Beachler reveals that the team built two juke joints: One in Braithwaite, Louisiana, at the Plaquemine Parish, used for the exterior and interior shots showcasing the overgrown foliage and nearby water (“Which was filled with alligators, so there was already the feeling of something old and prehistoric in the environment,” she says); and another—once a sawmill, located on a former golf course at St. Bernard Parish—built onstage for other shots.Beachler and construction coordinator Erik Van Haaren envisioned a gutted, abandoned feel for the juke joint, so its exterior was purposefully dilapidated, with carpenters and scenic artists on set transforming surrounding trees to look weathered and worn by torching, sanding, staining, painting, and even chemically distressing the wood.A struggle with faith illustrated through subtle design details“You keep dancing with the devil, [and] one day, he’s gonna follow you home,” says Jedidiah (Saul Williams), preacher and father of protagonist Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) in the opening scene. Sammie, a young blues musician, is set to play at the grand opening of the juke joint hosted by Smoke and Stack, his cousins. But in doing so, he abandons his duties at his father’s church, signaling an act of defiance—at first glance, anyway. Beachler sought to convey Sammie’s complexities of faith through the church’s architecture. The design brief for the church all came from “putting myself in Jedidiah’s head as he, in my mind, was the architect of the Church,” Beachler says. “I imagined that it was built by Jedidiah, the Pastor, and the men of the congregation.”The church is based on Clarksdale’s Sunflower Plantation. The set itself was built at the Laurel Valley Plantation in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Beachler’s team drew inspiration from vernacular clapboard praise houses established by African Americans throughout the Delta. The main factors she weighed for the church were its size and material, all to tell a story of the character’s access—or lack thereof—to certain resources. Its exteriors (double wood entry doors and a small louvered window at the peak, shaped into an exaggerated triangular silhouette) were made out of rough cuts of sawn wood, also used in the juke joint and Sammie and Annie’s (Wunmi Mosaku) homes. “As the wood dried, it naturally added age to the paint and shrank a bit to leave small gaps in the walls and floors,” she says. Beams that supported the roof were shaped like “the Wakanda crossed arm gesture,” Beachler adds, a nod to Black Panther, another blockbuster on which Coogler, Jordan, and Beachler collaborated. The set designer paid specific attention to “the smallest of details” in the church, including “the distance of the studs being 33 inches apart—the age Jesus died, a signifier of the end,” she notes.A musical performance in the juke joint, where Sammie defies his father. Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures