How Ryan Coogler Made Fruitvale Station At 25

Coogler was right out of film school at USC when he decided to make his first feature film after gaining acclaim for a number of his short films. It was actually the production company of Forest Whitaker (who later starred in Black Panther under his direction) that backed his idea to make a movie about the last 24 hours of Oscar Grant’s life before he was shot by a BART police officer on New Year’s Day in 2009. The movie was filmed in just over two weeks in Oakland for under $1 million with Jordan on board and Octavia Spencer, who also provided financial support for the film as a producer.

Coogler crafted a movie based on the true event by implementing public records and findings from news into the story. Coogler actually had previously worked with a fellow USC alum who was an attorney on Grant’s case and gave him access to records and testimonies, as he told IndieWire. The writer/director also spoke to the Grant family and used the specific accounts of witnesses at the BART on the night of Oscar’s death to create his vision for the film.

The Depiction Of Oscar Grant’s Life in Fruitvale Station

In Fruitvale Station, there is some brief background about Oscar Grant that can be inferred through Ryan Coogler’s storytelling. One important point audiences can note in the film is that Grant was in prison prior to his death. Coogler specifically did not want to shy away from Grant being a flawed individual. Before his death, he was arrested five times and he spent almost two years in jail in total, according to public records. He once admitted to dealing ecstasy to “five or six” regular customers and making “$1000 to $1500 a week” in an official statement – his family said his other arrests had to do with traffic stops over something like a busted light.

Sophina Mesa, his girlfriend and mother to his four-year-old daughter Tatiana confirmed that Oscar had been planning to do more honest work if he had lived, as illustrated in the film. In Fruitvale Station, he is given a business card by a man during his New Year’s celebration to signal a coming shift in his career. In real life, he had planned to attend barber school to get his life back on track and the couple had talked about getting a new place outside of Oakland just two days prior to his murder.

The detail about New Year’s Day also being his mother’s birthday was also completely true. Grant actually did stop and get crab for his mom too, the specific interaction with a customer may not have happened on that exact day, but Oscar’s real grandma said Oscar had called her once on the behalf of a customer to get her “secret recipe.” It’s true that Oscar’s mom suggested he take the train and he’d planned to take his daughter Tatiana to Chuck E. Cheese the next day, per SF Gate. There were some creative liberties done in order to fill the events of the day – such as the pitbull scene did not specifically happen but Coogler has compared the dog breed to the way Black people are treated in media.


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