The director of Black Panther and Creed talks about his new genre-bending vampire movie that takes place in the Jim Crow South. It's called Sinners and it stars Michael B. Jordan as twins working a juke joint in Mississippi. He spoke with Tonya Mosley about blues music, the supernatural, and why he wanted to own the movie outright after 25 years. Also, book critic Carolina Miranda reviews The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today is filmmaker Ryan Coogler. You probably know his name as the director of Fruitvale Station, Creed, and both Black Panther films. Well, his new film is called Sinners, and it hit theaters just last week. It delves into horror with a genre-bending thriller set in 1930s Mississippi.
The story follows twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan. After surviving the trenches of World War I and navigating Chicago's criminal underworld, the brothers return home to Mississippi, hoping to start fresh by opening a juke joint. But peace does not last long.
Instead, they're met by supernatural forces, vampires, who act as metaphors for oppression, exploitation, and systems that feed on Black life, body, and spirit. I only ever heard stories.
I ain't never come across them myself. What stories you heard? How haints work. They switch places with the soul of a man. But vampires is different. Maybe the worst kind. The soul gets stuck in the body. Can't rejoin the ancestors. Curse to live here with all this hate. Can't even feel the warmth of a sunrise. Okay then. Can we bring them back? Maybe if I kill the ones that made them this way.
Smoke. They have a connection, but they live on, even if the one that made them is killed. The best thing we can do for him is free his spirit from this curse. They got to be killed one by one.
How the hell do we do that?
Sunlight.
I wouldn't state that hard. Ryan Coogler says Sinners is also a tribute to his late Uncle James, who first introduced him to the blues. When he was a kid, Coogler would soak up his uncle's stories about Mississippi as old Delta Blues records spun in the background.
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