Written Interview: Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station”)

Anne Thompson (Indiewire) interviews Ryan Coogler, writer-director of the award-winning movie Fruitvale Station. Excerpts:

The film recreates the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, who at 22 years old was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer at the titular BART station on New Year’s Day, 2009. Michael B. Jordan (“The Wire”) and Octavia Spencer (“The Help”) are getting rave reviews; it’s a gut-wrenching tearjerker in the “Precious” tradition. (See new Michael B. Jordan featurette here.)

Coogler started out studying to be a doctor at the Bay Area’s St. Mary’s College on a football scholarship. He took one creative writing class, where his teacher told him he should write screenplays because his writing was so visual. He transferred to Sacramento State on another football scholarship, where he majored in finance, then attended USC grad school in film.

Anne Thompson: You were helped on this project by both Sundance and the San Francisco Film Society?

Ryan Coogler: The Sundance Labs reached out to me as I was writing the script. I had applied the year before with another project. They asked me to apply again, if I had something new. I applied to the screenwriting lab with “Fruitvale,” went up last January. It was a really great experience. They told me to meet with Michele Turnure-Salleo, who heads the great SFFS Filmmaker 360 program in the Bay Area. I wasn’t familiar with it. I’m from the East Bay, but was living in LA since film school at USC.

When did you discover you liked to write?

I used to write in school a lot, I always liked it, and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of “Twilight Zone.” I didn’t think about it. Before playing football, I didn’t fit in anywhere. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, which they spent on our education, to send us to catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early, I was young. So I’d come back to my hood and read.

Does Oscar’s death in ‘Fruitvale Station’ hit us so hard because he’s standing in for all the other folks who have needlessly lost their lives to racist violence?

I absolutely knew that he stands for that, without the movie, not just for being having his life lost in a violent way. I’m from Oakland, Richmond, and spent a lot of time in LA at film school. Violence is a reality for people like us, such a reality. It’s so unfortunate. I knew that his story would speak to that. I had a need to speak to things we deal with on a day-to-day basis. So few get our stories told by us. I knew I had an inherent responsibility to show things we struggle with every day, things that are good in our lives, the human relationships we have with people we love, with our kids. Because that is not often shown in the media, it often leads to issues where we are not seen as full human beings.

For the rest of the interview, go here.