For many of the crew members of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners”, the most nominated film of all time at the Academy Awards, this may very well be the best project they will ever work on, which is not surprising, as most folks who work in film production can count the “good” movies they have worked on with one hand. It’s the nature of the beast, you grind out months of your life for a product that rarely finds its place among the greats. Such is the way of creativity, especially on such a grand canvas as filmmaking; an inherently flawed and collaborative endeavor that feels more comparable to an ocean voyage into uncharted waters than simply pointing a camera and making pretend. But every once in a while, the stars align, and maybe you get the chance to touch a piece of art that is not just celebrated by award bodies and critics, but speaks to something deeper and human that might outlive us all, as was the case for those whose names grace the end credits of “Sinners”.
A deeply personal and sweeping chronicle of blood and bravery and blues, “Sinners” was big news when it was filming in South Louisiana, though its details were hush-hush even to many of the crew. Known by the code name“Grilled Cheese”, “Sinners” exploded upon release to become one of the highest-grossing and most critically acclaimed films of the year, taking home Academy Awards for Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Original Screenplay (Ryan Coogler), Best Cinematography (Autumn Durald Arkapaw), and Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson). It was a film that broke barriers and made history, with Autumn Durald Arkapaw becoming the first woman in history to win for Best Cinematography, and left a lasting impact on not just the audiences members who witnessed it but the crew members who lived it; slugging out a long hot summer in the swamps, rallied by the passion of a beloved filmmaker and guided by the promise, the chance, the hope, of perhaps making a movie that would be remembered.
Offer At The Crossroads
Movies of a certain size are inherently secretive, and “Sinners” was no exception. While most of the crew didn’t see the full scope of the endeavor they were set upon, the signs were clear that they were becoming a part of something quite special.
Max Beard (Dolly Grip): We knew a big show was coming, something with close to a $250 million budget. I rent camera support equipment and am really the only game in town, so I assumed they’d use our cranes. But a local Best Boy friend of mine said, “I don’t think they’ll use your stuff”. Now, this was in the middle of the biggest downturn in work any of us had ever experienced. I just knew I had to get on it. So I pushed my friend, who contacted the “Grilled Cheese” Best Boy on First Unit and promised me a job. But he never got back with me. So I sat on my hands for a while until around the time production was going to start, and I got a call, “Can you come to Donaldsonville tomorrow?” I said I’d be there. That was the third day of shooting, at the market, where Smoke asks the little girl to honk if someone tries to steal his stuff. They were so happy to have us that the Mayor of Donaldsonville brought us a cake! It was cool.
Douglas Ware (Property Master): I got a call from Hannah Beachler (Production Designer), with whom I had made some low-budget movies back in 2013. I got to read the script, and it was so amazing I read it twice to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I knew it was a vampire movie, but I didn’t know it wasn’t a traditional vampire movie. I was like, “When do we start?”
Kenneth Yu (Co-Producer/Unit Production Manager): I enjoyed reading the script and seeing it come to life. I thought the script was a great allegory and statement on “culture vultures”. The characters and story within the backdrop of this landscape landed a necessary hard punch. The first conversations were really about large format, IMAX, and logistics. We wanted to create an environment that felt natural within the deep south landscape and use a film format that allowed it to be large in scope.
Monique Motil (Stitcher): I had only been living in New Orleans a short time, and my background was mostly in theater and costuming. At the time, there was a lot of work for qualified stitchers in New Orleans. My first job was on “Interview With A Vampire,” and the person who ran it, Heidi Hafer (Manufacturing Foreperson), who had worked on every blockbuster ever, recognized that I could speak the language and was eager to jump into the work enthusiastically. Once someone recognizes you like that, it’s not surprising to get the call when something is happening. After a while without work, she called me up and said, “We’ve got this big movie happening.” So I started there at the tailor shop on a massive soundstage at Second Line Stages, and that was our home for a couple of hardcore months.
Nick Santos (Rigging Grip): I had a little bit of an idea about what the movie was. I had heard that Ryan Cooper was taking an idea for a “Blade” movie and flipping it to be his own. While we were all out in Braithwaite, Napoleonville, and Thioboxaux, filming was so slow and methodical that we couldn’t see the whole picture. But as we went along, I started to get a little more excited as things began to take shape. And the fact that we were shooting on IMAX film made it even more appealing.
Max Beard: We had no idea how the movie was piecing together. The weather was affecting our schedule, and things kept evolving rapidly. I assumed there would be weeks and weeks of reshoots after wrap, like we didn’t know if we even had a full movie. Then on the last day, Ryan showed us a sizzle reel, only about eight or eleven minutes, but you could tell that this was something special.
