One of director Ryan Coogler‘s favorite moments from filming the Black Panther movie is a surprisingly personal moment between a father and a son.
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Speaking at Vulture Fest LA alongside Ava DuVernay, the director of Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, Coogler described a moment of rehearsal on the set. The scene featured the film’s star, Chadwick Boseman who plays T’Challa, and John Kani, who plays T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka. Boseman and Kani were speaking to each other in the South African language of Xhosa, and something in that moment really struck the director.
“Realizing that we were going to have this film where a father and son talk to each other in this native African language in a superhero movie โ it hit me for a moment,” he said. “It was emotionally moving. That was a big one.”
Coogler went on to touch upon why representation in media is important, recalling how excited his own children were after seeing the first Black Panther footage.
“Their world is different from our world. These kids they are gonna save all of us,” he said. “We got to do our part to keep pushing things forward. To see a movie where somebody looks like me that is a king and knows their ancestry and has an army of incredible folks around them and who believe in them? I don’t know what that would have done for me when I was 10 years old.”
Black Panther will be the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie led by a person of color. That is a fitting distinction for the Black Panther movie since the character of Black Panther was the first black superhero to appear in mainstream American comics. The character was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and made his first appearance in Fantastic Four #52 in July 1966.
Boseman debuted in the role of Black Panther in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. T’Chaka died in that film, making T’Challa the new king of the hidden and technologically advanced African nation of Wakanda. This suggests that the scene Coogler is referencing from the Black Panther movie is a flashback.
Black Panther opens in theaters on February 16, 2018.
Thor: Ragnarok is now playing in theaters. Other upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movies include; Avengers: Infinity War on May 4, 2018, Ant-Man and the Wasp on July 6, 2018, Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming on July 5, 2019, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.
via Deadline