Ryan Coogler was not Marvel Studio’s first choice to direct Black Panther, hard as that is to believe with the film’s massive success in hindsight (the film has become the highest-grossing film ever directed by a black person, and one of the highest grossing films of all time). The studio first approached Ava Duvernay, then coming off the critical darling Selma, the story of Martin Luther King’s voting rights march in 1965. Duvernay turned down Marvel, citing creative differences and a desire to tell a more female-centric story (she went on to direct A Wrinkle in Time). Coogler was soon brought on to direct, hot off the success of Rocky franchise reboot Creed, also starring Michael B. Jordan.
However, it is Coogler’s first film, 2013’s Fruitvale Station, which feels the most pertinent to Black Panther’s themes. That film starred Jordan as Oscar Grant, a real-life man unjustly killed by a police officer in Oakland. In Black Panther, Jordan returns as Killmonger, another man from Coogler’s hometown of Oakland. As Doreen St. Felix puts it in The New Yorker, “...it is impossible not to read a resurrection of that anguished, dying figure in the villain’s angry gaze.” Though T’Challa is the film’s hero, much of Coogler’s sympathy clearly lies with the villain.
Of course, Coogler also had a great impact on the film through his casting choices. Despite several very famous actors being cast (including frequent collaborator Jordan) Coogler went with slightly less famous and even unknown actors for key parts. Letitia Wright had barely any feature film credits before being cast, Winston Duke had none. Danai Gurira was famous for her supporting role on AMC’s The Walking Dead, but Coogler reportedly had never seen the show before casting her, instead basing his assessment of her abilities on a Nigerian independent film called Mother of George.
Coogler’s visual style is also important for the film. Like in Creed, Coogler’s work in Black Panther thrives off of motion. He frequently sends characters hurtling at great speed through vast CGI spaces or cuts quickly around intense close-quarter battles. Of course, much of the credit also has to go to Director of Photography Rachel Morrison (recently the first woman nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, for her work on Dee Rees’s Mudbound) who shoots vibrant and colorful images to bring life to the fantastical world of Wakanda. But overall, it is Coogler’s perspective which pulls together these disparate elements (Afrofuturism, comic book movies, his own life experience, etc.) to create the vision that is Black Panther.
