Ryan Coogler revealed how the dance scene in Sinners together.
Appearing on Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Coogler was asked how he came up with the idea.
“I outlined the script before the final draft and writing it, and I didn’t really have that surreal element to it,” Coogler told Poehler. “It was just going to be, ‘Preacher boy sings and people like it’ — that’s what it said in the outline.”
Coogler admitted that he felt a “strange” feeling come over him while writing the script.
“I felt strange because I had fallen in love with all of these characters. I didn’t want them to die. Then I realized that in this movie, if you get bit in the neck, you check out,” Coogler said.
“I felt bad, and I realized that this scene was the midpoint. It dawned on me that Black folks in the 1930s who were of age to be in this juke joint. They were living in Clarksdale during Jim Crow,” he continued. “They all were sharecroppers because there was nothing else that society allowed them to be. Their grandparents were enslaved. And their children and their children’s children would still be sharecroppers.”
Coogler also revealed that even though Michael B. Jordan played twins in the film, he’s afraid of doppelgängers.
For sure,” Coogler agreed. “I mean, look, it was a hook for me. It was so sticky, right? In this day and age, I think you need multiple reasons to lean in when there’s so many great things available.”
He continued, “There are so many ways to spend time. So for me, I think that I’m a firm believer in things having multiple hooks, you know what I mean? And it’s a hook for me because I have twins in my family, and I love them, and I got a lot of homies as twins, but I also have a crippling fear of doppelgängers, like a straight phobia. You know what I mean?”