Monique Motil: We knew a little about the movie, but not too much. We would often joke about how we might not know what happens until it got released in theaters. A lot of times when you’re working on a project, it’s just for a paycheck, and whether it’s good or bad isn’t important. But when I saw “Sinners,” I was like “Damn, this is really, really good. I’m really proud to have been a part of it.
A True Louisiana Shoot
A Louisiana Summer is not for the faint of heart, especially when filming a period film set mostly among the bayous and cotton fields of a time long past. Braving the weather and the wildlife is par for the course for film productions, but the “Sinners” crew had their work cut out for them.
Kenneth Yu: Weather was our single greatest challenge. The nuance of Louisiana summers, especially during hurricane season, posed additional hurdles for production. We dealt with everything from alligators to flooding, and we had to find quick solutions that worked within the timeframe and the landscape.
Max Beard: There were times when it sucked. The weather at the Train Station was awful. People fell out because it was so hot.
Nick Santos: We were at the Train Station, and it was one of the heavier days from a rigging standpoint, with these 80-foot cranes and 20×30 green screens to cover where visual effects would take over. There was literally a whole town on the other side of those tracks, with a K-Mart and everything. Special Effects even made a fake train rig so that Visual Effects could get real smoke in the scene. That was cool to see it all come together.
Monique Motil: I spent most of my time in the shop, but I did get sent to Bogalusa one time because they needed a stitcher on hand. Now I’m pretty new to Louisiana; I mostly just know New Orleans. So I left at 3 am in the morning for a 5 am call time, driving through the darkness trying to find Bogalousa. But that was one of the heavier extra scenes with so much vintage clothing. It was an adventure.
Douglas Ware: One time out in Braithwaite, we had to evacuate to stage because it rained, and one of our exterior sets, the exterior of the Juke Joint, was all muddy, and it wouldn’t match from what we had previously shot. So every available crew member grabbed a hand tool or a shovel to help out, even Ryan Coogler. There’s a photo of Ryan and Hannah putting dry dirt all over the mud to dry it. Everybody came out to make sure we could finish the work because we were down to the last days, and everybody wanted to make sure Ryan got what he wanted.
Kenneth Yu: I would say all of our location work, especially the exterior juke joint work. It was in an overgrown area near a swamp. We cleared a narrow road that was about a quarter mile into the thick of it. Additionally, filming during the night during the rainy season added additional obstacles. If I recall, it was an unusually hot summer that year, but ultimately, it looked great, and the rewards outweighed the challenges.
Nick Santos: We were filming out in the swamps and bayous where the final fight scene with Remmick (Jack O’Connell) happens. So just outside The Juke Joint, where there is actual water, they built out a separate little pond to shoot the scene. It had an infinity look, so if you shot from just the right angle, you’d just see this big body of water. But it was close enough to the actual pond where gators were crawling onto the set, and a lot of people started feeding them their breakfast burritos and stuff. So the little swamp puppies were getting food from set while animal wranglers were busy trying to keep them and the snakes away. It was a true Louisiana shoot.
The Devil’s In The Details
When crafting the world of “Sinners”, Ryan Coogler’s guiding ethos was authenticity and care; the idea that every detail must have a purpose and feel as true to the world as the people in it. That journey for truth isn’t always the easiest or cleanest one, but as the old-time filmmaking adage goes, “pain is temporary, film is forever”.
Douglas Ware: We had a production meeting early on where Ryan Coogler mentioned a book of Eudora Welty’s photographs, which became a great reference point visually. Ryan was in no way a micromanager, but he expected you to do the research. He’d want you to tell him the history and “why” you picked a certain textile or color. I have never worked with a director who is so involved in the research.
What I love about props is that it’s a scavenger hunt to find things, especially from the 1930s, and some of the best things we found you barely even see. For example, at the end of the movie, when Smoke opens the gun box, you see his Tommy Gun and rifle, but also a couple of WW1 medals, since both he and Stack served. We even added some mail from Annie to Smoke, their correspondence from over the years. Another time, Yao, who played Bo Chow, needed a keyring. We could have just given him a key ring and said, “There you go”. Instead, we made him a keyring featuring a Chinese yen with a hole in the middle, implying that even if his character were to lose everything he owned, he could start again from that one yen. When we finally gave him the keys, he was thrilled, and you could see him building the backstory in real time. Often, actors will ask for things that we never see in the movie, but it helps them build their backstory or get into character. Michael B. Jordan, for example, carried two silver dollar coins in his pocket when he was playing Smoke. That’s something you’ll never see, but it was just a part of his process. One of the best parts of our job is being able to hide those little pieces of inside information between you and an actor; something nobody knows but you.
