1. The Funeral Procession

we worked with a lot of consultants on the ways that people grieve in different African countries. We found not just grief but celebration and singing. I’ve lived in

New Orleans for 20 years, and I said to Ryan, “We’ve got jazz funerals. When people pass and you’re mourning them, it comes out in song, in dance, in brass band, in secondlining”—and, a lot of the time, through dressing in white.

North Triangle, where we have the procession, was built about 300 feet long by about 80 to 100 feet wide—about the size of a football field. All the buildings were built in full, as were the interiors for a few of them, on a giant back-lot set, one of the biggest I’ve ever done. I used a lot of history from the Meatpacking District in New York City. As Wakanda’s capital, Golden City, grew and the tribes united and different ones were coming in—much like New York— we treated it like a mixture of cultures that became residential. I love to build something so they can bust it apart and blow it up, but I’m still doing the work of creating this city and asking how it functions: North Triangle is the oldest district in Golden City. You really have to understand what things look like before and after, why people were moving there, what inspired them. All of those things feed into the design.

We decided that Danai Gurira’s character, Okoye, lived there. Before I started designing, I thought, Oh yeah, Danai’s from Zimbabwe.

I wanted her to come onto the set and feel that. We built her whole house. Danai’s tribe is the Korekore people, so we have some of those tribal patterns on one building across from hers. The flower stand— which is actually a Musgum hut—inside and outside, it has all the candy she would have eaten as a child. There’s little stuff like that everywhere.

When she arrived on set, she grabbed me and we just cried. Ryan’s like, “Okay, we need to shoot this scene. Are you done talking? Are you done catching up?” No, we’re not.