Black Panther's Director Ryan Coogler Breaks Down a Fight Scene

Hey, what's going on?

I'm Ron Coogler, co-writer and director

of Marvel Studio's Black Panther.

And this is Notes on a Scene.

(spear whizzing) (thudding and groaning)

(grunts) (thuds)

So, this scene takes place in the second act of the film.

T'Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman,

and Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong'o,

and Okoye, played by Danai Gurira,

are on a covert mission to extract

Wakanda's number one enemy, Ulysses Klaue.

It's now or never.

(speaks in foreign language)

Hey.

Hey! (speaks in foreign language)

(grunts) (thuds)

(spear whizzes and chinks) (man groans)

(spear clanking) (squelching)

(loud thud) (man groans)

(Okoye grunts) (man groans)

(man grunts) (spear thuds)

(man whizzing through air)

(loud crash) (people gasping and screaming)

The mission's kinda spearheaded by Lupita Nyong'o here

in this magnificent green dress

that our costume designer 3D printed actually.

A lot of African symbolism here,

like Wakandan text is drawn in lines

and boxes as opposed to round shapes.

At the same time, Lupita looks fierce and like a warrior.

Different hairstyle than you see her in, too.

We had a big emphasis on Wakandans having natural hair.

There's a lot of motifs about femininity,

especially black femininity here in this scene.

It's now or never.

(speaks in foreign language)

We cut to Okoye and we see her in this

red dress, we accented it with gold

to bring out a little bit of the Wakandan,

and the gold is kind of a ranking system.

But the more important thing here is

that she's wearing this wig.

For the Dora, a big thing for them is

symbolism of their bald head.

When they become Dora Milaje they shave their heads,

something that's present in the comics

and something we really ran with in this film.

So for her, it's a dishonor for her

to have her cover her bald head.

But because she's on this mission,

she's gotta kinda look like she's fitting in

to the western world.

She has to hide in plain sight

with this elaborate, pretty good looking wig here.

You'll see nobody else in this

sequence is wearing the color red.

Nobody else in this sequence is wearing the color green.

Folks who are familiar with the concept of Pan-Africanism,

the Pan-African flag is red, black, and green.

So, when you see T'Challa, Nakia, and Okoye

in their covert looks, you see the colors

of the Pan-African flag.

It's now or never.

(speaks in foreign language)

Nakia's trying to go to interfere

with the transaction that's happening,

and she's yelling at her to stand down.

But she makes the mistake of yelling at her in Xhosa.

This represents the click right there, Xhosa.

She yells, Ehle!

Which is a Wakandan or Xhosa for stand down.

These South African goons that came with Klaue

actually hear that.

Hey.

[Ron] So, when she gets discovered,

she's happy to just let the Wakandan out.

(speaks in foreign language) Hey!

[Ron] Somebody touches Okoye,

that's the first thing that somebody does.

And that idea of how Wakandan's react

to being touched unwarranted,

this idea of not being in control

of your own body and having to be touched by

people who you don't feel like being touched by.

It also comes with being a woman as well.

Hey! (speaks in foreign language)

(man grunts) (thud)

(spear whizzes and chinks) (man groans)

You know, down here, that's T'Challa,

is somewhere about right there.

And Nakia is somewhere down here on this first floor.

In many ways, Danai is kinda isolated,

Okoye is isolated up here on this second floor.

We wanted to turn it on it's head,

'cause she's a really powerful warrior,

and this is when you kinda get to see her shine.

(man grunts) (thud)

(spear whizzes and chinks) (man groans)

(spear clanking) (squelching)

(loud thud) (man groans)

A big theme in this is tradition...

versus...

innovation.

So, we broke characters down.

Okoye is a traditionalist, so she fights

with a traditional weapon,

the African spear, even though it's made out of vibranium.

And she fights in a very traditional style,

it almost looks like dancing when she fights.

(spear whizzing) (thudding and groaning)

(men howling)

This is a moment that's been in the script

since the first draft.

This idea of Okoye, the traditionalist Wakandan,

just being tired of this wig.

She makes comments to Nakia that she doesn't

even wanna have it on in the first place.

So, as soon as the fight jumps off,

she finds a way to take it off.

She ends up throwing it on this guy's face,

and we see how he reacts to that.

(man grunts) (spear thuds)

(man whizzing through air)

(loud crash) (people gasping and screaming)

For the impact, we wanted to cut to another shot

of T'Challa showing that he still wasn't aware

that the fight had gotten that bad upstairs.

It wasn't a real person that was coming down in this,

this was actually a digi-double.

And we put a few CG chips in there too

to make the fall feel a little more violent.

You know, again you'll see the color story here

with Chad in black, the Black Panther.

Another bit of color story in the film,

this is one of our villains here,

and this is Ulysses Klaue, the color blue.

The color blue represented colonization.

(man whizzing through air)

(loud crash) (people gasping and screaming)

[Ron] So, now the fight's on.

(gun firing) And Klaue's shooting at Ross.

