Behind the scenes: Sinners

IBC

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Shooting large format IMAX and designing a surreal montage resonated with the film's themes of spiritual ancestry and musical legacy

The genre-fluid film Sinners switches in and out of supernatural and vampire elements as well as comedy, eroticism, romance, noir and, most of all, music. Writer-director Ryan Coogler has called it his ‘love letter’ to everything that he enjoyed about going to the movies, especially watching films with an audience.

Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, whose father was born in New Orleans and whose great-great-grandmother was from Mississippi, found she could directly relate to some of the subject matter. “There were so many profound themes in the film to explore that I’d never read in a script before such as religion, racial segregation, vampire lore and the legacy of music,” she says.

The standout scene is a hallucinatory dance that transcends its 1930s setting by birthing rock‘n’roll, electric guitar and hip hop from Southern blues. Dubbed the ‘Surreal Montage’, Durald Arkapaw designed the shot in three parts with hidden transitions because the IMAX film cameras they were using would spool through 1000ft of film in little more than two minutes.

Although no stranger to shooting with IMAX certified-digital cameras (she shot them for the Coogler-directed Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), Durald Arkapaw is being celebrated as the first female to shoot a feature with IMAX film cameras. These are big beasts weighing 65lb which didn’t phase her when crafting a shot that needed to appear to float over a cast of party goers and apparitions of shamans, African tribal dancers and modern DJs.

Each of the three shots are on Steadicam and shot on IMAX 15 perf film [which is 65mm running through the camera horizontally]. Each shot took around half a day to film with the movements of camera and cast carefully timed and choreographed.

In this she was aided by composer Ludwig Göransson who remixed Raphael Saadiq's track ‘I Lied To You,’ for the scene and is the DJ on set seen in the sequence. With Göransson and Coogler, Durald Arkapaw prevized the action on a soundstage in New Orleans. She lit the scene mainly from above in order to free space for camera movement.

Originally conceived as a 16mm project, it was Warner Bros. who first suggested to Coogler that he film with a larger format, and the filmmakers leapt at the chance to widen the scope of their ambition.

While the director took advice from Christopher Nolan about how IMAX would be experienced in cinemas, Durald Arkapaw connected with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who had shot Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

She then arranged to view tests at film lab FotoKem including of The Hateful Eight, shot by DP Robert Richardson, and 2001: A Space Odyssey projected in 70mm.

In particular, they explored how Richardson had used the 2.76:1 format for Tarantino’s western and how that width might showcase the Mississippi Delta landscape of Sinners.

They decided to shoot the entire film simultaneously on Ultra Panavision 70 (2.76:1) and IMAX large-format film formats – the first time this has ever been done (therefore making Durald Arkapaw a pioneer). The 2.76:1 aspect ratio offers more width in the frame, while the IMAX aspect ratio of 1.43:1 lends the picture a taller image area.

The DP says she framed for three aspect ratios (2.76, 1.90, and 1.43) in the camera viewfinder and tended to centre-punch everything so that all the important information remained in the centre of the frame.

“Even though we’re telling a horror story, we also referenced historical photography shot on 35mm Kodachrome slide film from the U.S. Farm Security Administration collection, which added a naturalistic texture to our visual language,” she explains. In fact, Kodak created a new IMAX EktaChrome film stock just for the movie.

Durald Arkapaw previously shot indie films like Palo Alto and Teen Spirit, the documentary Beastie Boys Story and major studio projects like Loki – which earned her an nomination – and Wakanda Forever.

Twins

Another key to the story is that the audience believe that identical twins Smoke and Stack are different characters, albeit both are played by Michael B Jordan. While his performance, the costumes, make-up and hair designs do a lot of the work, director and DP approached the VFX team for solutions.

After reviewing other films made with twins (The Shining, Dead Ringers, The Social Network, Legend) and exploring what was possible technologically, the VFX team shared what they called a ‘decision matrix’ with different options.

In the simplest scenario, they could shoot Michael B. Jordan twice (once in each role, then switch to the other twin), with different levels of complexity, depending on interaction and camera movement. In more difficult shots, they could employ computer technology to recreate a digital version of Jordan’s head and put it onto a well-chosen double’s body.

Durald Arkapaw says she initially expressed concerns that the technology used to capture facial movement would interfere with his performance, due to the size of the camera rig which was also potentially cumbersome to move around. The VFX team was then tasked with developing a more user-friendly capture device and workflow for facial capture to be used for VFX data collection.

What began as a sketch on a napkin transformed into a prototype, with 10 cameras situated around a ring positioned on the shoulders of Jordan, dubbed the Halo Rig, contributing to over 1,000 visual effects shots for the movie.

“I remember the moment Michael showed up on set wearing it, with red lights blinking all over. It was like Robocop showing up in the police station for the first time,” VFX supervisor Michael Ralla says. “Eventually, everyone got used to it, Michael became comfortable shooting with it and the Halo Rig became a nimble tool for recording his facial performances in situ, on set and in the correct lighting.”

“Humans instinctively analyse countless faces daily [and can] detect subtle emotional cues and inconsistencies, making digitally created faces exceptionally challenging to convincingly replicate due to our acute sensitivity to even the smallest imperfections,” continues Ralla. “That complexity is amplified, because the IMAX screen is huge. Everything had to be believable when seen larger than life.”

Constructing the juke joint

Production designer Hannah Beachler was instructed to present a 1930s South in saturated colour. She applied red, white and blue to the greens and browns of the Louisiana backdrop into the design of the film.

Principal photography began in spring 2024 in New Orleans. The majority of the film is staged at a make-shift nightclub called the juke joint, supposed to be a large corrugated metal aging sawmill that the filmmakers actually constructed in a former golf course in the Louisiana city of Braithwaite. Once a luxury destination, the course was destroyed by floods during hurricane Katrina and has since become uninhabitable with overgrown foliage, infested with alligators and snakes.

Since the juke joint exterior had to appear dilapidated the carpenters and scenic artists transformed freshly cut trees to look weathered and worn by torching, sanding, staining, painting and chemically distressing the wood.

On the final day of principal photography of the whole movie the crew lit the roof for backplates of fire later augmented by VFX for the Surreal Montage sequence.

The production also built more than a dozen small businesses in the small town of Donaldsonville, to create the film’s vision of Clarksdale, circa 1932, including grocery stores, a gas station, cinema, barber shop and hotel.

In the film’s production notes Coogler says that his earliest memories of movies were “while sitting in a darkened room, full of strangers, and being absolutely terrified by something that was happening on the screen. That feeling of being with others, the unison, the horror and delight made me feel like home. That’s where it began for me.

“The first story we probably told around a fire was a horror story. It’s the communal experience—and this movie was made to be seen with a crowd of people you don’t know.”