I know at press junkets.
We all sort of journalists will ask people
about working with the director, and everyone sort of speaks
about what a great experience is because that's what you do.
But Ryan Coogler is a genius, isn't he?
He actually genuinely is.
How I like to talk about the collaboration process,
because I've interviewed him a few times and he's just
he just knows exactly what he wants to do.
And he's a magician behind the lens.
Just wondered about that kind of process working with him for the
for the second time.
You know, Ryan knows what he wants,
but he really invites you to be a part of getting it there.
So he has a really strong vision, but he's not
exclusive about it.
He he invites us into the process.
We get to advocate for our characters because he trusts us
to know our characters best.
So in the process, we'll be able to
we were able to offer up
suggestions, and it's a very collaborative process
and he doesn't stop working.
So he is refining and adjusting things until the very end.
I mean, he was still refining things last week, you know.
So that is, I think, what makes him special.
And he's a man who really relies on on the collective.
You know, he is loathe to take credit for it.
And but I would just say that
he is a good leader because he brings out the best in everyone he works with.
And he also picks people that he can trust and have confidence in.
And I think that's a power that is little spoken
about the power of like putting together the right team.
And he has that.
Yeah, it's a safe space.
It creates a really safe space for you to kind of do your best work.
And like Lupita said,
invites you into the collaborative process.
So, you know, even with, say, the Jabari, like even from the first movie,
he said, I want, I want something that feels call and response.
What are you thinking?
And, you know, I went away,
collaborated with some other
folks on set and came up with that chant, you know what I mean?
And he then does his thing.
He comes in, he's like, I love that
there's I don't know if that works there, but I love this.
And he'll do that every way around because, you know, big part of this movie
is the world building. Mm hmm.
So creating the language and I mean, like, the body
language, the, like, cultural language, like all these very specific things
really comes from us contributing a lot to it.
Like, none of that is something that's on the page, you know, necessarily.
And that's something that, you know, Ryan, like Lupita says,
really excels at the collective, conscious, trusting, trusting that.
So it feels like an incredibly safe space to work.
So you end up just risking doing your best, doing your most interesting work,
because, one, you have the best playmates and then you have a person
who is just saying, sometimes I'm going to get out of the way.
And then when he comes in, he gives you any notes.
It's something that you definitely didn't see or plan for,
and it just makes everything just go crazy.
It goes it comes alive differently.
I mean, because obviously as I mentioned at the start, is a very
I quite taken, quite profound, quite an emotional watch as a viewer,
which means we can't tell you how much we need M'Baku in this movie
because he does provide those moments of just I mean,
they're just little peppering the film with little moments of light relief.
Did you even get that from reading the script going off,
you know, this, but did you even get that sense of relief
during the process of reading it as as actors?
I don't think
I can only speak for myself on what I read.
I didn't
I did not understand
until watching it the entire
tailoring of the grief process.
So that was not as apparent on the page, it was always about grief on the page,
it was always about loss.
And that entire that whole left by T'Challa,
that really reflected our own loss.
But what came out of the finished product felt like something different.
I always knew that part of M'Baku's
role was always just
to be the the truth sayer and the the stress test.
And every moment, like he'll stress every moment to make sure that,
you know, the foundation is good.
That's one of his biggest, you know, roles in the franchise.
It's if there's weakness, he's going to point it out
and he's going to try it, you know what I mean?
He himself is very reverent and irreverent
is he has a lot of duality and is based on duality.
So I knew he was funny,
but the juxtaposition of what
what happens in the movie and the finished product
really shows that totally different than how it reads on on the page.
Yeah, I mean, grief is such a vulnerable emotion.
You guys do an incredible job in depicting this and it's hard to keep it light.
thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you. Thank you.