My favorite season? Awards! Yes, we’re already into awards season, so we’re revisiting some of the year’s best projects and the artisans who made them great.
To paraphrase Lady Gaga: There can be 100 versions of a movie in a room, and 99 of them don’t really work, but all it takes is one.
Almost literally, in the case of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. “We tried maybe a hundred different versions of this movie,” editor Michael Shawver says. “The first cut was three hours. Then a 90-minute version where we cut out almost the whole beginning, but we were like, ‘This is definitely not the movie.’”
The film’s bold bait and switch—a period drama about twin brothers (played by Michael B. Jordan) opening a juke joint in a small Southern town takes a bloody, Gothic turn an hour in when it becomes a supernatural thriller—would seem baked into the very concept, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, most of those 100 versions began with the scene in which vampire Remmick reveals himself and turns a couple in a lonely farmhouse into the undead.
“The intention is the Wes Craven style, where you have an opening scene and you put the audience on edge,” Shawver says. “The challenge was how do we make this movie, which is extremely unique, the most digestible for audiences to go along for the ride? When you’re putting a movie together, you’re always walking this fine line between intrigue and confusion, and the problem was when we were testing it, we could tell that people were like, ‘Hey, this is a vampire movie, but then there’s an hour or so where you don’t see any vampires.’ People were waiting for the vampires.”
Instead, Coogler and Shawver open the film with Sammy’s abrupt, bruised, unsettling arrival at a church service, setting the film up to be seen through his eyes. And later, confusion reigned during the rip-roaring, ghostly performance of “I Lied to You.”
Part of that was intentional, of course, “but what we realized is that we needed to set the audience up for that moment,” Shawver says. “So that’s where the animated prologue came in, where we talk about music and piercing the veil of life and death and associating music with supernatural possibilities. That set the audience up enough where we told them, “‘Hey, music, magic, horror, all this stuff is happening through Sammy.’ So when that moment hit, people felt like they were primed for it, and it wasn’t too confusing.”
So the movie became bolder and more daring after test screenings, which is pretty much unheard of. That’s almost entirely due to the confidence that Coogler and Shawver have in their working partnership after 15 years and four films.
“ We would watch the movie in a packed theater and it would play like a rock concert,” Shawver says. “People were jumping at the scares and yelling, ‘Don’t go in there!’ You can’t ask for anything better. But then our test scores would come back in the mid to low 70s, and it just didn’t line up. We had to really trust ourselves and trust the actual experience of the movie.”
Shawver points out that Sinners plays like a group experience, something that changes subtly now that the movie has been in the world and there’s a certain amount of cultural familiarity with its twists and turns. But the film is so packed with symbolism and history that there’s always more to unpack and discover.
More importantly, Shawver has seen audiences claim the movie as their own, imbuing it with a life and meaning they bring to it. “We have our post-credit scene where Sammy’s playing the guitar and singing ‘Little Light of Mine,’” Shawver says. “That was just a performance that we had cut out earlier in the movie, and it’s a great performance. So we said we can’t lose this, so we threw it at the end as a little treat for people who sat through the credits. But the amount of discussion about what that scene meant and did Sammy take the deal and is this an alternate timeline where he decided not to go to the Juke at all? It’s so amazing to see it have a life.”
Michael Shawver’s editing credits include Creed, Black Panther, and A Quiet Place Part II. His go-to at craft services? “If I’m not worried about calories or anything, we’re going for some sort of sour gummy candy, like peach rings or something. When I’m cutting, it’s gum. There’s a brand called Simply Gum, it’s got three or four ingredients per flavor. And wrappers come in a pouch on the side of the box, so when you’re done with a piece, you wrap it up and throw it away. It’s brilliant. I’ve probably contributed much to their stockholders.”
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