Warning: This article contains spoilers from Sinners.
The story of Sinners doesn’t end when Miles Caton’s Sammie walks beaten and blood-stained into his father’s church underneath the morning sun or as Michael B. Jordan‘s Smoke reunites with his love (Wunmi Mosaku) and child in death. Another sequence arrives midway through the end credits and gets to the heart of director and writer Ryan Coogler’s personal journey with the film.
“In many ways, it was a reason for the movie,” Coogler tells Entertainment Weekly.
The scene picks up in the future, decades after that traumatic night on Oct. 15, 1931, when Smoke (Jordan), Annie (Mosaku), preacher boy Sammie (Caton), the young Pearline (Jayme Lawson), musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), and family friend Grace (Li Jun Li) fought against a horde of vampires — including Smoke’s twin brother, Stack, and Stack’s lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who were both turned.
After living through that hell, the young Sammie shirks his father’s wishes and becomes a blues player of great renown. Famed blues musician George “Buddy” Guy plays Sammie in his older years. He sits at a bar, enjoying a drink after wrapping up a set, when a security guard says someone’s asking for him.
Eli Adé/Warner Bros.
Director Ryan Coogler on set of ‘Sinners’ with Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton
In walks Stack and Mary, now completely embracing ’90s streetwear. Stack reveals that Smoke left him alive that night, and while Remmick (Jack O’Connell) and the other vampires burned beneath the sun, he and Mary ran off together, promising Smoke never to bother Sammie.
They reveal themselves now to offer an elderly Sammie the gift of everlasting life, but he declines. For old time’s sake, Sammie instead plays for them some old-school blues, the kind he used to perform on his guitar as a boy back in the ’30s.
Coogler considers Sinners to be a love letter to both Delta blues and his late Uncle James, who loved this particular genre of music and died when the filmmaker was in the midst of post-production on 2015’s Creed. “I wrote what I thought he’d think would be cool,” Coogler tells EW, noting how Buddy Guy was Uncle James’ favorite living musician during the latter years of his life. “He’s the only artist that my uncle would consistently get dressed for and go see a lot.”
Everything about Sinners speaks to something personal from Coogler’s family. The setting? Uncle James was born and raised in Mississippi. The name of Caton’s character? Coogler’s aunt, Sammie, married his Uncle James after he left the state in his adult years to live in Oakland, Calif. “Pretty much any man of his age that was in Oakland had left Mississippi basically under threat of violence,” Coogler explains.
The fact that Smoke and Stack went to work for Al Capone in Chicago before moving back home to launch a juke joint? Coogler’s father-in-law grew up in the Windy City. The inclusion of the Chow family as characters? A 23andMe test confirmed Zinzi Coogler, Coogler’s wife and producing partner, has some Chinese ancestry. Even the vampires themselves, in some ways, relate to Uncle James.
Eli Adé/Warner Bros.
Miles Caton’s Sammie in ‘Sinners’
“Whenever I would spend time with him, all he would want to do was listen to blues records on vinyl, drink Old Taylor Whiskey [now branded as Old Taylor Bourbon], and listen to or watch the San Francisco Giants play baseball,” Coogler recalls. “Very rarely would he go into detail about what it was like [in Mississippi], but if the music was really good and you had enough to drink, you might get a story out of him.”
Most of those stories, Coogler continues, “had a big element of danger and almost a mystical vibe.”
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The first day of principal photography on Sinners in New Orleans was dedicated to shooting this post-credits scene with Buddy Guy. At first, the sequence wasn’t working. “I got stuck in terms of blocking,” Coogler recalls. “So I do what I often do when I work with Michael. I say, ‘Hey, man. This is not feeling right to me. What do you think Stack would do here?'”
Jordan, wearing special contact lenses to emulate vampire Stack’s glowing eyes, thought for a moment and then popped in his fake fangs. “[It] looked like he was going at Buddy’s neck very swiftly, and I kind of panicked in the moment because I was a fan and, you know, he’s 90 years old,” Coogler explains. “And then I realized he gave him a hug and then looked at me and said, ‘Well, how about that?’ And, bro, I broke down crying in tears because I realized that this whole movie was about that. It was about me not having a chance to say goodbye to my uncle.”
Warner Bros.
Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and Sammie (Miles Caton) in ‘Sinners’
Coogler received the news of his Uncle James’ passing when he was in a Los Angeles post-production facility finishing up Creed. “I felt like s— getting that news, not having been able to be home with him. It was something that I felt I had to reckon with,” Coogler says. “And what I found myself doing after he passed away, when I wanted to think about him, was listen to blues records. I felt like I was conjuring his spirit.”
That moment in the Sinners post-credits scene, when Stack goes in for a hug, becomes comic relief in the context of the film because many audiences share the same sentiment Coogler did on set before the realization sets in. Coogler finds that very ironic, given his own connection to this sequence. “The scene is incredibly important to the narrative in many ways,” he adds. “The movie’s driving towards that moment.”
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