DETROIT — Growing up in the 1990s in Oakland, California, director Ryan Coogler was fueled by his city's magnetic hip-hop scene and artists such as Digital Underground, 2Pac and E-40.

But it was Bay Area heavy metal legends Metallica who helped provide a structure for his new movie "Sinners," the director says over a Zoom call earlier this month from Chicago.

"Sinners," opening Friday, stars Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as Smoke and Stack, twin brothers in Mississippi in the early 1930s. The movie takes on the history of blues music and mixes it with a supernatural story about a pack of bloodthirsty vampires, and Coogler says he had the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame metal outfit on his mind when he was laying out the story's rhythms and beats.

"I wanted the movie to have the simplicity — and simultaneously the profound nature — of a Delta blues song. But I wanted it to have the contrast, variation and the inevitability of a great Metallica song, like 'One,'" he says.

"It starts off with almost like an easy listening solo, you know what I'm saying? And then it just goes bat s--- insane, in a way you could have never seen coming — and at the same time, it felt like it was going there all along," says Coogler, of the signature song from the band's 1988 album, "...And Justice For All." "The movie's basically that."

It's a wild swing from the 38-year-old filmmaker, who made his debut with 2013's "Fruitvale Station" and has since become one of Hollywood's most celebrated directors. He directed "Black Panther" and its sequel — together, the two films grossed more than $2 billion at the global box office — and he's collaborated with Michael B. Jordan on each of his five films as a director.

Detroit-bred filmmaker Lawrence Lamont, who made his feature debut with this year's hit comedy "One of Them Days," says he's been following Coogler since "Fruitvale Station," and now puts him on his list of Film Gods.

"To me, he's a pioneer for Black filmmakers," says Lamont, who sees Coogler as an event filmmaker on name alone, like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. "He's a pioneer for filmmaking in general, but it's rare that we see someone who is a success be so real, so humble and so kind, and so authentic to himself. That's a huge inspiration.

"He shows that someone, being from where I'm from, can make it," Lamont says. "That's one of the big reasons why I'm a filmmaker, so people can see me and say, 'I'm going to keep going.' In a way, Ryan's success made me keep going, and I want to watch his work forever."

"Sinners," which co-stars Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Jack O'Connell, Omar Benson Miller and newcomer Miles Caton, is a horror movie with historical context, a genre movie with elevated ambition.

Coogler got to thinking about making a movie orbiting the blues after the death of his uncle James, who was born and raised in Mississippi and schooled Coogler in the history of the blues from a young age. It wasn't until his death in 2015 — Coogler was working on "Creed" at the time — that he was able to truly open his ears to the music his uncle loved so dearly.

"The blues didn't feel like it belonged to me. It felt like it belonged to older Black people and, frankly, white people," Coogler says, citing "The Blues Brothers" as an example. "It took him passing away and me listening to that music, with the intention of wanting to soothe my grief, that gave me a chance to listen to it with a more artistically mature ear, and it let me understand the greatness of it."

Coogler now calls the blues "our country's greatest contribution to global culture," and he sees the strains of it everywhere. It's what led to the film's epic scale, he says.

The blues was for his uncle, the horror was for himself. Coogler has always been a fan of horror movies and horror stories — he reread Stephen King's "Salem's Lot" around the time of his uncle's death, he says — and they've always provided a jolt, even when they were too much to handle. "Back when I was a kid, 'Candyman,' bro? I couldn't watch it. I still have not seen all of it," he says.

Coogler, who is married and has two children with his wife, Zinzi Evans, first heard Metallica when he was playing college football at Saint Mary's College of California. His teammates were racially mixed, he says — Black players from the Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles, and white players from California's Central Valley — and they would trade off days playing music in the weight room. That's where he fell in love with rock music in general, he says, but Metallica's "One" struck a particular chord.

Metallica was more than just a source of inspiration for "Sinners"; the band's drummer, Lars Ulrich, plays on the score by Ludwig Göransson, the Swedish composer who has worked with Coogler on all of his films, including his Oscar-winning "Black Panther" score. (Göransson also won an Oscar for scoring "Oppenheimer.") The pair met while they were students at USC film school in the late '00s, after an injury sidelined Coogler's college football career.

"Metallica has kind of changed his life," Coogler says of Göransson, who is also an executive producer on "Sinners," "and he was taught the guitar at the age of 5, because his father is such a Delta blues fan. His father wanted to name him Albert, after Albert King. So me and him were kind of destined to link up, and to have the opportunity to make this film about the Delta blues, but simultaneously all the music that's related to it, and all the music it brought about."

Coogler took his mix of influences — from John Carpenter on the filmmaking side to Alice in Chains on the music side, especially songs like "Would?" and "Don't Follow" — and balled them into a sprawling and highly personal American original without walls or barriers.

"In researching the blues, you realize that genre, as a concept, is kind of a racist invention. When music started becoming commerce, it was a racially volatile time, and if a Black person sang the same song a white person sang, it would make them different genres, just because segregation was law," Coogler says. "So I wanted to make a film that kind of flies in the face of that, and make a film where Black people and white people sing the same songs."

'Sinners'

MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence, sexual content and language)

Running time: 2:17

How to watch: In theaters April 18

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