Coogler goes about things differently. “My experience is that most directors who lead with ego are not so secretly very insecure or self-conscious,” Morrison said. “Ryan’s comfortable in his own skin and confident in who he is, and that allows him to turn to his D.P. and ask what she thinks of the script, or ask the writer what he thinks of the cinematography.”

“For Ryan, it’s important to have a lot of different perspectives around the table, not just his,” said Beachler. She recalled a moment on “Black Panther” when a line gave her pause and Coogler suspended shooting the scene to discuss her concerns. “He took the time to make sure I felt good about it, and safe,” Beachler said. “And that does not happen on other sets.”

For Coogler, this approach is common sense. “The more angles you have when you’re making something, the more it helps the film cut through, in my opinion,” Coogler told me. “I think that’s why this is made for the audience, at the end of the day: Film is a collective experience.”

It’s been that way for Coogler ever since he grew up in the Bay Area, when his parents would throw movie-marathon house parties for him, his two brothers, and their cousins. “I was watching high-quality stuff at an early age,” Coogler said, crediting his mother, Joselyn, for helping him become a cinephile. “We used to joke and call her IMDb, because before IMDb even came out, she used to say, ‘You see that actress there in the back corner? She played this person in that TV show.’”

When Coogler speaks about the crucial people who have helped him develop as a filmmaker, many of them are women, including his wife, Zinzi, who weighs in on casting decisions, and a college teacher, Rosemary Graham, who encouraged Coogler to take up screenwriting and still reads many of his drafts. According to Jordan, his longtime friend and muse, giving female perspectives priority is a throughline that began in Coogler’s childhood and extends throughout his work.

“The strongest warriors in Wakanda are the women, and the smartest,” Jordan noted, likening that lineage to the matriarchies found in many African-American communities. “That’s how it is in our households and our culture, and that’s what our family dynamic is made out of.”