The heart of filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is the Delta blues. When the film opens, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) have just returned to their rural Mississippi hometown to open a juke joint, one that will serve as Black folks’ musical oasis from a hard life working the cotton fields and avoiding the Ku Klux Klan.
But it’s not the Klan that interrupts the opening night of Smoke and Stack’s blues haven, but a trio of traditional Irish music-playing and jig-dancing vampires. When Coogler appeared on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he explained the choice came from a place of reverence.
“I’m obsessed with Irish folk music, my kids are obsessed with it, my first name is Irish,” said Coogler. “I think it’s not known how much crossover there is between African American culture and Irish culture, and how much that stuff is loved in our community.”
One of the vampires’ most important weapons is the allure of their music, which Coogler needed to rival the powerhouse of blues talent and performances he had coming from inside Smoke and Stack’s club.
Lead vampire Remmick is played by Jack O’Connell, who knew a little guitar prior to “Sinners,” but was hardly a professional musician before working intensely with Oscar-winning composer (“Black Panther,” “Oppenheimer”) and record producer (Haim, Childish Gambino) Ludwig Göransson in the recording studio. (He also put in the rehearsal hours to perfect his jig with choreographer Aakomon Hasani Jones.)
Coogler and casting director Franchine Maisler reached for real musicians to round out Remmick’s trio, by casting actress/singer Lola Kirke and Canadian rocker Peter Dreimanis, the co-founder/singer of the band July Talk, to play Joan and Bert, the married couple who are Remmick’s first victims upon his arrival to town.
Coogler wrote Remmick as an empathetic and charismatic villain — so much so that IndieWire critic David Ehrlich’s lone knock on the film is that, by design, the darkness of the vampires is more about the fun of being alive than the usual horror movie terror. O’Connell’s character is also stranger, intentionally made to feel out of place with the real-life horror of 1932 Mississippi.
“It was very important that our master vampire [in] this movie was unique as the situation,” said Coogler. “It was important to me that he was old, but also that he came from a time that pre-existed these racial definitions that existed in this place that he showed up in.”
The use of traditional Irish music gives Remmick a timelessness, especially in contrast to the juke joint’s of-the-moment Delta blues. In a speech to those inside Smoke and Stack’s club, designed to lure them into his fold, he speaks of experiencing Ireland first being colonized, making him hundreds of years old, but it also part of pitch built on his personal connection to the plight of the Black characters and separating himself from the white community that terrorizes them.
“[Remmick] would be extremely odd, and [the racial dynamics of 1932 Mississippi] would all seem odd to him, but he would see it for what it was and offer a sweet deal, and that the music was just as beautiful,” said Coogler.
The way Coogler writes and O’Connell plays Remmick, it is possible for the characters to write him off as an oddity. But as the movie progresses, his offer of eternal life and enlightenment is made much more alluring by the music, dance, and a world and time and place outside the hell of living under American racism.
To hear Ryan Coogler’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
A Warner Bros. release, “Sinners” is now in theaters.
