- Talk to me. Look, you know,
on a serious note, is there a moment?
Are there-
I would imagine there's more than one moment,
with Chadwick's passing,
where you ask yourself the question before tackling this,
or even ask [Kevin] Feige and say,
"You know what, this might not be right for me.
The emotional toll for me, all of this.
Maybe I need to bow out of it."
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would say, in the days following the news,
it was a lot of that.
And thankfully, I was given some space.
After a lot of reflection, you know,
those feelings didn't ever really come back again.
'Cause I think the way that Chad lived,
specifically those last years of his life,
it didn't make any sense to stop
because we were hurting.
Because he did so much while he was hurting, you know?
- [Josh] Congratulations, man, on the film.
This is an astonishing achievement.
It's entertaining and emotional,
as all your work has been,
but maybe this one the most so, thus far.
So, big congrats.
- Thanks so much.
- Let's talk a little bit about
just the bar for a film like this.
Because look, the first 'Black Panther,'
the mantra was, it became more than a movie.
It was a movement.
And that's a high bar to reach for any movie.
And then there are all the other factors
that go into something like this.
What's your own metric for success on 'Wakanda Forever'?
- I don't know if I had one
while we were making it.
If anything, it was
our own instincts and our own tastes
while we were with our filmmaking family.
It was a very collaborative process.
This was a movie that almost forced collaboration,
if that makes sense.
Like with us exploring other cultures and,
you know, it's seven languages spoken in this film.
So it would be, you know,
it would be whole scenes in a language
that I didn't speak,
that nobody on set spoke except for our cultural consultant
that would be there, or our linguistic consultant.
So it was a film where we were constantly
checking our own work
and going to our partners and saying,
"Hey, is this working?
What do you think?
What do you think about this?"
Or, "Hey, man, I'm having a tough time today,
you know, 'cause of X, Y, and Z,
I might need help picking up the slack."
It was a true group effort.
So I would say our metric of success through making it
was our own taste, you know, our own instincts.
- Yeah. Well, the good thing is
you surround yourself with the best
and the best is gonna come out of it.
So clearly that's what you did.
- That's true, man.
It was a lot of days where I felt like
I was the dumbest person on set, you know?
Which is a good thing when you're a director.
- Hey, you're just, you're the ring master.
You gotta know who to ask the right questions to, right?
You mentioned early on about sort of
expanding the world in different cultures, etc.
Like look, you could have just spent the entire time
in Wakanda and we would've been good,
but you've created this whole -
bringing in Tenoch [Huerta] and Namor is amazing, and look,
you set the bar again.
Killmonger, iconic villain.
Iconic villain from the first one.
But what you have in Namor, which is,
maybe outside of the Marvel die-hards,
maybe most people aren't gonna be familiar with him.
And I'm a Marvel fan, and like,
that's a character that's tough to pull off
and make credible and resonant and real,
and you did it.
Can you talk to me about what the approaches
to making a character like Namor
charismatic and even relatable,
even though he's your antagonist?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I could talk about that.
We read a lot of Namor books
and I was familiar with the character.
Always liked the character,
he's a character that you either love to love
or you love to hate, you know?
And there's something that's relatable
and enviable about him.
Like that he's got a few core things
that are Namor things.
He's got dark hair.
He walks around in his underwear.
He has wings on his feet.
He's very strong.
He's very arrogant.
He's charismatic, you know.
He likes to hit on other people's wives, you know?
He's very dangerous.
All of those things.
He's a child of two worlds,
so doesn't really totally fit in in either one
and wears that as a chip on his shoulder.
And he's also extremely xenophobic.
It's kind of like
there's Atlantis and then there's everybody else.
So those are the key principles
that I felt like we had to adapt.
We couldn't change those things
about him and bringing him to life,
but this had to be a character
that was organic to 'Black Panther,' you know what I mean?
It had to be a character that was organic to the themes
that made that movie what it was.
And it also needed to exist
in the pantheon of other films.
I really liked 'Aquaman.'
I like Disney's 'Atlantis,'
the cartoon that came out when we were younger,
like I love those films.
So I want to give the audience something
that's different from those things,
you know what I mean?
In a perfect world, when we were making it,
it's like, OK, yeah, you could watch this,
and then if you wanted to go watch those other movies
and not feel like either one of 'em
was taking away from the other.
They'll feel like different things.
So often because we do come from,
we are here in the States raised in a society
that has a Western bent,
a lot of the myths that we pull from
that are common knowledge are Western myths.
So Plato's Atlantis is the one that we know,
that's the one that gets the most run in our fiction.
But there are a lot of other examples around the world
of a similar story of a continent that sank
or people that went into the water and were lost
and maybe they're still there, you know?