T'Challa kicks over this thing here to protect him.

This shot is all about setting up the different ways

that everybody's gonna be fighting here.

We have to set up that Chadwick,

playing T'Challa, is a super soldier.

So, this dude that he kicks

is rigged up to a wire, snatching him back.

Just to accentuate the fact that T'Challa here is

not your average bear, he's a super solider.

(people screaming) (grunting and thudding)

(gun firing) Now, Ross is shooting

with a gun and T'Challa is engaged

with several different people.

And now here, we get into the fun part, right?

Now Nakia has joined the fray.

We got Klaue still here, talking to his goons,

and he's trying to get to that case of diamonds.

Ross is somewhere over here shooting.

And now Nakia is in the mix.

Nakia fights completely different from

how Okoye fights, we really wanted differentiate that.

We talked about again, tradition...

versus innovation.

Lupita's character Nakia is an innovator.

What we wanted to do was give her a very

innovative fighting style.

She'll use any weapon, any thing

that she can get her hands on.

She fights dirty, she fights aggressive.

She's a spy who had to learn how to make do

with what she had.

In this film, you'll never see Okoye pick a gun up.

(Nakia grunts)

(man screams) (gun pops)

She slams this guy's head into this Craps table,

which was real fun for us to do.

We did get a few takes of that. (laughs)

We're just gonna pause on her heel right here.

Once again, femininity...

used, I'm just writing now, (stutters)

and it's not even legible. (laughs)

Weapon, right?

Just to re-turn the idea of femininity on it's head.

A lot of times you see Wakandas walking around

barefooted, it's a barefoot culture, sometimes

it's barefoot, sometimes it's sandals.

First thing she does after she slams

this goon's head into this here table,

is she's gonna use another weapon that she has,

she's gonna use that high heel.

She's gonna take that off and she's gonna drag that

right across another bad guy's face.

(people screaming) Boom!

And now this guy, right here,

this is another part of choreography.

We wanted everything to feel continuous,

we wanted every character to have their own time,

and that's when we start getting into our long takes.

So, this is kinda Lupita's take,

it'll get broken up by some punctuating cuts here.

Everything is fluid, but it's fluid in our own way.

It's aggressive, like look at this right here.

You got the contrast of beauty and aggression.

The film's all about contrast here.

You've got one of the most beautiful people in the world

making a face like, man, she's about to get it going.

You know what I mean? She's ready.

Can't teach that.

Now, she's gonna break this dude's shoulder here

and she's gonna take his weapon from him.

This right here is a very, very...

a very, very difficult shot to achieve

technically, it took us a lot of takes.

So, if you start here, the first frame

is gonna go from an over-the-shoulder on Lupita,

we had to do here is, we had to float a Movi up

on a cable rig.

Imagine the camera here and a big cable rig.

'Kay?

That we're sending it up.

There's no green screen here, you know?

This is all happening live and direct.

We're down here on the first floor, this is really

Lupita right here taking aim with a blank.

This is a CG explosion here on this light

to get the glass kind of flying.

She shoots these guys who are trying to shoot her.

As you can see, there's a little bit red right here,

that's Danai Gurira doing her choreography.

(people running and yelling) (gun popping)

Also, another thing is music here.

Our composer Ludwig Göransson did some beautiful music.

And this is where you hear the Dora cue,

it's a group of women in Senegal doing a yip,

like a choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo.

That kind of comes into play, whenever you hear

the Dora really getting into their fight.

And it's a big shift musically here,

as we get ready to send this camera up on this cable rig.

Once it arrives up here, we got a guy standing by

who actually picks it up and takes it.

(people screaming) (gun firing)

So, Danai's engaging these guys here,

and this is really where we're seeing her shine.

That music is going, she's takes this dude out here,

catches him there, see a little bit of CG

accentuation for that shocking mechanism there on the blade.

There's no doubles here in this footage that we just showed.

It's all Chad, all Lupita, all Andy Serkis, all Martin,

and all Miss Denai here.

I wish I could tell you the spear is real, it wasn't.

It was a rubber spear.

But this fall that this dude is gonna take

off of this balcony here after he gets shocked

by this spear, that was real fall.

That's really going from the second story

down onto pad here, took a lot of bravery there.

(man howling) (electric shocks)

(thud) (crashing and glass breaking)

This scene we shot very early in our shooting schedule.

It was something that we kind of bookmarked

and said, Look, if we can get this right,

it'll set the tone for the rest of the film.

I had a to scale model, 3D printed of this whole set

that sat on my desk the whole time I was in prep.

I had a little small scale, almost like action figures,

that I was able to plan everybody out.

You know, re-work the script to really

make sure that we were being descriptive on what levels

all of our Wakandas were at, what levels

the South African adversaries were at, where Ross was.

It was really fun to work out.

It's pretty stressful, a big expensive set.

But at the same time, when I would be in my office,

it kinda took me back to being a kid

playing with toys again.

So, it was really fun.