When you think of a film like Sinners, it’s hard not to pick up on the incredible level of detail used in every craft department. For costumes, writer-director Ryan Coogler tasked the legendary costume designer Ruth E. Carter with crafting the looks.
“The whole vision in mind is starting with the script,” says Carter. “Ryan Cooglers’ words are just a magical entry into the world that for me.” As someone who has history in the south herself, Carter says it immediately “brings up all kinds of images and all kinds of memories.”
While thinking about her Aunt Ramona and the other women in her life, Carter says you can’t help but connect with your roots for the work. “That is the macro view – it’s in your heart, it lives in your mind, it lives in your soul,” she says. “Someone like Annie, who is a root worker, she is a person who is a community hub. People during that time needed someone like her in the community because she was the healer and they didn’t go to the doctor.”
Wunmi Mosaku, who plays Annie in the film, says that watching Carter put together her outfit was like “watching an alchemist” at work. “Every time I stepped into your studio, Annie became more and more real to me, and she became more and more tangible.”
As Mosaku is speaking with Carter about her costume, it’s clear to see how much thought went into the history of every piece she wore. “We already know that with costume design, you have to know costume history,” says Carter, “but you also have to know what people were going through. You have to know what lives on the clothes, there’s all this representation in the clothing and for someone like Annie, we connect to what she needs to survive and how it lives in the clothing.”
Even though Annie is a practitioner of Hoodoo, Carter’s goal was to make sure she didn’t become defined by that. “I very much wanted to present a new vision of who this woman is,” she says. “We looked at these root workers in cinema… and how it’s represented. We’ve seen that, we’ve done that.”
“We were talking about a headtie at one point, almost like presenting this hoodoo queen,” says Mosaku. “But then when we took the head wrap off, it was like, Oh, this is who she is.”
“It was very important to not make her this saint, but to make her a spiritual force, a feminine woman, a mothering soul, but also independent,” says Carter. Her focus was on showing Annie, not her profession. “Let’s make her a real woman and make it about empowering the women in our lives, the strong women who nurtures the community and not such a mystical character that is so far away from us being able to relate to her.”
Click the video above to watch the full discussion.