As vast a country as the United States is, and as diverse as its regions are, all too often there’s one news report that resonates from coast to coast. The locations, victims’ names, and MOs change, but over and over the story recounts yet another young black male meeting a violent, and often avoidable, end. The new film Fruitvale Station takes one such true crime story and amplifies it into an emotionally complex and highly compelling drama. Writer-director Ryan Coogler, 27, makes the particular universal in his rendering of the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old San Francisco Bay Area resident who was shot and killed by a policeman on a BART elevated platform early on New Year’s Day, 2009. Michael B. Jordan, 26, stars as Oscar, an ex-con who’s trying hard to stay straight and prove himself to his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer) and his partner Sophina (Melonie Diaz), and make up to his young daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal) for lost time. So skilled are the director, cast, and crew that even though we know the outcome of the story going in, its climax is nonetheless devastating.

   The film won both the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. The Weinstein Company, its distributor, is widening the movie’s release this weekend and next. Recently Coogler and Jordan flew to Chicago, where I caught up with them.      

Andrea Gronvall:  Welcome, but I’m sorry you had to arrive in this heat.

Ryan Coogler:  Oh, we caught 90-degree days in California when we shot this time last year.

Michael B. Jordan:  Yeah, we had a few obstacles. I was calling him “Firefighter Ryan” because he was putting out fires every day.

AG:  Like what?

MBJ:  You name it. Take Oscar’s wardrobe, which didn’t change that much. I had two white T-shirts, one with blood, one without. Since we weren’t shooting chronologically, continuity was a real problem.

RC:  We were running and gunning. It was great that we had phenomenally talented actors and crew. Our actors were real team players. Octavia Spencer and Michael could have easily been prickly, but they weren’t. They just rolled their sleeves up. And I put this guy through the ringer—stunts, getting beat up, getting shot, lying on a hospital slab, working with animals. And emotionally put him through a lot of hoops, as well. But he was always trying to figure out how to do it better.

AG:  I’m sure I’m not the first, and not going to be the last, to comment on how Fruitvale Station couldn’t have had a more timely release. I’ve been glued to MSNBC’s coverage of the trial of George Zimmerman for the slaying of Trayvon Martin, and keep asking myself why these senseless killings of young black men keep happening. Like Trayvon, Oscar Grant was guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How do you see your film fitting into this national debate?

RC:  People often don’t recognize certain people as human beings. So many people look at African-Americans as criminals, degenerates, and then turn to the media to confirm these attitudes. That kind of mentality leads them to view a lot of people dying as, “These people got what they deserved.” And some African-Americans internalize that, too, and start thinking that way. As a filmmaker, all you can do with your art is to trigger thought, inspire thought. Thoughts count. All I can do is to bring people to reflect, so that they can gain insight, so that they might understand something about these young men, and who they really are.

MJB:  To piggyback on what Ryan just said, I think that what we show in the movie is about as real as it can get. I hope we stir thoughts about how we are responsible for our own actions, ask questions about manhood–how can I be a better brother, father, husband? –and how to deal with people outside our comfort zone.

AG:  Michael, there are only a couple of flashbacks in Fruitvale Station during which you can show what Oscar was like in the past, and therefore how far he has come by that fateful New Year’s Eve. Which means that you essentially have to establish the layers of his character within just the last few hours of his life. What were your techniques with, say, body language—like, how did you choose your swagger in the prison scene where Wanda visits her son?

MBJ: That was something that Ryan and I worked on together, to show Oscar acting one way to survive in prison, and then shifting out of that, because when you’re going to see your mom, you don’t want her to see that side of you. So what happens in that scene is kind of a warming process. We always wanted to show how Oscar’s mind changed when he had to deal with different people. That’s why there were a lot of long takes.

AG:  Ryan, let’s talk a little about your visual strategies. You had a very fast shoot, on a tight budget. How did you get such a warm, vibrant look for your film? I’m thinking, for instance, about the softly illuminated, intimate scene of Wanda’s birthday party on New Year’s Eve. It perfectly conveys the centrality of family.

RC:  The budget was around a million dollars. Our director of photography, Rachel Morrison, was just recognized with the Kodak Vision Award for her contributions last year to the art and the industry. She’s very tough, and operates cameras herself. She’s done a lot of non-fiction work, so she’s used to getting right into the thick of the action. It was the first time I saw a cinematographer get so close to the actors. Yet somehow Rachel would know when to give them space. We shot in Super 16mm, and therefore had to forego screening dailies because the film had to be sent to L.A. for processing. We used film because I wanted an organic, visceral feeling, and a contrast to the digital video taken of the real-life Oscar Grant on the BART.

AG:  Did you intend symbolism in the scene where Oscar tosses the bag of weed he was planning to sell into the Bay? It strikes me as though he’s washing away his sins, a spiritual concept that’s part of both Christianity and Judaism. I’m just asking if that scene is your poetic touch, because you couldn’t have known if that really happened, since only Oscar was there at the time.

RC:  Actually, that did happen; Sophina told me that Oscar told her he threw the weed into the water. But you’re right about the spiritual aspect of water, and it’s not limited to just the Christian and Jewish religions—it’s part of a number of different religions. The scene with Tatiana toward the end of the movie, where she learns the truth about Oscar from Sophina in the shower, that really happened. I can say that working in the Bay Area, water is all around us. For us, it has a sort of meditative character—the sea can change in an instant. That goes for us as people, too: our day can start out one way, and then change in an instant.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•