'The perfect achievement': Ryan Coogler wanted Sinners to feel like an 'old blues song'

Ryan Coogler wanted Sinners to feel like “an old blues song”.

The 39-year-old filmmaker is excited to go back and watch the film in the years to come and see how it has changed for him, and he wanted it to feel like a complete piece, rather than to have people clamouring for a sequel.

He told Empire magazine: “I did feel myself as an audience-member, forgetting what it was like to watch a complete thing.

“I wanted to make something that’s rich enough, and that could mature properly, so that when I go back to the movie as an older person, whether it’s two weeks or two years or 20 years from now, I’ve changed enough and it’s a new movie. That, for me, is the pinnacle, bro.

“I was listening to blues music constantly while I was writing the script and making this movie.

“You get a phenomenal blues song, and you just play that s*** again. You run it back. It’s not like, ‘Ah, when are you gonna make a sequel to this song?’

“You want it again, you go back to it.

“And as you get older, maybe it reminds you of the first time you heard it, or the summer that it came out.

“For me, the perfect achievement for this movie was if it felt like an old blues song.”

And Ryan is proud that people have reported seeing Sinners multiple times in the cinema.

He said: “When I hear people say, ‘I’ve seen the movie three, four, or five times’, I’m like, ‘Yo, that’s literally what it was for.’

“I was trying to make something that would make people break their VCR tapes from watching it so much.

“If I was after, ‘Oh, this is gonna launch a franchise or whatever the f***, I don’t think it would have had that quality.”

The Black Panther filmmaker “feels good” about having made a stand-alone film after years of working on franchises.

Asked if he has plans for a sequel, he said: “I won’t say what the future holds. All I can speak to is what my perspective was while I was making it.

“And truthfully, I was fresh off a decade of franchise filmmaking.

“So I was very much about making something that was complete, telling a story from A to Z and letting that be that. I still feel good about that decision.”