Ryan Coogler’s new movie Sinners starring Michael B Jordan was inspired by his deep “personal obsession”

Ryan Coogler’s American period action horror film Sinners is based on his “personal obsession” with the great migration, which refers to the mass movement of Black Americans from the rural South of America to urban areas in the North, Midwest, and West starting in the early 1900s.

The 38-year-old writer-and-director’s latest movie is a period vampire thriller set in 1930s Mississippi, close to where his own ancestors lived, and he admitted the themes of slavery, poverty, war, the Ku Klux Klan, spiritualism and blues music were all very important to him.

He told The Guardian newspaper: “I was bringing my whole life to it.

“I’ve been struggling to tell a story that does the great migration for a while. It’s a personal obsession of mine, this period of time when Black people were considering leaving the South en masse.

“(My late uncle and I) were really close, and he would always listen to blues records – it was his only form of entertainment. I would find myself listening to blues records to remember him.

“That’s how I got inspired to explore and research, and that’s how I got to this movie.

“So it’s me growing and dealing with my own position, my own mortality.”

The movie stars Coogler’s frequent collaborator Michael B Jordan as the twin characters Smoke and Stack and the director felt the “challenge” of the dual roles would spark his friend’s interest.

He said of the Creed star: “He’s an incredibly kind man, a humble man, generous, but he does have a raging ambition within him.

“If you can offer him something that he hasn’t done before, that, on the surface, is a challenge, you have a better chance of getting his interest – especially with me, because we’ve done so much together.”

The Black Panther filmmaker thinks he and Jordan differ in the same way Smoke and Stack do in the film, making them a “good pairing”.

He said: “Mike is very like Stack, in terms of his ambition. He’s a wild dreamer. He comes up with incredible ideas and concepts, and oftentimes I’m like: ‘Bro, that’s impossible.’ So we make a good pairing.”

Meanwhile, Jordan recently revealed that Coogler convinced him that he could become a movie star.

He said: “It’s extremely important to me … I feel like, at a time, earlier in my career when I was figuring out what type of actor I wanted to be, lead actor, you know, like where do I stand in the entertainment industry? Only been a part of ensembles and in this nature, never opened a movie before, never been a lead of a film before, so I was searching for that and Ryan was the first director to believe in that, and tell me I was a movie star and believed it and made me believe it, you know?”

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