Ryan, let’s talk about your path to Black Panther. Now, industry scuttlebutt would have it that when Marvel first went to you for this project, initially you were wary or turned it down. What got you to the point where you wanted to commit to it?
RC: There wasn’t ever a time when I turned anything down. It actually worked out in a way that I couldn’t have imagined: I was into comic books my whole life, but once I got into filmmaking, I realized I liked to select projects that had questions I was dealing with personally. One of those things I found myself coming back to was, “What is colonization? What does it mean to be African?” Right around that time, Marvel reached out about the project and we engaged, and I shared that with them. They were really open to exploring those things in this massive superhero film, and it ended up working out between us and I was really excited to do it.
RC: T’Challa is a very interesting character, and on the surface, I think he’s kind of difficult to write. He’s great in so many different ways: He’s extremely wealthy, extremely smart, culturally knowledgeable. He’s a king who’s got this power. Especially in comic books, I was always drawn to characters where you got into the stories through their flaws, like Batman, who’s reliving this terrible moment that’s happened to him. With T’Challa, he’s got everything going for him, and in a way when I first thought about it, I was like, “Man, this is gonna be tough, because I’m not sure I would like this dude!” But through the process of making the film and working with Chad and trying to explore these things and find ownership in it, I’m incredibly attached to this character now. In our film, you find him at a time when he’s just lost the most important person in his life, his father, and he’s inheriting all this responsibility at a time when Wakanda is struggling over what their identity is going to be, so he’s incredibly conflicted and aware of this responsibility. It’s not much unlike what me and Ava are going through with these films: You find people trusting you with this massive thing that has a lot of importance, but they’re watching, hoping that you don’t mess it up. And you’ve got smart people all around you putting their opinions in, but at the same time, you’ve got to remember, “Oh, yeah, I’m smart, too.”
To judge from the cosplay and the online reaction to Black Panther, one of the things people are most excited about are these amazing costumes you and Ruth Carter have put together.
RC: It’s funny, Ava was mad at me for using Ruth. She was like, “Yo, you got Ruth?”
AD: Ruth worked with me on Selma, and I just assumed she was gonna be there for Wrinkle. She was like, “Um, no.” [Laughs.]
RC: Ruth’s incredible, obviously. She’s designed the costumes for movies like Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Selma … The big question for everybody — for myself, for Marvel, for Ruth — was, “What does it mean to be African?” We looked to the continent for clothes and colors and patterns. It was a collaboration between all of us to tell the story through what these characters put on, and when they change their costumes, what is that saying about their journey in the film? But yeah, we looked to the continent for what the Dora Milaje would wear, we looked at Afrofuturist works, and we found that in African culture, clothing has multiple functions. A shirt is not just a shirt: It tells a story, it’s got a design that speaks to what your rank is in your tribe and what your family has done, and it also might serve as a form of protection from weather or battle.
RC: Nah, I couldn’t have afforded that coat in college, man! In college, I just wore a sweatshirt that my football coach gave me or something. But it’s great, because we really wanted to explore what it means to be African from everywhere. Mike’s character, Erik Killmonger, is from the States, so you get a little bit of the diaspora of our culture here as African Americans. Everything that he would wear, we talked about heavily, and we tried to pull from cool fashion. Mike was really interested in that scene to kind of look at some of the stuff that street fashion is bringing to it — you’ve got Jerry Lorenzo, Fear of God, Virgil Abloh. We looked at a lot of that stuff.
How do you find the happy medium where this movie can be Marvel but it can also be Ryan Coogler?
RC: I think that’s what the studio was interested in when we sat down. They’re in a place where they’ve made a lot of these films, and they’re really interested in ways to make them different. You see what they did with Taika [Waititi] and Ragnarok, what they’ve done with [Guardians of the Galaxy director] James Gunn. They want the filmmakers to bring themselves to the table.
To make an analogy, fashion right now is about collaborations: Like, Nike will go to a designer and say, “Make your version of an Air Force,” and people will go crazy for it because it feels familiar, but at the same time, it’s bringing something different to it. That’s a way that these films can be effective, and Marvel was extremely open to that.
RC: Ava talked about naming names, and I gotta talk about Nate Moore, who’s a black man and works at Marvel as a producer — he worked on [the Captain America movies] Winter Soldier and Civil War. When I first met him, I didn’t know there were any black executives at Marvel, you see what I’m saying? He actually called me on the phone, and I was talking him on the phone, like, “I think this dude’s black!” [Laughs.] Y’all know how it is on the phone. And I go into the restaurant for the meeting and I’m like, “Oh, he is! That’s what’s up.” Nate was very supportive and obviously very conscious of what it would mean if Wakanda existed — not just what it would mean for the world, but what it would mean for us.
Ryan, what was that big moment for you?
RC: Man, it’s tough. It happened every day, and it still happens, in post. I would have to actively play mind tricks on myself, that I didn’t see what I was looking at, so that I wouldn’t emotionally break down and lose time. I would say the first time I felt that — and it’s a trip, because these are two actors that I inherited — was [a scene with] Chadwick and an actor named John Kani, who’s a massive talent and kind of like a titan of acting in South Africa. He plays T’Chaka, T’Challa’s father in the film, and he was cast by the Russo brothers for Civil War. I’m giving a little bit of a spoiler, but they have a scene together in our film, and he showed up to rehearse the day before they were supposed to shoot, this African man in his 70s. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a backwards cap, he’s dressed like us, and Chad shows up and they start rehearsing. Both of them being the incredible actors that they are, they just snap into it, and it’s just me and them and my cell phone. And they start speaking in Xhosa, which is a dialect in South Africa that Chad learned and John speaks naturally, and something about realizing that we have this film where a father and son talk to each other in this native African language in a superhero movie … it kind of hit me pretty hard for a second. It was emotionally moving. And whenever that happens, you have to remind yourself, “I can’t fall to pieces right here. There’s so much work left to be done.” So you give yourself a couple seconds and you get right back to it.
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