Director Ryan Coogler wanted to capture the experience of a truly transcendent performance: &34;For a moment, you feel so present that you almost feel immortal.&34; Sinners scene breakdown: The cast and crew delve into the hallucinatory juke joint sequence Director Ryan Coogler wanted to capture the experience of a truly transcendent performance: &34;For a moment, you feel so present that you almost feel immortal.&34; By Nick Romano :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/NicholasRomanoauthorphotoadc9b60763e34711935cbf7b3d768d24.

Director Ryan Coogler wanted to capture the experience of a truly transcendent performance: "For a moment, you feel so present that you almost feel immortal."

Sinners scene breakdown: The cast and crew delve into the hallucinatory juke joint sequence

Director Ryan Coogler wanted to capture the experience of a truly transcendent performance: "For a moment, you feel so present that you almost feel immortal."

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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on December 4, 2025 12:00 p.m. ET

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Sammie (Miles Caton) leads the entertainment at the juke joint in 'Sinners'. Credit:

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

- *Sinners* director Ryan Coogler, composer Ludwig Göransson, and stars Wunmi Mosaku and Delroy Lindo unpack the hallucinatory sequence.

- Coogler explains why it was "impossible" to film the scene in one take with IMAX cameras.

- On the final day of shooting, the crew literally lit the roof on fire: "It was pretty symbolic."

**Warning: This article contains mild spoilers for *Sinners*.**

While making *Sinners*, his new historical horror film with vampires, director Ryan Coogler found himself thinking about the kind of live performances that feel transcendent.

"It tends to be the most potent with music," he tells *, *"but it can exist in any of the live art forms."

A cinephile might say they were "blown away" by a movie. At a concert, you might say a performer "burnt the house down." Says Coogler, "For African Americans, we'll say, 'The roof is on fire.' Rock fans might say this dude 'shredded' this thing. There's phrasing for this type of experience."

For *Sinners*, a movie that, in many ways, is about the transcendence of music, he wanted a cinematic representation of that experience — specifically, how the experience of an artist who hails from a particular community comes with a particular point of view that the audience fully understands.

"They're participating in this performance, in a way, that becomes a feedback loop," the filmmaker explains. "And if you've ever been present in an experience like that, it feels euphoric. For a moment, you feel so present that you almost feel immortal."

That's the vision behind *Sinners*' hallucinatory sequence that arrives midway through the movie. During the tail end of Prohibition, Al Capone–blessed twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) return from Chicago to their hometown in Mississippi to launch a juke joint. That night, preacher boy Sammie (Miles Caton) performs a song on his guitar that becomes so transcendent, it summons the spirits of the past and future.

As the music plays, apparitions of shamans and African tribal dancers begin to mingle with the crowd. The roof *literally* catches fire as the dreamlike moment continues to draw in spirits: modern-day DJs, an electric guitarist, twerking clubgoers, a ballerina, and more.

Director Ryan Coogler on the set of 'Sinners' with Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton.

Eli Adé/Warner Bros.

It's the crux of the movie, because it is Sammie's music that catches the attention of the vampire Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who hopes to turn the preacher boy and use his gift to reconnect with his own ancestors.

"It was certainly a singularity of vision and purpose in terms of how we approached that work," Delroy Lindo, who plays musician Delta Slim, tells EW. "There were so many human beings in the scene, the ethnography, all these icons, all these individuals representing specific genres, these specific points of musical history, and how you capture all of that to make the grand statement that you want to make."**

"I got goosebumps reading that scene. It's so unique," Ludwig Göransson, the Oscar-winning composer who has worked on every Coogler-directed movie since 2013's *Fruitvale Station*, tells EW separately. "I never experienced anything like it. I'd never *seen* anything like that on IMAX."

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Musically, Göransson knew it would be a challenge to pull off. The more apparitions that arrive, the more the Delta blues mashes up with hip-hop, rock, and other styles. Göransson tapped singer-songwriter Raphael Saadiq to craft this montage piece with him, out of which came the blues number "I Lied to You," which served as the anchor for the sequence.

The visual effects team and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw (of Coogler's *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever*) also developed previz to give an idea of what this moment in the film would look like, and Göransson created a demo from there.

"Then we met at the soundstage in New Orleans weeks before we were going to shoot the scene," he recalls. "We mapped it out with the camera — the route it's going to take, what musicians we need and where they're going to be. The camera operator was there, too, and with dancers. We created a video and then I created another piece of music that tied everything in together."

"We did a lot of rehearsals, and our crew size swelled up from that," Coogler says. "We expanded for all of the extras and the dancers and all of the different materials we needed."

Michael B. Jordan as Smoke in 'Sinners'.

Eli Adé/Warner Bros.

The filmmaker shot the sequence using IMAX cameras, which came with pros and cons — the pro being, obviously, the larger format, and the con being the size of the reels. "It would be impossible to film it in one take," Coogler explains. "They can only film for about a minute and a half — maybe it's a minute and 45 — because they rip through film at such a speed that you can only shoot for so long. So we basically broke it up into sections that were as long as we could film per reel."

Wunmi Mosaku, who plays Annie, Smoke's longtime love and a conduit for the supernatural, remembers filming the sequence in three parts, which were then stitched together to look continuous. Each portion took about a half day to film.

"We go back and we watch it and, like, the timings aren't right or someone lifts their cap in front of the camera at the wrong time," she says. "It had to be so perfect for that one shot to get everything we wanted. And then also the twin work, because you've got both brothers in the same shot."

Göransson DJed live for these two shoot days, playing the soundtrack so the cast and guest performers had something to dance to. "It was almost like I was creating while we were shooting a little bit, because I had my computer with all the stems and all the music," he says.

"And Miles sang the whole time, because why not?" Mosaku adds.

Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and Sammie (Miles Caton) in 'Sinners'.

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Caton was a new discovery. The teenage son of gospel singer Timiney Figueroa, he performed with the likes of Fred Hammond, Faith Evans, and H.E.R. at a young age before landing his very first film role in *Sinners*. "He's so grounded and talented and eager and all the good things," Mosaku says. "He's amazing." (In addition to performing "I Lied to You," Caton and Alice Smith perform and also co-wrote "Last Time [I Seen the Sun"] with Göransson; both songs have been submitted for Oscar consideration for Best Original Song.)

On the very last day of shooting in Louisiana, after getting the rest of the coverage of that location, the crew literally lit the roof on fire and filmed a live burn of the juke joint ceiling, which you can see in the movie. "It was pretty symbolic," Coogler recalls. "It was complicated, but everybody was willing to bring their all."

They somehow locked into the very spirit that drives the scene. "For these [characters] that had the f---ing rotten luck of being born in 1932 Mississippi, that's where their adulthood would be experienced," Coogler says, "to have this transcendent experience where they get to spend some time with the people that came before them and the people that come after. Even if they don't know it, they feel it."

*Sinners* is playing now in theaters.

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Published: December 04, 2025 at 07:38PM on Source: ANDY MAG

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