Black Panther gave Marvel a fresh spin on superhero films. A predominantly black cast telling a story about colonialism and exploitation, an incredibly realised Afrofuturist setting in Wakanda, and an array of complex female characters who carry the narrative while also finding time to smack wrong 'uns about.

However, it turns out that director Ryan Coogler looked to two of the most iconic characters from cinema's past to come up with something which felt so new.

Speaking at his Q&A session at Cannes, Coogler said that Marvel told him Black Panther was to be "their James Bond".

"I hadn’t thought of that myself, but I liked it,” he admitted. So, he stuck on his copy of Octopussy and started making notes.

"We watched a bunch of Bond films, but that was early research. Once we realised the themes we wanted to explore, we started to watch different films," he said.

"A big one was we realised we were making a film about a guy who lives in this secretive country nobody really knows, he works with his family, his father dies, he has to step into this position of power, and it was like ‘Oh man, we’ve got to look at The Godfather.’ So once we pivoted and looked at the Godfather films, a lot of things opened up for us."

Yes, it's disappointing to hear someone as cool as Ryan Coogler talking about 'pivoting' to anything, but he's got more than enough credit in the bank at this point to get away with it. He was understandably quite bashful about telling people he wanted to go the full Coppola in a superhero film.

"You tell people you’re trying to make a superhero movie but it’s going to be like The Godfather, and I was worried about people thinking we were aiming too high."

Coogler also looked to Ron Fricke's documentaries Baraka and Samsara to work out how best to immerse an audience in an unfamiliar Wakandan landscape: "We would screen those with our whole art department and talk about how we wanted the areas in Wakanda to feel."

He also remembered how his wife forced him to go back to the comic books and rediscover how it made him feel as a child when the project threatened to overwhelm him.

"My wife is real cool – she made me go back to the comic book shop where I first found out what Black Panther was, and I went back there and bought a Panther book, and that reminded me of the awesomeness of it.

"I had to remind myself of that while things were getting heavy – you have to find that kid, go back in time, and tell him he would be directing Black Panther. My jaw would have hit the floor, my eyes would have lit up."