Ryan Coogler sent his cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw the script for the film “SinnersThe night before filming began on Gia Coppola's The Last Dancer.
“I read it and I was just blown away because if you don’t know anything about the storyline and you read something like that, it’s so unique,” Arkapaw says. She responded to Coogler's script by sending him a long email. “I just poured out all my thoughts about how it made me feel, the visuals that came out, and what I liked about it.”
The Sinners is set in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow era. It stars Michael B. Jordan as identical twins Smoke and Stack, who return to the city after an encounter with the Chicago mob. The Twins rally the local community to help build a jukebox. However, when the sun goes down, vampires appear and wreak havoc on the city and on the opening night of the music concert.
Arkapo made history by becoming the first cinematographer to shoot a 65mm film in IMAX format.
But this decision was made during testing. Coogler had previously used Super 16 when filming Fruitvale Station, a format he wanted to return to. Sitting at Variety's Inside the frame” says Arkapaw, “Things started to progress as we started communicating more with the visual effects supervisor. Because of the doppelgangers aspect of the film, the 35mm format had a more stable shutter and was more convenient for the work we had to do. So we moved on to thinking about the film in 35mm. And then Ryan got a call from the studio and asked if we'd talked about the big format, and that made him just open up.”
They went to the desert near Lancaster, California, and tested IMAX 35mm and 65mm, with Coogler showing great interest in showing the landscape – an idea inspired Quentin TarantinoThe Hateful Eight, shot on 65mm film using Ultra Panavision 70mm. “We showed these tests at FotoKem and IMAX headquarters. Once you see what we created, you won't be able to unsee it.”
One of the vampires, Remmick, is played by Jack O'Connell. In the film, he appears almost halfway through the film, falling into frame with a farmhouse in the distance as birds circle overhead. Arcapo says this was one of her favorite scenes, revealing that Coogler's script actually began with this scene. “I remember when I read it, I was shocked because I thought, 'Where did he come up with that?' He's very good at writing things that jump off the page and get people excited. And this comes from his love for cinema and theater. You watch Jaws or The Dark Knight and you have these scenes that just hug you and you feel like you're a part of that scene. That's exactly how he wrote the scene.”
Arkapaw says Coogler discussed the scene with editor Michael Shover and ended up pushing it further down the timeline. “It was one of my favorite scenes and it read like a Western. I was very excited to shoot it and I saw it in my head as soon as I read it. It's about Remick appearing in the film trying to approach a deserted farmhouse where he meets these two farmers. He's trying to sneak into the house and take cover because he claims he's being chased by Indians Choctaw.”
The key to the scene was the correct placement of the entrance. Coogler wanted it to be big. Arkapaw says, “It was important to Ryan that you allude to the fact that he can fly. Jack jumped off the box, and we did that a few times to get it right because Ryan wanted it to look a certain way. You're close to the camera and it just alludes to the fact that maybe he flies, that he has supernatural powers. Later, obviously, in this scene you see that he is a vampire because you meet him again in the back room in the nursery.”
Another aspect of the scene was its juxtaposition with the magic hour when the sun sets. It was important to see the sun set on the horizon and understand what that meant for the story. Arkapaw had two days to film the episode. She says, “We filmed it for one day and then came back to finish some work, which gave us more time to get it on camera.”
Not everything was smooth sailing. All the footage of the Choctaw watching the sunset was filmed. “The IMAX camera jammed right before we were about to shoot that shot of him looking at the sun on the horse. You can see the sun falling behind his shoulder. But we were able to clear the jam and we literally rolled right before it went down.”
As for her period shoots, Arcapo says she wanted the format to sing, and this was a prime example of how that happened. “We had cameras on the cranes and there's a lot of moving footage, like an old Western, with the ability to track the horses. It's a beautiful scene.”
