Back in October, it was rumoured that Marvel is looking at director Ryan Coogler for its upcoming Phase Three movie Black Panther, and now Screen Rant has caught up with the filmmaker during his promotional tour for the Rocky spinoff Creed, and asked him his opinion on whether it’s important for Marvel to hire a black director for T’Challa’s solo debut.
“Yeah, I think it’s important,” states Coogler. “Perspective is so important in art. It’s an important thing. That’s not to say that you can’t work outside yourself. When I was coming up, I made movies about things that were close to me; I made movies about things that weren’t close to me. But I definitely think that it helps when you are close to a subject. Like, I was an athlete for most of my life before I was a filmmaker. And that helped to inform me when writing this script, when directing. Having had those types of experiences helped me inform this process. A lot of times with great movies, you find some part of the filmmaker’s life informing what they were doing. You look at Marty’s great movies. It’s like, man, you look at Mean Streets, that was his life. That was what he was dealing with. That was what he was coming up with.”
“If someone said, ‘What’s Marty Scorsese’s greatest movies,’ they’re going to generally be about the Italian American experience,” he continues. “People are going to throw out Goodfellas, they gonna throw out Mean Streets because it was something that was close to him. That’s not say that Departed isn’t a great movie. But the proximity…you could feel the director’s proximity to a movie like Goodfellas a little better because he grew up in that neighborhood. He grew up in Little Italy. That was his world. So I think that there is a potential for a greater truth when a filmmaker comes from a particular culture that they’re dealing with. That’s not to say that a filmmaker can’t work outside his or her cultural space. But I do believe that the opportunity for the film to have more nuance will come when you looking at filmmakers that bring a little bit of that from their personal experience.”
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“That’s why I think folks are opinionated about it,” he adds. “But if I was in a position where I’m making a movie about the first woman superhero that’s every going to get released all over the world, I would do everything in my power to find a woman to direct that movie out of the simple fact that I think it will give you a cultural perspective. I don’t think that’s wrong of a studio to do. I think it’s actually responsible. It’s responsible because it’s their job to make the truest, best film.”
Is Coogler right? Does Marvel need a black director for Black Panther? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below…
Black Panther is set for release on February 16th 2018, with Chadwick Boseman set to play the title role following his debut in next year’s Captain America: Civil War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=zo9wUtSEME8
Originally published November 23, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
