With one of the highest-grossing horrors of the year under his belt, Ryan Coogler recently revealed how he found inspiration in a Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM).
During his Sinners panel on Saturday at Deadline Contenders Film, the writer and director noted that 2001’s The Luck of the Irish stoked his fascination with Irish culture’s similarities to Black culture, inspiring the villainous Remmick (Jack O’Connell) in his Mississippi Delta-set vampire film.
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“That was our first introduction to some of the similarities in Irish folk music to, basically, our music,” he explained to Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. “There was a small Irish community in The Bay, and we would talk about it. That movie was kind of a touchpoint for us to jump off of, crazy enough. We’ve been fascinated with that culture in my family.”
Directed by Paul Hoen from a script by Andrew Price and Mark Edward Edens, The Luck of the Irish follows high school basketball star Kyle O’Reilly Johnson (Ryan Merriman), reluctant to embrace his Irish heritage, as he has to reclaim his family’s lucky gold coin from an evil leprechaun (Timothy Omundsun), or else they’ll transform into leprechauns themselves.
As a Contenders audience member noted that she worked on the Disney movie, Coogler said “God bless you,” noting: “There’s a lot of fans of you in Oakland, California, right now. We used to watch that movie like crazy.”
In Sinners, twin brothers Stack and Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) return to their Mississippi hometown in 1932 to open a juke joint, which quickly becomes a hunting ground for O’Connell’s Remmick.
“The film was a great opportunity,” said Coogler of the film. “It was also a big shoutout to Bram Stoker, who was Irish, and kind of gave us the first context around the concept of a vampire in popular culture. So, it just made a lot of sense to explore the character that way.
“He’s not Satan, but we saw him as a pre-colonial Irishman who had this massive backstory that we would kind of hint at and peel back like an onion,” he added.
Coogler praised “the great Jack O’Connell,” who gave a “beautiful performance” and “brought the memory of his father to the role, the same way that I brought the memory of my uncle. And it was a profound experience to see somebody take ownership of the film in the same way.”
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