At the tender age of 27, Fruitvale Station writer/director Ryan Coogler is just three months younger than Oscar Grant would have been, had Grant not been shot and killed by a BART cop early New Year’s morning back in 2009.
In a case that roiled the San Francisco Bay area, the 22-year old Grant, who was unarmed and already handcuffed by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police after an altercation on the train, was shot in the back and killed by officer Johannes Mehserle, who later claimed to have been reaching for his Taser before getting confused and pulling his revolver instead.
The tragic incident was captured on numerous cellphones and video cameras by horrified onlookers, which only further added to the furor.
The case reopened old splits of racial disharmony, especially when, after a lengthy trial, the jury found Mehserle not guilty of second-degree murder, but instead involuntary manslaughter. He served seven months of a two-year sentence before being freed.
The case was national news, but it was certainly felt most acutely in the Bay area itself, a liberal, open-minded enclave.
“It was rough,” Coogler, a Bay area native, says. “It was a gut punch for us because of the timing of it: We had just put Obama in the White House and everybody was feeling optimistic going into that new year.”
Instead the city was thrown into a politicized struggle for civil rights with two tangled perspectives wrestling to control the spin. “Oscar’s character got blownup by both sides,” Coogler says. “One side wanted to say he was a perfect person and never did anything wrong in his life; all these things that weren’t necessarily true. And then the other side tried to justify what happened to him, saying basically he was a felon, a thug, a drug dealer and he deserved what was coming to him and brought it on himself.”
The impetus for this film, his debut feature, which he developed in part at the renowned Sundance Institute, was to show something crucial that neither of these highly polarized divisions was really paying much attention to: “Nobody was really thinking about the fact that this 22-year-old human being didn’t make it home to the people that he loved and it didn’t have to happen,” Coogler says.
The resulting film, which debuted, appropriately enough, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, hit like a wrecking ball among the industry types and critics lucky enough to attend the screening. It won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize and went on to win the coveted Un Certain Regard-Avenir Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. That first Sundance screening was also attended by the audience Coogler was most concerned about, Oscar’s family.
“They’re reliving one of the worst days of their lives, with a bunch of strangers in the room,” he says, “but they were strong about it and very positive.”
Oscar’s daughter, Tatiana, just 4 when he was killed, had particular insight, Coogler says. “She’s a smart girl and she understands that things are more complex than she might not see now, but she’ll see [them] later.”
In order to bring his vision to the screen successfully, Coogler well understood the importance of casting the right actor for Oscar. “His face is on the screen 98 percent of the movie,” he says, “and the most important relationship in it is between the audience and him. He had to be so different in different scenes.”
Coogler wasn’t content to turn Oscar into a cinematic martyr, cleansing the world of its sins while suffering his own tragic death. He wanted a nuanced portrait of the man - the good and the bad and the in-between - to properly do justice to him. For that, he needed an actor charismatic enough that the audience could still sympathize with him, even when he wasn’t necessarily doing the right thing, while also being volatile enough that you could understand how he had gotten himself into trouble at various times in his life. In the end, only one actor made sense to him: Michael B. Jordan (Friday Night Lights). “I was writing the script for Mike, basically,” Coogler says. “He’s an incredible actor, man, and in my mind he was the only person who could really do it.”
Jordan captures the essence of Oscar without lionizing him, and does it all without ever losing touch with his audience. In one outstanding scene, Oscar is shown talking to his former manager at a grocery after just getting laid off for excessive tardiness, at first rationalizing, then pleading, and finally threatening, to try and get his job back.It was important to Coogler that Oscar remain absolutely human. The most extraordinarily tragic element of his life was in his circumstance, not his persona.
Through it all, Coogler always had a sense of how he wanted his film to end, with Oscar’s girlfriend, Sophina, having to tell their 4-year-olddaughter, Tatiana, about the incident. Naturally, it is the single most heart-breaking scene in the film, made even more powerful by its understatement. “For me the three women represented different things,” he explains. “His mom represented his past; his girlfriend represented his present, the person who knew the most about him; and Tatiana represented his future. She was the person who I felt would feel the brunt of what happened to him the most. Looking at his situation through the women he left behind, his daughter had the most profound impact on me.”
And, in meeting with the family, does Tatiana still remember her father, years after his death? “That’s a great tragedy in this,” he says. “She remembers her dad, her last month with him, clearly. But all the time she would talk about him, she would use the present tense, as if he were still here. You know, she’d say, ‘My dad’s hair is like this’ or ‘My dad, he does that’ and I was wondering if she had wrapped her head around this yet. She’ll be dealing with it the rest of her life.”
Style, Pages 46 on 08/04/2013