Hi, my name is Nia DaCosta, and I am the director of Candyman. You guys want to hear a scary story? No. Too bad. So, this scene is Troy and Brianna theyre siblings and Briannas boyfriend, Anthony who is an artist and Troys boyfriend. And theyre all together trying to have a nice dinner, but Troy insists on telling a ghost story about the neighborhood that Brianna and Anthony have just moved into. You see Yahya Abdul-Mateen II playing Anthony, Teyonah Parris playing Brianna, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett playing Troy, and Kyle Kaminsky playing Grady. [LAUGHTER] This is a story about a woman named Helen Lyle. She was a grad student a white grad student doing her thesis on the urban legends of Cabrini Green. For research, she came down to Cabrini a few times. You know, asking questions, taking pictures of graffiti, people. And then one day she just snaps. So, the shadow puppets came about when Jordan Peele, whos the co-writer and producer on the film, he came to me and he was like, I think we should do shadow puppets instead of shooting actual flashback scenes. And I was super into it because I did not want to shoot flashback scenes, and I also didnt want to cut in clips from the first movie. And so, we kind of made a decision, O.K., the flashbacks will be shadow puppetry. But then, as I was working with the shadow puppets and trying to figure out where they fit, it turned out they actually were just going to be much more useful. So thats how they ended up in this scene. We wanted it to be very specific to the teller. So every shadow puppet scene has a very specific style and point of view because it is someones way of thinking about the story. Its not necessarily the truth. Helen arrives with a sacrificial offering. [BABY CRYING] And thats why we wanted to also create that separation between fact and fiction, real and fake. And thats why you see the hands moving because its about these people creating a story puppeteering the way we think about these people. And for Troy, because hes trying to tell a scary story, hes being very hyperbolic. Hes also saying things that didnt happen. We made the style very jagged and scary and very much not the sympathetic character of Helen that we know and love from the original film. Is my ros still in the freezer? You dont want the moscato? Moscatos a dessert wine. [CHUCKLES]

More here:
'Candyman' | Anatomy of a Scene - The New York Times