The cinematographer who had a lot on the line

Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who helmed the camera for Oscars hopeful Sinners, opens up on working with director Ryan Coogler and more

- Melena Ryzik

When cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw received the script for Sinners, she wasn't sure what to expect — even though she had worked with its writer-director, Ryan Coogler, for a year, shooting the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever.

For Sinners, their next project together, she was told very little: "I knew it was a period piece. I knew it was personal." The film was inspired by Coogler's beloved uncle, whom he spent time with growing up, listening to the blues.

"I really wanted to make sure that it felt like those memories," she said. But she wasn't prepared for the vampires, the cultural sweep-from before Jim Crow to present day - or the fact that Michael B. Jordan would play two characters, a set of flashy identical twins. As background, Coogler sent her a book of Depression-era photographs by Southern writer Eudora Welty, a visual leap from the Afrofuturism of the Black Panther universe.

What Durald Arkapaw also did not imagine was how Sinners would change cinematic history, making her the first woman of colour to be nominated for an Oscar for cinematography, one of the record-breaking 16 nominations the genre-melding drama earned. (On Sunday, it won the top prize from the Screen Actors Guild.)

The decision she and Coogler made to shoot the movie on film, in two grand-scale formats, IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70, was another boundary broken. Durald Arkapaw is the first woman to shoot a film in large-format IMAX — and she mostly operated the 65-pound camera herself, with Coogler, the visionary Black filmmaker, close enough by her side that she sometimes had to shoo him out of the frame.

"I've always wanted to make big movies," she said in a video interview last week. At the same time, telling an original, ambitious story like Sinners was a risk. "We don't see movies made like this, by people that look like us, with this format," she said, adding, "We all had a lot on the line."