The 1961 song that gave Ryan Coogler a career-defining epiphany: “Oh shit”
Very rarely, films come around that stun you to the point where afterwards you’re left thinking ‘how the hell did someone even think of that?’ Inception was one, Everything Everywhere All at Once was another, and then last year another arrived in the form of Sinners from Ryan Coogler.
It was the vampire-skewering, music-packed action drama that rightly took home more Oscar nominations than any other film in history last year, and it placed Coogler right at the top of the ‘what on earth are they going to do next?’ pile when it comes to directors.
As of writing, the answer to that appears that he’s going to heading in a direction nobody really expected, which is to take the reins on one of the episodes of the upcoming X-Files reboot, which Hulu has only greenlit as a pilot, because regardless of Coogler being the hottest property behind a camera at the moment, it is a franchise with a very passionate fanbase to say the least.
You’d imagine it is safe in his hands, he is a huge fan of Mulder and Scully himself and has been working on the project for some years. In terms of movies, it looks like Coogler may well continue his preference to work alongside the man he’s been friends with since he cast him in the lead in his jaw-dropping debut Fruitvale Station back in 2013, Michael B Jordan.
The pair have optioned a film called Wrong Answer, the true story of a maths teacher who is so desperate to get funding for his struggling school that he alters his students’ test scores. Coogler and Jordan have had record-breaking success in the 13 years since their first movie, most notably in the Rocky spin-off trilogy Creed, and then most spectacularly in the two Black Panther movies for Marvel,
Those two films brought in more than $2billion at the box office and 12 Oscar nominations between them, with a third film set to begin production once the Russo Brothers have put their all-encompassing Avengers double to bed with Doomsday and Secret Wars… And it was after the second Black Panther movie had finished filming in 2022 that Coogler first started to put together the ideas that would eventually form Sinners.
Those initial thoughts ended up directly inspiring the mass of threads that make up the final film, with the director taking a trip through the Deep South of America, immersing himself in the blues while thinking about the recent murders of rappers Young Dolph and Nipsey Hussle – he had also been reading the Stephen King classic vampire novel, Salem’s Lot, realising he was ruminating on central themes of grief and love.
And then, while cleaning one day, he heard the Howlin’ Wolf song ‘Wang Dang Doodle’, a two-minute blues number from 1961 that seemed to crystallise everything in his mind. The song tells the story of a group of disparate characters that have drunk, sung and danced through the night in Chicago; characters with names like Automatic Slim, Razor-totin Jim and Fast-talking Fanny.
Coogler recalls thinking, “Oh shit!”, adding, “I’m listening to the lyrics, and he’s telling all these people to, like, meet up, and they’re gonna throw this crazy party. Some real dangerous people getting together, and they meet something that they couldn’t be prepared for. I was like, ‘Man, what is it? A supernatural force? Oh, yeah, maybe it’s like Salem’s Lot. It’s a vampire.'”
Three years later, and $300million in profit, Coogler’s brainstorming paid off in a big way.
