Producers on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners said shooting the director’s vampire feature in New Orleans “could not have been more difficult” thanks to the extreme weather.
Producer Sev Ohanian spoke to Screen at the European premiere in London last night (April 14) and explained why the Louisiana city was chosen.
“There’s only a couple of places in America that can really work for [this film],” Ohanian said of the Warner Bros feature, which stars Michael B. Jordan in two roles as twins who return home to Mississippi during the 1930s to find a great evil waiting for them.
“New Orleans just happened to be a really great space, because the crew base is amazing,” said Ohanian. ”It had the facilities that we needed. We felt like we could really pull it off there.”
Executive producer Rebecca Cho added that the city’s extreme weather caused several delays when Sinners filmed over the summer in 2024.
“It was not easy. The weather made it really difficult,” she said. “New Orleans is known for its rain and its lightning. I think one of the most challenging days was where we shot the big dance sequence outdoors, and we were battling weather all through the night shoot.”
Coogler also produced Sinners via his production company Proximity Media, alongside Zinzi Coogler.
Nolan comparison
As well as reuniting with Jordan after Fruitvale Station, Black Panther and Creed, Coogler also re-teamed with composer Ludwig Goransson, who has scored all five of Coogler’s features to date, winning the Oscar for best score for Black Panther.
”In the beginning, Ryan was calling me every day, asking me for some guitar lessons because he was learning to play the guitar,” the Swedish composer said of how the Sinners score first came about. “Very quickly, he started sending me songs that he was listening to while writing the script - Tommy Johnson, Son House, Robert Johnson.”
Goransson also explained how his own history with blues music influenced the score. “My dad is a blues guitar player, and the blues changed his life, even though he lived on the other side of the world,” he explained. “When I was nine, I heard Metallica for the first time and that made me go hard in for music.
“| didn’t realise how heavy metal comes directly from the blues as well. But I think in this film, I feel like I’m portraying that story through the score.”
Goransson is also known for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan, winning his second Oscar for best score last year with Oppenheimer. ”Ryan and Chris are both such incredible storytellers and filmmakers and the experience they create for the audience is unlike anything else out there,” he said of a comparison between the two.
Sinners begins its international rollout tomorrow (April 16) in several European territories, before opening wide around the world, including in the US and UK-Ireland, this weekend.
No comments yet