‘Sinners' is back in IMAX. Fans have this Bay Area cinematographer to thank

San Francisco Chronicle​

15-05-2025

' Sinners,' Oakland auteur Ryan Coogler 's blues vs. vampires movie set in 1930s Mississippi, is such a success that it's been booked for a rare return to nine IMAX theaters nationwide this month.
'It's like you get to have fun all over again!' the film's director of photography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, enthused during a recent interview with the Chronicle ahead of the limited engagement that runs Thursday, May 15, through May 21.
As the first female cinematographer to shoot a feature with 65mm IMAX film cameras, she is largely responsible for the visually awesome good time. Durald Arkapaw and Coogler combined shots done in IMAX's boxy, vertical 1.43:1 aspect ratio with 2.76:1 widescreen footage captured by Ultra Panavision 70mm cameras.
'The film was shot with two different aspect ratios, and this is the first time ever that a film has been released combining these two,' Coogler said in a film format explainer video that went viral around the time of 'Sinners'' April 18 release. 'It was a pretty complicated process to shoot (but) we had a lot of fun.'
San Francisco's AMC Metreon 16 is the only theater in Bay Area fans can fully enjoy the frame shifts between the two formats projected from a 70mm IMAX film print. It's the optimum way to see every millimeter of what the filmmakers wanted to show you. That includes high-resolution dance numbers, gory killings, vast cottonfield vistas and two Michael B. Jordans, often in the same shot.
And that's along with a deeply personal artistry the cinematographer put in every frame.
Born in Oxnard (Ventura County), Durald Arkapaw moved to Hayward when she was 2 and later grew up in Danville. She attended film schools in Los Angeles and met fellow East Bay filmmaker Coogler after she shot some episodes of 'Loki,' the Marvel spin-off series that also starred East Bay native Rafael Casal of ' Blindspotting ' fame. Coogler later hired her to shoot the sequel to his own Marvel project, ' Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,' signaling the start of a beautiful collaboration.
'Whenever I do a film with Ryan, you're not only learning new film techniques,' said Durald Arkapow, who's also shot Gia Coppola 's ' Palo Alto ' and ' Showgirls ' and music videos for the rock band Haim, singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe and pop star Rihanna, who's 'Lift Me Up' she also directed. 'When we did 'Black Panther,' we shot underwater, which was a great feat.
'This one forces you to dive into your own ancestry and want to know more about where you came from,' added the cinematographer, who is of Filipino ancestry on her mother's side and New Orleans' Creole on her father's.
The filmmakers got so much out of their new IMAX equipment that they added scenes that hadn't been planned for the format during production. This resulted in the DP's favorite setup, the opening and near-end scenes when guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton) returns to his father's church after surviving a vampire attack.
'It makes so much sense to shoot that space in IMAX,' Durald Arkapaw said. 'It was such a powerful scene that, obviously, ended up bookending the movie. One of my favorite shots is the church door opening in IMAX.'
Probably the film's most talked-about sequence is the big dance number at the juke joint Jordan's twin gangsters Smoke and Stack open outside their rural hometown. It involved dozens of dancers intermingling with figures out of Black music history from African origins through hip-hop to Afrofuturist. All the while, the camera wove through the crowd before rising up and over them all, then out into the threatening night.
'It's a very emotional piece that a lot of people are responding to,' Durald Arkapaw acknowledged. 'We did three interior shots on Steadicam IMAX. Then we tip up to the roof, which is a VFX (CG enhanced) takeover; the plate of the roof burning was shot on our last day of photography. Then it tilts back down into a night exterior shot, a 50-foot MovieBird telescopic crane that pulls back on 100 feet of track, booms down and reveals the vampires from behind.'
Both film and social history guided the overall look of 'Sinners.' Exteriors were informed by Kodachrome slides taken by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and '40s. Underlit interiors hark back to classic horror movies.
'I tend to like darker shadows, people going in and out of light,' Durald Arkapow explained, 'shaping faces, shaping the space, not always showing everything. That creates tension, which is a beautiful thing for a story like this.'
And there was a personal factor to close-ups.
'I take being able to expose African American skin very seriously,' she said. 'It's a part of myself. Lighting different skin tones to have richness and a depth to them, it plays better in shadow sometimes.'
As for filming Smoke and Stack in the same shots, every old trick and some new ones went into twinning Jordan onscreen, from shooting the actor twice to inventing a 'halo rig' — 10 digital cameras in a ring perched on Jordan's shoulders — that captured his facial performance to digitally graft onto a double's head.
'When you're shooting in such a resolute format for such a big screen, you want it to feel real,' Durald Arkapaw notes. 'So it was very nice to come up with a system in order to showcase the twinning, whether it was a simple lock-off or over-the-shoulder, or if it required more complex moves. We had the proper team to execute it, and I feel as though you cannot see the effects in this film, which is a testament to all that work.'
So is Durald Arkapaw's prominence in the film's wider discussion. 'Sinners' has turned her into that rarest of Hollywood pros: a celebrity cinematographer.
'To have people contact me saying they love the work and emotionally reacted to it, that's really why I became a DP,' she said. 'It was rewarding enough just to shoot the film, but to have people respond in this way … especially girls. It's nice to be inspiring to people who were similar to me growing up, when there weren't many female cinematographers and I had to seek them out a bit more. With this out there for people to see, it will encourage more women to do the job as well.'