Or spirits that are down in the water.
That's a human thing that Greco-Roman culture
doesn't claim ownership of exclusively.
So once we unlocked ourselves from that,
we were able to kind of look at it from like,
"Yo, what would make sense for us?"
Then that was when we looked to the Americas,
another place that had a deep history of colonization,
but also had some key differences from
what happened there than what happened on the continent.
And once we did that,
it started to make a whole lot of sense.
- One of the many aspects
that is very enjoyable about the film,
like in the first one, again,
you set the bar so high with the soundtrack.
So can I ask you a little bit
about getting Rihanna involved?
Because look,
it's tough to get new music out of Rihanna.
So what's the,
do you have the magic touch?
- No, no. - The magic number?
Was it much of a struggle? What?
- Nah, nah, it's not,
it wasn't a magic touch,
and I wouldn't call it necessarily a struggle either.
We had a benefit of having incredible talent on our cache,
incredible talent on our crew.
The great Ludwig Göransson is not only a film composer,
he's also a hit record producer,
very well respected in that industry as well.
So I think that we had a lot of things going for us
and it was more, with Rihanna,
I think it was just more about timing
and what she personally was motivated to do.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I don't think -
if she didn't feel compelled to do something,
I don't think I could convince her.
- What's that moment like
when you get the soundtrack,
when you get the song, the song from her.
- It's overwhelming, man.
It's overwhelming.
And that song is kind of like a movie in a way,
like in how it came together.
It took many years.
Ludwig pieced it, pieced the beat together
from music that he had composed on different continents
at different times in his life.
He asked me to write some words
that would become the chorus.
And I was thinking about Chad,
I was thinking about my own life
and how it changed since the last film, personally.
I think that speaks to kind of why the song
feels like a lullaby, you know?
That was kind of how I saw it.
Like a lullaby that could go both ways.
And we got to work with the -
we got to go to Nigeria
and work with the great Tems.
And she opened herself up to it
and gave us some words,
some incredible words that were
just heartfelt from her soul.
And Rihanna brought it home.
But that song touched a lot of people,
just like in making it.
And when she got done playing it for me, she said,
"Y'all was trying to honor his family.
I was trying to honor him," him being Chad.
So if anybody convinced her, it was him.
- One thing I want to hit, look,
the De Niro to your Scorsese,
Michael B. [Jordan] has just made his directing debut.
'Creed' is close to your heart, too.
I know you're a producer,
or a key part of that.
But blown away by the trailer.
What Jonathan Majors is bringing
looks really special.
- If you like the trailer,
you're gonna love the movie.
- What do you think of what Michael B.
did as a director, first time out?
- It's fantastic.
He did a fantastic job.
Thoroughly impressed.
I called him the first time I saw the director's cut.
I'm just proud of everybody involved, man.
We helped produce it, my company at Proximity.
There's a lot of cultural representation in it.
I think the young actress who plays Amara Creed
is gonna knock people out.
Young, deaf actress.
And like this film,
it has a lot of different languages in it.
It feels like a worldly film
with ASL and Spanish, in addition to English.
I think Mike and Majors's work,
along with Tessa [Thompson] and Phylicia [Rashad]
and Wood Harris.
But Mike and Jonathan's work,
it's just astounding, man.
You watch some of those scenes
and you kind of have a lump in your throat the whole time.
- I'll let you go on this, man.
You're just about finishing the first decade
of your feature film directing career.
And it's remarkable to look at.
You're four for four, as far as I'm concerned.
- Ah, that's crazy.
- But look ahead for me for a second,
because it strikes me, you have your pick.
Like, you could do franchise films the rest of your life,
but my guess is, your interests...
Look at 'Fruitvale [Station],' look at 'Creed.'
I mean, yes, 'Creed' is a franchise movie,
but it's a grounded emotional movie,
and so are the 'Black Panther' movies.
What's the mantra to yourself going forward?
What do the next 10 years look like?
- Man, I'll be honest with you, man, I'm not sure.
I'm just grateful, man.
Grateful to be in this position,
grateful to have had the opportunities
to make the films that I've had,
and grateful to be here now, man.
I'm just happy to have this job, bro.
To be honest with you.
'Cause like you said,
I've been doing it for 10 years,
but there was a lot of years when I wasn't doing it.
A lot of years when I was making short films,
begging people to watch 'em,
or sending them to festivals and getting denied.
That part of my life isn't publicized,
but it's very real.
It's still very close to me.
And what I'll say is,
whatever I'll do professionally going forth,
I'm gonna still hold on to this feeling,
you know what I mean?
The feeling of graciousness and gratefulness
to be doing this thing
and to have the ability to make things
that will get out there for people to see.