Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is finally out now for everyone to see, and it’s just as incredible as the first. The run time is two hours and 41 minutes, and the cast is massive. How do you begin on a project of this scale? How long did the entire process take for your department?
Looking at the end result of it feels like the enormity of this project. Going into it is enormity. We lost our hero, and many of us poured into our art form. We all wanted to honor Chadwick [Boseman]’s life and also present an incredibly elevated art form to the world.
When you think about the inspiration, the passion, the purpose, the intention, it doesn’t feel enormous anymore. You start to divide it and say, “Who will I include in this journey? Who gets the aesthetic? What outsourcing can I use?”
Everything starts from an enormous number of artists that come together with drawings. We sit together, and we talk about the story. All of these artists come together with illustrations.
We’re evaluating and talking about what we like, talking about what doesn’t work, talking about story. After we lost our dear Chadwick, kind of Ryan Coogler became our hero. We needed him and Joe Robert Cole to bring us a script.
One thing he was very clear about was going to honor Chadwick, and it was going to examine grief in many forms.
