Sinners: Ryan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan and Li Jun Li on their Southern horror blockbuster

Moving on from Black Panther and Creed, Ryan Coogler returned this spring with his fifth feature film and fifth collaboration with Michael B. Jordan: Sinners, an original horror thriller that has dazzled audiences, becoming one of the highest grossing original films in the past eight years.

The story focuses on twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (Jordan), who’ve left their troubled lives in Chicago behind to open a juke joint in their Mississippi hometown. Among the exes and family members welcoming them back with varying degrees of enthusiam (including their Robert Johnson-esque musician cousin Sammie, played to incredible effect by Miles Caton) — and the perils of the Jim Crow-era South — is an evil they’re forced to reckon with.

Coogler had worked with Michael B. Jordan since his 2013 debut, Fruitvale Station. During a virtual press conference, Coogler said of their collaboration, “What I like the most about working with (Jordan) is he has an incredible work ethic, but he’s also a very kind person. He’s such an incredible sport and just moves. Kindness is the default. That’s just infectious on the set in terms of establishing the tone that everybody’s going to work with.”

For Jordan, this was the first film he’d acted in since making his 2023 directorial debut with Creed III. He said of that experience working with Coogler again, “Especially on this one, for me to be able to be an extra set of eyes for him and help where I can, or anticipate his movements or needs, allowed us to maybe get a little bit more done, especially when time is always an issue on set in general. But it’s just a mutual understanding. I can’t really explain the nonverbal communication that we have, that’s only gotten better over the years.”

Coogler not only directed Sinners but wrote the film’s screenplay.

“I was fortunate enough to have a really, really close relationship with my Uncle James and the seed of this movie started with that relationship with my uncle,” says Coogler. “He would listen to blues music all the time. He would only talk about Mississippi when he was listening to that music. He had a profound effect on my life and I got a chance to dig into my own ancestral history with this film.”

Talking about some of the inspiration behind Sinners reveals the film’s genre-bending style. Coogler name-drops the Coen brothers, particularly Inside Llewyn Davis and Fargo. As the film is (in part) a horror film, it’s unsurprising that he also mentions From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty — he calls the latter his favourite horror film. 

“There’s a lot of (John Carpenter) in the film as well,” Coogler says. “Truthfully, the biggest influences are not in cinema. Salem’s Lot is a massive influence and there’s a real deep-cut influence, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and my favourite episode called ‘The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtleban’.”

Coogler’s screenplay integrates different immigrant communities in the South. Among the characters in the film are the Chinese owners of a general store on the town’s mainstream. Li Jun Li plays Grace Chow, the shopkeeper who becomes embroiled in the horrific events of the opening night of the Moore twins’ juke joint. During the press conference, Li was asked about how she built her character: “I was not aware of the Chinese American community in the Mississippi Delta at all. I had no idea about them,” she says. “All I knew was that when I was presented with the sides during my audition process, I had no other information other than the fact that she was a Chinese American with a very thick, deep Southern accent, which was what really piqued my interest.” 

To prepare, Li watched a documentary by filmmaker Dolly Li (The Untold Story of America’s Southern Chinese, produced for Al Jazeera). “One of the women’s name was Frieda Kwan, and she’s who we used for our dialect inspiration. She always said that as long as we stayed in our lanes, we were fine, but trouble would start if we crossed over. Yeah, I just love how fascinating it was, how deeply embedded they were in the culture and how you would never think that a person who looks like me would speak that way — and yet they did. They also made Southern-style Chinese food and they built their own community.” ■

Read our review of Sinners here.

Sinners is now playing in Montreal theatres.

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