Sev Ohanian on Producing “Sinners”, Working With Ryan Coogler, and How He Got His Start in Hollywood 🎬

Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, is a genre-blending vampire thriller mashup set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta that mixes Southern Gothic horror, blues music, Irish folk music, and historical drama. The story follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack — both played by Michael B. Jordan (possibly for budgetary reasons) who return home hoping to start fresh by opening a juke joint. The film has generated major buzz for its ambitious mix of vampire horror, music, folklore, and social commentary, Sinners also stars the sinful Hailee Steinfeld and Delroy Lindo.

Producer, Sev Ohanian, who also worked with Coogler on Fruitvale Station, discusses the biggest challenges in making the film and leaning into his American Armenian background to get his start in the film industry.

Sinners gets so much right, even when it gets so much wrong. We were dealing with voodoo culture, blues culture, and the unique world of the Mississippi Delta — all of it was created for this film.  Speaking of all those different cultures, we’re big believers in bringing on consultants. We had a voodoo consultant, a blues consultant, and a Mississippi economic consultant who advised us on details like how large the back should be when buying the juke box and other nuances. At one point, Warner Brothers’ legal team became exasperated with us, asking, “How many consultants do you need?” We later learned that, in Warner Brothers’ history, our film had more consultants than any previous productions.

But the biggest challenge by far was what we called the “surreal montage.” That middle sequence was a massive undertaking.

Sev flashes back to filming on Fruitvale Station and the challenges of needing to film at the BART station for three full days. It was a brutal shoot. As we rehearsed, we kept thinking how much we looked forward to the day when we’d make studio movies and not have to do this again.

Fast forward to Sinners. The surreal montage in Sinners was an almost impossible sequence to pull off. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the IMAX cameras could barely hold enough film because the sequence was so long. Even the steadicam operator struggled, but we found creative ways to work around the limitations. We used visual effects, and everyone contributed to making this sequence possible. But timing it was the hardest part.

We needed to figure out how to rehearse everyone while building the stages. Someone pulled out the blue tape again, and we marked the empty soundstage with tape, then ran the entire cast, crew, choreographers, and musicians through the sequence, just like with the Fruitvale Station BART shoot. I remember having an out-of-body experience, thinking, “Wow, we’re back to this thing again.”

And it worked. Ryan Coogler had an incredible vision. I will always marvel that we had Ludwig Göransson our composer and executive producer with us during drills. Every time we realized the music was too slow in a section and needed to speed up, Ludwig would put on his headphones, make quick adjustments, and suddenly the speakers would play something new. We would adapt on the spot. As challenging as the film was, that montage felt like the final exam of producing, and I hope we passed with an A.

Sev Ohanian. Photo by Jordan Strauss

On Location and Braving the Elements

I’m often asked about the site where the juke joint was built. My understanding is it used to be a fancy golf course, until Hurricane Katrina hit. Afterward, it was overrun by water moccasins (cottontail snakes) and alligators. All of that had to be cleared to make it inhabitable.

We built our juke set on a soundstage for the interiors, but all the exterior shots were deep in the swamps, as we called them.

Hannah Beachler, our incredible production designer, built this beautiful set with a real vision. However, every day we dealt with thousands of mosquitoes. All 4063 of them. The crew was constantly suffering — production meetings were miserable.

One day, I heard over the walkie, “Hey guys, we got a gator,” and I thought, “Is that some kind of equipment I don’t know about?” But it was a real alligator. Like, “Oh, yeah, gator bigger.” I’m like, “Oh, like, is that those little tractor thingies?”

Luckily, no one got eaten, and I learned something about how you deal with alligators on set — something they never taught me in film school. Essentially, the animal wranglers would “arrest” the gator, using handcuffs for their tiny feet and something to wrap around their snout. There were several times when our actors had to be in the water, so we built a barricade for safety.

Getting Started: My Path to Film

I’m an Armenian American, not a child of immigrants, as is common in our community, I wasn’t encouraged to go into film — doctor or lawyer was preferred. While finishing high school, I started shooting videos with my dad’s mini-DV camera, the one we used for family vacations. I shot a video of my friend acting like an Armenian dad, yelling at his son about crashing the car — a semi-autobiographical sketch.

Today that would be a TikTok, but this was 2007, so I uploaded it to YouTube for my twenty friends. The video was ultra low-budget — the camera shakes because I’m laughing — but to my shock, it went viral in the global Armenian community. If you have Armenian friends, they’ve probably seen it and quoted it. I made a sequel about an Armenian guy picking up his date and insisting on meeting her parents — again, my friends played all the parts. That video went even more viral.

With encouragement, I thought, “Why not make a feature film?” I spent $800, wrote, directed, shot, and produced the movie — did everything except makeup. When the makeup artist quit, I did that too (badly). I got my high school to let me screen the film, bringing my own projector and a screen my mom sewed from fabric. My dad built the scaffolding. Thousands of Armenian Americans came to see it, week after week. I made money, but more importantly, people clapped and cheered during the movie, not just at the end.

That’s when I realized I was meant to pursue film, so I went to USC film school. There, I was embarrassed to show that first movie — my friends wore fake boobs, it was in Armenian, and I thought it was less than the work of my peers. One student asked to see it — Ryan Coogler. I was nervous; he’s not Armenian, would he get it? But he did. He said, “That’s my dad. That’s my uncle. That’s my aunt.” It was an early lesson for me: when you tell honest stories about your own culture, you connect with people across cultures. And that’s something I’ve carried with me into every project since.

by Staff Writer

From our in-house editorial team.