgirl), she understood that conveying those complicated feelings would be key to realizing his vision. And after having worked together on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Coogler had no doubt that she was the woman for the job.
When I recently sat down with Arkapaw to discuss the film, she told me that Coogler’s script and its focus on what life in Mississippi felt like immediately conjured arresting images in her mind. But to put them on screen in a way that would truly make theatergoers feel the humanity woven into them, Arkapaw knew that she and Coogler would have to whip out the big guns. (“Guns,” in this case, referring to a pair of IMAX and Ultra Panavision cameras.)
The conversation, which contains spoilers for Sinners, has been edited for clarity.
Warner Bros.
I was listening to a chat you had with Ryan about your collaborative process, and you mentioned having a conversation early on that was focused on emotions rather than cinematic references. What were those feelings Ryan was interested in the film evoking in an audience, and what kinds of techniques came to your mind when you started mapping out how you wanted to elicit those feelings?
We had a similar conversation when I first joined onto Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I’m a more emotionally driven director of photography. I shoot from the heart, and before anyone is putting past films in my mind or handing me exact references of what we’re trying to replicate, I just want to know what the film itself means to them and what they’re trying to say. I want to know what’s important to them, and Ryan is so brilliant at conveying his vision because he’s someone who has such a big heart.
With this film, he’s trying to tell a big and important story about ancestry, and there were just so many things to discuss regarding who we — our team — are as Black filmmakers. My father is Creole and from New Orleans, my mother’s Filipino, and my great, great grandmother was from Mississippi. I don’t have siblings, but Ryan, who has two brothers, wanted to explore that kind of dynamic through Smoke and Stack’s relationship. But it was also important that we saw the brothers’ relationships with the women in their lives, and that we heard the music of the era — the music of our ancestors.
I like talking about these kinds of things first because it gets me excited about depicting humanity, and that humanity is really what people are generally going to respond to first when they see a film.
You also talked about different strengths of various shooting formats and how big you could potentially go. You’ve said you went “full bananas” on this project. For us laypeople, what exactly is going “full bananas” format-wise?
Early on, I think the studio had called Ryan and was like, “Are you guys thinking about doing any large format?” Ryan called me and we did a test shoot out in Lancaster to experiment with all these different formats.
I sent him an email where I presented to him all of the roads we could go down with this film just spelling out the different formats. We could with 35 millimeters, or anamorphic with 35 millimeters. There was also Ultra Panavision 70, or we could go IMAX, which I called “bananas.” But I called going with IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70 the “full bananas” option, and that’s what he chose.
I put together a little test screening at Photochem, and we were able to see 70-millimeter prints of the 5 perforations per frame and 15 perforations per frame. And we joke about going full bananas because once you see that kind of film, there’s really no going back.
Warner Bros.
What aspects of the Mississippi Delta did you really want to capture with the film’s bigger, wider shots?
Before we knew we were shooting Ultra Panavision 70, Ryan had mentioned how important it was to show the flat landscape and the flat horizon of the Mississippi Delta, and how important that was to the script. Showing the vastness of that land is part of how you tell the history of the people who worked those cotton fields. That’s how you make people understand how hard life was under those conditions, and how far people had to travel. It gives you a sense of how your day would begin with the sun rising, end with the sun setting, and you could see it all clearly because there’s nothing to impede your view.
So, ultimately being able to shoot that wide scope-y 2.76:1 ratio and also a tall ratio, works really nicely together, and does exactly kind of what Ryan was after when he was expressing to me what was important to show audiences.
Every choice that they’re making in the edit is so rooted in emotion, and I think you as a moviegoer can feel it especially in a big theater. And I hope that, more than other films you may have seen before where the images just felt large, people come away from Sinners feeling like it’s working on a different level.
You see those big shots, and the way they really showcase Mississippi’s beauty immediately makes you go “Oh, this is an IMAX film,” but talk to me about close-ups. What were your guiding principles for closer, more intimate moments?
I come from operating, and as a DP, that’s kind of where I like to be — right next to the camera. Ryan and I have that in common, and part of what was so beautiful about working on this film was how you see everything — all that motion and emotion — in the eyepiece itself. We knew which lenses we wanted to use for different moments, and in each format, we had a close-up lens that was important to us. We actually only had two focal lenses on the movie; we used a 50 millimeter, which is a very wide lens IMAX, and an 80 millimeter, which we used for those close-ups.
I’m sure those stick in your head if you’re able to see the 1.43:1 projection. It’s an insanely large close-up that’s obviously much bigger than you are, but it feels as though you’re right there looking at the person. It has that medium format portraiture quality that’s very nostalgic, and even on a hundred-foot screen images can feel like a big hug just drawing you in. Those really emotional moments — Sammie in the church, Smoke at the end of the film when he grabs the baby — they’re important, and you can really feel them. Their emotion translates so beautifully in that format and with that lens. And as we started shooting, things started making sense pretty quickly.
We have to talk about the big juke joint music number. Walk me through your creative process as you were planning the scene out and then capturing it on set.
That scene is in script, and it was always something Ryan wanted to try to execute in one shot, which takes a lot of planning, previs, and working with the choreographer and the composer. There are a lot of departments involved just in terms of figuring out how we were going to execute the shot and asking questions like “Are we doing this with a crane, are we using a steady cam, is there going to be a dolly on a dance floor?”
So these were all conversations that we had in prep, and it took a lot of meetings and working things out because just on paper, that sequence is actually five shots. Three of those shots are steady cam shots in the interior juke joint — shout out to our amazing Steadicam operator, Renard, who flew the IMAX camera on his rig for the first time for this movie, and did a beautiful job, beautiful job.
Warner Bros.
Were you shooting to the music?
Yeah, we used a music guide track for timing and making sure that you’re hitting certain moments at the right moment, and previs is there to let you know where these handoffs occur and how the camera will move throughout the space. Ryan loves to do oners, and he’s so good about making sure all of the departments have the right information and that we’re communicating and collaborating effectively to pull off these very technical, complex shots.
What shot or sequence from this project has stuck with you most?
There are definitely two: Sammie’s close-up in the church after he returns from the fight with Remmick, and he’s got the scratch on his face, and he’s crying and shaking.
I’m starting to get emotional just even mentioning it to you now. Being in that space, which our production designer, Hannah, built, and thinking of my great grandparents being in a church like that was a beautiful experience. It didn’t really feel like I was there shooting a movie, it felt like I was sitting in church, and this other part of me was also capturing the moment. For this being his first film, Miles [Caton] did such a brilliant job with that close-up, and I think that scene is always going to be burned in my mind.
And then there’s the farmhouse scene. I love Westerns, and I’m named for a John Ford Western called Cheyenne Autumn. I think that sequence in Sinners is just so beautifully written, and I was so eager to ask Ryan where he came up with it because when I read the scene in the script, I could immediately see the images in my mind.
