THE POWER OF PANTHER

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler and Chadwick Boseman met with Variety on a secluded road in Griffith Park for an interview about making the long-awaited Disney action adventure, in theaters on Feb. 16. The 31-year-old director of “Fruitvale Station” and the “Rocky” sequel “Creed,” says there is an overarching message in his films. “For me, in retrospect, I realized a lot of what I deal with as an artist is with themes of identity,” the director says. “I think it’s something common among African-Americans. For us, we’ve got a strange circumstance in terms of our view of ourselves.” Coogler couldn’t step behind the camera and fire off “ACTION!” until he made a pilgrimage to Africa, the first time he visited the continent. “I have to go if I’m making this movie,” Coogler says. “I’m not qualified just because I look like this.” When asked if a white director could have made “Black Panther,” Boseman hesitates. Well, is it possible for them to make it? It could be, yes. Would they have his perspective? Probably not. It wouldn’t be nuanced in the same way because they wouldn’t have the same conflict. They don’t have the African-American conflict that exists: Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you have an ancestry that is very hard to trace.” Adds Coogler: “I tend to like movies where the filmmaker has a personal connection to the subject matter. I don’t know if you could find a group of films that deal with the Italian-American organized crime better than ‘Godfather 1,’ ‘Godfather 2,’ ‘Mean Streets’ and ‘Goodfellas.’ Show me a movie about Brooklyn better than ‘Do the Right Thing.’” Boseman had to enter a boot camp to understand the character physically and emotionally. He even took a DNA test to learn about his own origins “One of the key factors was me getting a sense of my background,” he says. Not only did he work with a dialect coach, Boseman spent as many as five hours a day in the gym. He also had to stick to a special diet. “At first, I was eating a lot of meat,” he says. “And then I felt it was too much for the amount of energy we needed to expend every day.” He wasn’t feeling agile. “So my diet became more vegetarian as we went along.” Boseman doesn’t want to speculate about other installments either. At least not yet. “I’m enjoying this moment,” he says. “If we start talking about sequels — if we do four of them, two of them, three of them — I just want them all to be special like this one. Read more of this interview in Variety Magazine.