Max Beard: We were shooting on IMAX 70mm and 65mm, which are incredible formats that have their drawbacks because of the sheer amount of equipment needed and the amount of time it takes to change each film magazine. The rigs, the camera support gear, everything had to be more robust. So, for the scene where Stack (Michael B. Jordan), Sammie (Miles Caton), and Delta Slim (Academy Award-nominated Delroy Lindo) are driving through the fields, we had to rig two cameras to the car, which was a huge build, especially considering they would be driving a vintage-looking car. But they were able to take the engine of a Ford Escort and put the body of the period car onto it so that it drove like a regular car, and also had several rigging points to make our work easier.
Monique Motil: When costuming on a movie like this, you often have multiples, especially because of dirt and blood continuity. For every dress, there are eight or twelve others for stunt people, back-ups, etc. We had one costume, though we built it out of only two yards of fabric. It was meant to be a skirt for the amazing Academy Award-nominated Wunmi Mosaku’s first look costume as Annie. It had this beautiful star print on it and began as white before it was aged and dyed. Wunmi is such an incredible actress that Ruth E. Carter (Academy Award-winning Costume Designer) kept having different visions of how it would sit on her body. So after the camera test, Ruth would come back and say, “I think I’d like shell buttons down the front.” That would be fine, but we only have so much fabric to work with. So they sent it back for alterations a few times, and each time I thought, “Please let it pass this time.” But we made it work, and Ruth loved what we came up with. Recently, I learned that the costume is in a museum exhibit for “Sinners,” and it’s the exact one that we worked on. I even still have a teeny tiny scrap, it was on my altar of sewing as a memento.
Douglas Ware: For Annie’s Cabin, Ryan and Zinzi Coogler (Academy Award-nominated producer), gave me the number for a consultant who actually knows about that world of herbs and remedies. A lot of Annie’s Cabin was dressed by Hannah Beachler and Monique Champagne, but we were able to provide a few things, including a mojo bag and the matches. Making a space like that feel lived in and real is always a joint effort. That one was so well designed that we were able to utilize set design as actual props for authenticity.
Monique Motil: Another thing about Ruth’s vision, for the background players, she didn’t alter anything. Her thinking was that these were sharecroppers in the nineteen-thirties; nothing would fit perfectly. It would be too long or patched. She really gave those extras a unique lived-in look. There was a depth of historical understanding that permeated every part of the movie. We even worked with the Choctaw people in the costume shop to ensure the Vampire Hunters’ costumes were accurate. It’s a small part of the movie, but there was just so much amazing reverence and research that went into so much of what you see on screen.
Douglas Ware: The instruments were also a combined effort. Originally, my department was charged with finding Sammie’s Guitar. We went through the history and found a fantastic guitar that actually came out a few years after the movie takes place, but sometimes you take liberties. So we found the guitar, and we had to get two so that Miles Caton could practice with a music teacher. But then, Ryan and Ludwig Göransson (Academy Award-winning composer) found a guitar that Ludwig already had and said, “Sorry, we’d like to change and use this one.” Originally, the guitar was going to be “haint blue” as a warning of spirits, but Ludwig’s guitar was black. Now we had to find four more guitars just like that one; one for the stand-in, one for special effects to build the one that kills Remmick at the end of the movie, and one for Visual Effects. We also provided Delta Slim with his harmonica and some of the background performers with their guitars and instruments. For Buddy Guy, as Older Sammie at the end of the film, his musicians brought their own instruments. With that, I deferred to them. If they want to bring their own stuff, I’m all for it.
Somebody Take Me In Your Arms Tonight
The “Seance” sequence of “Sinners” is easily one of, if not the most, iconic aspects of the film. A phantasmagoric jam session where musicians from the past, present, and faraway future join together with the denizens of the Juke Joint to revel in their shared ancestry and artistry as the building burns around them was a transcendent experience in the theater; a powerful totem to the sublimity that only filmmaking can offer. To bring it to life, however, took some ingenuity and quick thinking.
Douglas Ware: When you read that scene, you wonder how many takes it’s going to be or where the cuts are going to go? When you watch it, it’s one long take, and everybody has to be in place. Every crew member who could be there on that day to watch was there. Then, to have it transition to it being on fire, that became another fun night spent at the exterior Juke Joint.
