BlackPantherWakandaForever editor breaks down cut scenes, how the BlackPanther team honored Chadwick Boseman, and the importance of exploring Shuri's perspective in the film:
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever wraps up MCU's Phase Four, simultaneously introducing new corners and characters to the universe while honoring the memory of Chadwick Boseman. The highly anticipated sequel follows Shuri, Ramonda, Okoye, and Nakia as they mourn T'Challa along with the entirety of Wakanda. A new threat to Wakanda arises, meanwhile, when Namor and Talokan pull the vibranium-rich country into a secret war against their hidden underwater kingdom.
There are a good amount of similarities, in terms of what we had to do in building a world. In the first movie, we had to build Wakanda. For the second one, we had to build Talokan and show even more of Wakanda. Ryan is unbelievable when it comes to research. He's always learning, he's always studying, and we're always trying to get better. We come from a place of not knowing; we don't go in it knowing all the answers.
Those things are actually what cause a lot of the big action scenes, as opposed to people responding to an event or an antagonist. I don't like to use the word villain; I like antagonist better, because the antagonist is just somebody who tests the protagonist. That's sort of how we handle Killmonger and handle Namor. They're right about a lot of things; they just go about it the wrong way. Obviously, the lessons we learn with Killmonger [helped].
Then the other thing is, the end of the movie and how you feel at the end changes based on what comes before every time we watch the movie. When we go into Shuri's head at the end, and she sees that shared trauma, that helped us hone in on what was truly necessary for Talokan, because that Talokan scene was at least three times as long when we first came up with it. We were working on it early in pre-production, trying to make it work. Then you just keep watching the movie.
Then I was like, "What if we do something crazy and fade Shuri's face into the Chadwick logo, so the moment she goes away, he comes up?" Then we take the concept that Ramonda talks about to her on the riverbank before they meet Namor, about how she felt him with his hand on her shoulder like the breeze in the air. We took a wind sound and put it over the logo so that you watch that and think, "Oh, this is a moment of silence.
When you do it like that, you care about the people around you and support them. If someone's having a bad day? "Take off, go home, go see your kids, do whatever." That kind of thing. We all have kids now, and my son was two during the first one. He didn't have any kids at that point; now he's got two kids. My son's six, and he's jumping on Zoom, and so is his daughter. “Let me see blue people, let me see blue people.” You know what I mean? We embrace where we are.
I would tell Ryan sometimes, "Look, I understand that point. But for me and for the rest of the world, maybe we keep this line in because it helps us grieve for him." There's a really interesting thing with movies where the more specific you make something, the more universal it becomes. Honing in on Shuri's story, her loss and her family, allows the world to grieve for Chad and to come out the other side feeling like, "Okay, we can move on and move forward.
Obviously, there are scenes wholesale that we had to lose just for time. There are trims, and there are always lines cut out. One of the bigger things that we lost, which helped the movie pacing-wise but [hurt] some of the emotional connection and resonance, was when Shuri and Riri are underwater. There was actually a subplot where they helped Namor design something for his people. He was still deliberating whether to kill Riri or not, and to buy time, Shuri was like, "Hey, we can help you.
I'd say, wholesale, there's a scene that was taken out. I don't think Marvel would be mad at me saying this because there was a shot in the first teaser from this scene. There was a scene where Okoye, after she gets fired, tries to go get Shuri herself undercover at night. She goes to try to get on a ship, and the Dora Milaje stop her. They point the spears, and she's ready to fight them for Shuri. It was in Wakanda at night outside, but it was really tense.
On the first one, there's a big learning curve that you could do anything you want as long as you have the time. That's the other thing too, being involved early and having input early lets you solve the problems, but it's also going to go through 100 different iterations. You can get ahead of that and have enough time when you actually find what that piece is.
This is, obviously, a very unique movie. We are walking this line that has almost never had to be walked before between reality and fantasy. We needed to make sure this movie was what it was, and there was never any pressure to connect the major universe.
We very much found the moments where it was pertinent for her story to bring it up. When her mom's pushing her to make another heart-shaped herb, she's like, "I wasn't doing it for the Panther. I was doing it to save my brother." When she talks to Namor on the stairs, when he's like, "Only the most broken people make the best leaders," and she's like, "I didn't understand why I was given all these gifts and I couldn't save my brother.
With these great minds on the same page and focused on the same thing, we were able to make a credit sequence that feels like it's still part of the movie. It's even more shocking, because you're used to seeing mid-credit scenes that happen in a different part of the world or a different time or whatever. But to go right back to where you were and see the little out-of-focus kid walking by with his mom? Once we did that, we were like, "Yeah, this is the movie right here.
For editing, you need moments. You have an extra shot of them diving in and seeing them change, and you have an extra shot in the third act of them coming out of the water or in the flood. You're seeing that transition, but you don't want to point to things and distract people with information. You want to let the audience discover what they can.
Now, there's a line that we added later when they're in the garage. Shuri looks at Rri and what she's working on, and she goes, "What is this? Is this Stark tech?" We added the, "Is this Stark tech?" Because, we wanted to link to that love for Stark and Iron Man. Then, when the cops bust in right before the car chase, they go, "Oh, shit, she's got an Iron Man suit." It's subversive, and it's threaded into the world in an experiential way.
Mike Shawver: I think on the surface, Killmonger said it. He goes, "You chose me." The herb baths, all that stuff, reflects what's in your heart and not what you want on the surface. There are levels to it, and there's a lot of attention put into the misdirect. You think it's going to be Ramonda, and then it's not. We have Nakia say, "Ramonda," while she's praying, then we have the flashes of Ramonda and Shuri together.
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