As the culture prepares for the next edition of the renowned “Black Panther” film, its director Ryan Coogler has opened up about wanting to walk away from it all following the untimely death of our forever Black Panther Chadwick Boseman.
“I was at a point when I was like, ‘I’m walking away from this business,” said the 36-year-old during an interview with Entertainment Weekly shared on Monday (Oct. 3). “I didn’t know if I could make another movie period [or] another ‘Black Panther’ movie, because it hurt a lot. I was like, ‘Man, how could I open myself to feeling like this again?'”
He says that after Boseman passed away following a battle with cancer in August 2020, he spent a lot of time replaying old footage between the two during the first film. “I was poring over a lot of our conversations that we had, towards what I realized was the end of his life,” Coogler continued. “I decided that it made more sense to keep going.”
For other people connected to the film like Lupita Nyong’o, who played Nakia, T’Challa’s lover in the film, she spoke about how filming Wakanda Forever helped them to face their grief and work towards healing.
“One of my favorite refrains of [Ryan’s] while we were filming was, ‘We’re making a big movie!'” she recalled. “He said it to pump us up when the day was getting long and arduous. If you know Ryan, you know he is a very modest human being, so it would tickle us to hear him say that. We would echo it all around the set to get refocused and re-energized.”
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The highly anticipated film is set to hit theaters on Nov. 11. Check out the emotional, jaw-dropping second trailer below.