Max Beard: That exterior scene was a lot. The interior steadicam shot was filmed at Second Line Stages, and then we transitioned to Braithwaite. That whole day, the grips were building that dance floor and stage because the Art Department wasn’t able to. So we built that along with one hundred feet of crane track, which was a couple of hours’ work. When it came for the shot, pulling back from the burning Juke Joint onto Remmick and the vampires, we did it maybe six or seven times before the sunrise. That was a good 16 – 18-hour day, and we were out there the next day once the sun was up to take it all off again.
Douglas Ware: For the musical number, Ryan and Autumn Durald Arkapaw had everything choreographed out, but the only thing they couldn’t figure out was how to get the 80’s DJ onto the stage without crew members being in the shot. I said, “Why don’t you just put three other crew members and me in costume so we can hide the DJ and table off to the side until the camera is facing away from us. Then we can put it in place and just blend into the crowd.” Even to look at it now, it’s just amazing. You’ve just never seen anything even close to that, and it easily became everybody’s favorite day on set.
Conjuring A Legacy
“Sinners” won big at the Academy Awards, though not as much as it perhaps should have. But a film’s legacy is much larger than the awards it receives; it is in the power of its conjuring, the breadth of its reach, and the way its story instills itself into the soul of a generation. “Sinners” is one such film that will endure. Its characters will endure, its music will endure, and most of all, the memories of those artisans, craftspeople, costumers, stitchers, writers, musicians, technicians, grips, and electricians whose collective blood, sweat, and tears made it real will endure. That’s the power of the movies. We may fade, but not unlike Irish vampires, haints, or the ancestral music of love, struggle, and freedom, films made by people for people always endure.
Douglas Ware: It was definitely a family atmosphere. Certain directors you get the chance to work with just want to go above and beyond for. From the first day, we knew there was something special going on.
Kenneth Yu: The creative team has worked together before, so there was an established shorthand that was clearly an asset to the filmmakers. I have also worked with a lot of the local New Orleans crew on previous projects, and this allowed for friendlier working relationships.
Nick Santos: Ryan Coogler is a very personable director. Normally, for us, the Grip and Electric Riggers are just laborers off to the sides, rarely recognized. But every time Ryan would walk up to me, he’d say, “What’s up?” It felt like he did that with everybody. I mean, we are all creatives. We all got into this for a reason; we all like making movies. To be on a set of that magnitude and be recognized just adds a little extra pep in your step.
Max Beard: So my Mom was a producer on Lil Wayne’s “The Block is Hot,” and one day the musicians from that group came to the set. Everybody was wearing 25th anniversary Hot Boys shirts, and that night, we went to their show, Ryan and Michael B. Jordan too. That was just a special thing for me because that was my Mom’s work. Also, we had an on-set painter who did watercolors of various scenes, and at the end of production, we got to choose which one we wanted. Now, in my front room, I have a painting of the Choctaw Indians riding up on the cabin.
Kenneth Yu: Sinners, as we know, is the most Oscar-nominated film of all time, and it still seems so surreal to be able to say that I was part of that. It feels incredible to have worked alongside such passionate filmmakers who have pushed boundaries and who will continue to inspire the next generation.
Nick Santos: I was so proud, and not just because of all the awards. I was just proud to have had a hand in making it, to go and see the final product with my name in the credits. It was a long road to get there, a long, hot summer, but then I think back to when I first got into the industry in 2015. Back then, I never went to the theater to watch anything I worked on. Mostly it was TV and straight streaming. But this one was different.
Max Beard: I’m proud of it, absolutely. We got to see the movie three days before its release. Coogler wasn’t there, but he did record a thank-you video for us, and an executive from Warner Bros. came to thank us in person. To be there with my wife was really special.
Monique Motil: The costume shop was such an open space with people setting and sewing, with Ruth’s inspiration pictures all around. Ruth was there the whole time, really making us all feel like a part of the team. She had a vision and would have us working on outfits again and again to get them just right. But everyone was supporting each other throughout. It was a very big team of people, and that Oscar Nomination always felt like OUR nomination.
Douglas Wares: There was a time when I had to pinch myself, with my last two movies getting Oscar recognition (the other being “Nickel Boys”). You start in this business and never think every movie you’ll do will be nominated, but to do these back-to-back, I must be doing something right. “Sinners” is more than its awards, though; it’s won something purely for what it represents. And the people I worked with: Melissa Waltrip, making sure that Sammie’s guitar was always tuned, Jasmine Hall, Madison Aucoin, and Drew Guajardo all did an amazing job and made my job easier. Now I’m just looking forward to putting an Oscar-winning feature on my resume.
Read the Screen Time review of “Sinners” HERE.
“Sinners” is back in theaters on 70mm at Prytania Uptown.
