Ryan Coogler sent the script for Sinners to his go-to cinematographer, Autumn Durard Arkapaw, the night before he started shooting Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl.
“When I read that, I was just shocked, because even if you read something like this without knowing anything about the storyline, it’s very unique,” Arkapaw says. She responded to Coogler’s script with a long email. “I just unloaded all my thoughts on how it made me feel, the visual things that jumped out at me, and what I loved about it.”
Set in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow era, Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan as Smoke and Stack, identical twins who return to town after an encounter with the Chicago mob. The twins rally the local community to help build a juke joint. But as the sun sets, vampires appear and wreak havoc on the town and on Juke’s opening night.
Alcapeau made history by becoming the first cinematographer to shoot 65mm film in IMAX.
However, that decision was made during the testing process. Coogler had previously used Super 16 format when filming Fruitvale Station and wanted to return to this format. Sitting on Variety’s Inside the Frame, Arkapaugh said, “The more we had conversations with the visual effects supervisors, the more work started to progress. Because there are twin elements to the film, the 35mm format had a more stable gate and was more friendly to the kind of work we had to do. So we decided to go with 35mm. And then Ryan got a call from the studio asking if he’d talked about large format, and he just opened his video.” ”
The two went out to the desert near Lancaster, California to test IMAX 35mm and 65mm. Kugler expressed a keen interest in showcasing the landscape. The idea was inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, and was shot on 65mm film using Ultra Panavision 70mm. “We screened those tests at FotoKem and IMAX headquarters. Once you saw what you created, you couldn’t miss it.”
Jack O’Connell plays Remick, one of the vampires. In the film, he appears about halfway through, framed by a farmhouse in the distance as birds circle overhead. Al Capaugh said it was one of her favorite scenes and revealed that Coogler’s script actually began with this scene. “I remember reading this and being shocked, because I thought, ‘Where did he come up with this?'” He’s very good at writing things that jump off the page and get people excited. It comes from his love of movies and theater. When you watch “Jaws” or “The Dark Knight,” there are scenes where you just put your arms around someone and you feel like you’re a part of the scene. And that’s how he wrote that scene. ”
According to Alcapeau, Coogler discussed the scene with editor Michael Shober, who ultimately decided to move it further down the timeline. “That was one of my favorite scenes, and it felt like a Western. I was so excited to shoot it, and the moment I read it, it just popped into my head. Remick is in the movie, and it starts off with him trying to approach this dilapidated farmhouse, where he meets two farmers who are trying to get into the house and take shelter because they claim they’re being chased by Choctaw Indians.”
The key to this scene was finding the entrance correctly. Coogler wanted it to be epic. Arkapaw says, “It was important to Ryan to hint at the fact that he can fly. Jack jumped off the box, but Ryan wanted it to look a certain way, so we went through it several times. You’re getting closer to the camera.” But it just hints at the fact that he might be flying, that he has supernatural powers, because obviously in the later scenes we see him again in the back room. Nursery school. ”
Another aspect of the scene was to set it at the magic hour when the sun was setting. It was important to watch the sun go down on the horizon and understand what that meant for the story. It took Alcapeau two days to film this sequence. She says, “I shot for a day and then went back and completed some work, so I had more time on camera.”
Not everything was smooth sailing. Every shot of the Choctaw watching the sunset was captured on camera. “The IMAX camera jammed right before we tried to film him looking at the sun on a horse. You can see the sun falling over his shoulder. But we were able to fix the jam and it literally rolled right before the sun went down.”
Speaking about her historic shoot, Alcapeau said she wanted the format to sing, and this was a prime example of doing just that. “There were a lot of moving shots, like old Westerns, where there was a camera on the crane and you could track it with the horses. It’s a beautiful scene.”
