Ryan Coogler sent his go-to cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw the script for “Sinners” the night before she started shooting Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl.”
“I read it and I was just blown away, because if you don’t know anything about the storyline and you read something like that, that’s so unique,” Arkapaw says. She responded to Coogler’s script by sending him a long email. “I just unloaded all my thoughts about how it made me feel, the visual stuff that popped out, and what I liked about it.”
Set in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow era, “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan as identical twins Smoke and Stack, who return to town after encountering the Chicago mob. The twins rally the local community to help build a juke joint. However, when the sun sets, vampires show up and wreak havoc on the town and the juke’s opening night.
Arkapaw made history when she became the first cinematographer to shoot 65mm film in IMAX.
But that decision came during the testing process. Coogler had previously used the Super 16 format when filming “Fruitvale Station,” a format he had wanted to return to. Sitting down for Variety’s Inside the Frame, Arkapaw says, “It started to progress as we had more conversations with the visual effects supervisor. Because of the twinning aspect in the film, the 35mm format had a more stable gate and was more friendly for the kind of work we had to do. So, we transitioned to thinking about the movie in 35mm. And then Ryan got a call from the studio asking if we had talked about large format, and that caused him to just open his mind up.”
The two went out to the desert near Lancaster, Calif., and tested IMAX 35mm and 65mm, with Coogler showing a keen interest in showcasing the landscape — an idea inspired by Quentin Tarantino‘s “The Hateful Eight,” which was shot on 65mm film using Ultra Panavision 70mm. “We screened those tests at FotoKem and the headquarters of IMAX. After you see what you created, you can’t unsee that stuff.”
One of the vampires, Remmick, is played by Jack O’Connell. In the film, he appears almost midway through, dropping into the frame with a farmhouse in the distance as birds circle overhead. Arkapaw says it was one of her favorite scenes, revealing that Coogler’s script actually opened with the sequence. “I remember when I read it, I was blown away, because I’m like, ‘Where did he come up with this stuff?’ He’s very good at just writing things that jump off the page and get people excited. And that comes from his love of cinema and being in the theater. You’re watching ‘Jaws’ or ‘The Dark Knight,’ and you have these scenes that just wrap their arms around you, and you feel like you’re a part of the scene. And that was how he wrote that scene.”
Arkapaw says that Coogler discussed the scene with editor, Michael Shawver and ended up putting it further down in the timeline. “It was one of my favorite scenes, and it read like a Western. I was very excited to shoot it, and I could see it in my head the moment I read it. It’s about Remmick’s entrance into the film, trying to approach this desolate farmhouse where he meets these two farmers. He is trying to get into the house and take cover because he’s claiming to be chased by some Choctaw Indians.”
The key to the scene was getting that entrance right. Coogler wanted it to be grand. Arkapaw says, “It was important for Ryan that you give a hint at the fact that he can fly. Jack jumped off the box, and we did it a few times to get it right because Ryan wanted it to look a certain way. You’re close to the camera, and it just hints at the fact that maybe he’s flying, that he has supernatural powers. Later, obviously, in the scene, you see that he’s a vampire because you meet him again in the back room in the nursery.”
Another aspect of the scene was setting it against magic hour when the sun is setting. It was important to see the sun break the horizon and understand what that meant for the storytelling. Arkapaw had two days to shoot the sequence. She says, “We shot it for one day, and then we went back to complete some work, which allowed us more time to get it in camera.”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. The shots with the Choctaw watching the sun drop were all in camera. “The IMAX camera jammed right before we were about to shoot that one shot of him looking at the sun on the horse. You see over his shoulder the sun dropping. But we were able to fix the jam, and we literally rolled right before it set.”
As for her historic shoot, Arkapaw says she wanted the format to sing, and this was a prime example where it did just that. “We had cameras on cranes, and there are a lot of moving shots like an old Western, being able to track with the horses. It’s a beautiful scene.”
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