Editor Michael P. Shawver worried at one point about how he could juggle all the elements of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — it’s a gangster drama, a musical, a supernatural horror story, and a historic love story. What he finally realized is that it’s all anchored in very real human experience.
“It really comes down to the characters,” Shawver says. “Because if you can put the viewer in their shoes and create an engaging relationship and allow the audience to like the characters but attribute their own hopes and fears to them, that is the vessel, that’s the throughline.”
That philosophy guided every editorial decision. For Shawver, editing wasn’t about controlling genre; it was about establishing emotional perspective. The editor, he says, is ultimately “the first audience,” and his job is to ensure that every reaction lands truthfully.
“I know a jump scare’s working if I scare myself every single time I watch it,” says Shawver, who is nominated for an Oscar for his editing of Sinners. “If it’s only half the time, then it may not be right yet. It’s the same thing with laughing or crying. It’s that feeling, that elevation, that you want to feel at certain parts of the movie.”
Nowhere was that instinct more important than in shaping the film’s pacing. With so many tonal shifts, from intimate conversations to explosive confrontations, Shawver had to create a rhythm that felt organic. So he watched everything and prioritized emotional authenticity above all else.
“If something makes me laugh, if something makes me sad, if something is exciting to me, my job is to take those things and translate them into the cut,” he says.
Of course, instinct only goes so far, so Shawver relied heavily on test screenings for feedback and to read the energy in the room.
“It’s really important for filmmakers to sit in those screenings because you can feel it,” he says. “You can feel the lulls. You can see when people get up and go to the bathroom, and you can hear when they talk back to the screen. You don’t want people to talk in your movie, but if they’re yelling at your character not to walk up to that door, you’re winning the game.”
Editor Michael P. Shawver on Keeping the Sinners Audience Entranced
The film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) as they return home in 1932 to racially polarized Clarksdale, Mississippi to open a juke joint. Its structure changed dynamically in the edit — especially when Shawver and Coogler worked together to change the opening, which at one point was a vampire attack.
“When we were starting it with vampires, we were saying, ‘Hey, it’s a vampire movie,’” Shawver explains. “And then when you spend an hour getting the gang together and learning about interpersonal relationships, the audience is just waiting for the vampires to come back.”
Instead, the film opens with Sammie (Miles Caton), the young musician whose journey becomes the audience’s emotional entry point. That shift reframed the entire film.
Editing Smoke and Stack presented tremendous challenges. Because Jordan plays both characters, Shawver’s job wasn’t just technical, it was psychological.
“If an audience member sits there and says, ‘That’s two Michael B. Jordans,’ we lost them,” he
says. “You have to believe these are twins and share a life experience, but that they’re different
enough that you can distinguish between them.”
Working with carefully planned takes, Shawver would mix and match performances, sometimes
speeding up or slowing down one side of a conversation to preserve the illusion. Just as
importantly, he shaped each brother’s emotional rhythm, reinforcing their subtle differences in
how they carried trauma and moved through the world.
Even accidental moments became essential. In one scene, actor Omar Benson Miller reset between takes. The gesture was never intended for the final film, but Shawver added it in and it started getting a laugh in the movie theatre. To him, those discoveries are what editing is all about.
By the end of Sinners, what could have been a wild collision of genres instead feels like a singular, immersive experience. That cohesion didn’t come from simplifying the film, but from embracing its emotional complexity and trusting the audience to follow.
“You want to make things that people want to revisit,” Shawver says. “Those are the forever movies. Those are the unique experiences that people had in the theater that keep them going back.”
Main image: Michael B. Jordan as Stack and Smoke in Sinners. Warner Bros.