Made for less than $1m, Coogler's first feature film is garnering early Oscars buzz for its riveting portrayal of Oscar Grant
When Ryan Coogler decided to make a film about the real-life story of a young black man killed by a white transit police officer he had modest expectations.
Coogler was an untried, first-time director. Few outside the black community in Oakland, California, had heard of – or cared about – his subject, Oscar Grant, gunned down on a train platform on new year's day 2009.
Hollywood, and by extension audiences, were assumed to have limited appetite for a rounded portrait of a small time ex-con who died as he lived, anonymous.
Yet Fruitvale Station, named after the station where Grant died, has this week burst into the box office top 10, powered by glowing reviews, word-of-mouth buzz and an anguished national debate over the Trayvon Martin case.
"I just wanted to raise awareness about this certain issue, about this person, Oscar," Coogler, 27, who also wrote the film, told the Guardian in an interview on Monday. "This reception … is a great achievement for the film-makers involved. I've been surprised at every step of the way of the process."
Coogler said he hoped moviegoers, regardless of colour or background, would relate in some way to Grant, played by Michael B Jordan, who made his name on The Wire.
"The most moving thing is to see it open in theatres. Our hope was to focus on the specifics of Oscar's life. I wanted people to see a little of themselves in Oscar even if they were outside of that community."
After a limited initial release Fruitvale Station opened across the US last weekend, showing in more than 1,000 theatres. Garlanded at Sundance and selected for Cannes, it is tipped for Academy Award glory.
Coogler's film arrives amid debate over racism, gun violence and the killing of young black men in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal earlier this month for shooting Martin, an unarmed teenager who was visiting his father in Florida.
There are parallels with Grant, a 22-year-old who was returning home after celebrating new year's eve in San Francisco when police detained him and several friends following a fight on a Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) train.
Grant was lying on his stomach, handcuffed, when an officer, Johannes Mehserle, shot him in the back. Mehserle said he intended to reach for a Taser and shot by mistake. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years.
The independent film, made for less than $1m, has triumphed critically and commercially during the so-called "summer of doom" for Hollywood blockbusters, with audiences ignoring many mega-budget productions.
What is the value of a young black man's life – a question that should have been settled a long time ago – had been posed anew with uncanny timing and force, said David Denby in the New Yorker.
It opens with real videophone footage of the shooting, then rewinds to a partially fictionalised account of the last 24 hours of a convicted felon with a quick temper who adores his mother, cheats on his girlfriend, dotes on their daughter and tries to go straight.
"One has the sense of a man being slowly, surely written back into being," wrote the Guardian's reviewer.
Coogler, who is from Oakland and studied film at the University of Southern California, said race could obscure another's humanity. This galvanised him to create a rounded character. "How somebody looks plays into how I feel about someone. If you're African American in this society oftentimes a lot of negative processes come from that, from just looking at you."
The film touched on the fact so many young black men died on US streets, he said. "Homicide through gun violence is the leading cause of death among young African American males in the United States. If people look a certain way they have a higher tendency of dying, of having their lives taken away."
The violence had multiple sources and did not always cross racial boundaries, he noted. "Black on black crime is a massive human rights issue that's going on in America," he said.
Coogler praised President Obama's recent speech about race and growing up a young black man, a subject of suspicion.
"Every human being feels their own reality and it's difficult to understand someone else's reality until you walk in their shoes. He was being very honest and open about his own particular reality. Sometimes when you do that you run the risk of turning people off, the people who haven't had that experience. So I think what he did was very honest and very brave."
Fruitvale Station, which stars Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer as Grant's mother, focused on the loss of a losing a loved one. "It's the human element. People are gone, they can't come back. I was really interested in looking at it from about the lives of the people most affected."
The Weinstein Company, which bought and distributed the film, said the release date was planned before the Zimmerman trial started.
Coogler and Jordan are due to team up again to make Creed, a spin-off of the Rocky saga in which the grandson of Apollo Creed, Rocky's rival and friend, takes up the gloves. Sylvester Stallone is due to reprise the role which made him a star in what would be the ageing pugilist's seventh cinema outing.
That film is in the early stages, said Coogler, who will write and direct. Like Fruitvale, it would be a very personal project, he said. "It's about an experience I had with someone very close to me. Rocky was my father's favourite movie."
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jul/30/ryan-coogler-fruitvale-station-race
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