The year was 2009, just hours after New Year’s Eve fireworks lit up the San Francisco skyline. Revelers were riding the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system on their way back home. Among them, a twenty-two-year-old local resident named Oscar Grant. A scuffle broke out. Grant was involved. The conductor parked the train at the Fruitvale Station stop as BART police officers were called to the scene. Grant and others were escorted onto the platform and forced to sit with their backs against the wall, at which time police allege Grant became uncooperative and was ordered to lay prone on the cement. It was then that BART Officer Johannes Mehserle shot Grant in the back with a SIG Sauer P226 pistol, in front of dozens of eyewitnesses. Mehserle later claimed he went for his taser—a defense many found dubious—since Grant was unarmed with his hands behind him. Grant died the next morning and Mehserle was subsequently sentenced to two years for involuntary manslaughter. He served 11 months.

In response to the incident, masses of people protested. Some rioted. But filmmaker Ryan Coogler decided to make a movie about it. “I was devastated that this could happen in the Bay Area,” says Coogler. “Oscar could have been me.”

Indeed, both Coogler and Grant are African American males from the Bay area, born less than three months apart. And as the case went to trial, Coogler was struck by how polarizing this story became. “Oscar was either cast as a Saint who had never done anything wrong in his life, or he was painted as a monster who got what he deserved that night,” says Coogler. “I felt that in that process, Oscar’s humanity was lost. When anyone’s life is lost, the true nature of the tragedy lies in who they were, to the people who knew them best.”

Fruitvale Station doesn’t shy away from Grant’s darker impulses—including the multiple felony drug charges that landed him in prison more than once. And in a pivotal flashback scene, a hotheaded Grant, capably played by Michael B. Jordan, tussles with an inmate he would fatefully encounter on the BART years later, in the altercation that ultimately led to Grant’s death.

Yet aside from that particular narrative cause and effect, the bulk of the film shadows Grant meandering through a laundry list of pedestrian activities; hanging with his buds; quarreling with his girlfriend; shopping for a birthday card. And if these activities don’t necessarily ratchet up a suspenseful build-up towards the film’s climax, a typical day-in-the-life of Oscar Grant is precisely what Coogler was going for. “I thought that if I could bring the story to life through art, and give audiences the chance to spend time with a character like Oscar, it could maybe lower the chances of an incident like this happening again,” Coogler explains.

Others agreed with Coogler’s vision, including Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker, whose Significant Productions produced the film, Oscar winner Octavia Spencer, who signed on to play Grant’s mother Wanda, and surprisingly, the BART organization itself, which threw its support behind the film by allowing the crew to shoot on the very platform for which the film is named.

Click here to read Creative Screenwriting‘s interview with Nina Yang Bongiovi on producing Fruitvale Station on a limited budget.

Creative Screenwriting Magazine sat down with Coogler to discuss the challenges of low-budget filmmaking, serendipity in both life and in art, and the role of pit bulls in contemporary urban society.

ANDREW BLOOMENTHAL: James Cameron once said that his goal with Titanic was to make viewers forget that the ship sank. Was it challenging to maintain suspense when telling a story with a well-known outcome?

RYAN COOGLER: A lot of my favorite films have that one-day format, and with many of them, you already know what’s going to happen. Titanic isn’t shaped in a day, and I think of that film as grand in scale, but I’m referring to a lot of films that are smaller in scope. I think of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—a Romanian film about two women who go to get an abortion. Maybe that’s not the best example, because you don’t know the outcome of that film, but some other films, you do know the outcome. I think of Elephant, the Gus Van Sant film about the Columbine shootings, or United 93, where you know that plane is going down, but you still watch it, and you’re gripped. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been done and been done over again? People still go see it even though they know what’s coming at the end. There are so many movies like this that I didn’t feel like it was super daunting. But I definitely wanted to keep the audience engaged with real situations or else they’d get bored. If you think about Oscar Grant’s day, it was relatively mundane. He was taking his daughter to school, picking her up, then going to his mom’s birthday party. It was pretty regular stuff.

BLOOMENTHAL:Is that why you incorporated the birthday party scene, where people are preparing food and making small talk—to demonstrate an average day in people’s lives?

COOGLER:Try spending the day with somebody. It might be a family member, it could be a friend. Someone you don’t normally spend the day with. At the end of the day, you feel like you know them so much better, just doing mundane stuff. I wanted the audience to have that feeling. You don’t often get the chance to spend time with a character like this guy.

BLOOMENTHAL:So we relate to Oscar’s human motivations, since we know what will go down, from a plot standpoint.

COOGLER:Yeah, and it’s also the Hitchcock theory, with the bomb under the table. It adds to the tension. Regular moments are heightened, because the audience knows something the characters don’t. So I saw it as somewhat of a benefit in many ways. But it was definitely a struggle.

BLOOMENTHAL:One profound moment loaded with foreshadowing was the dog getting hit by the car. Tell me about the importance of that scene.

COOGLER:That’s a very divisive scene. People either love it or they hate it. But the inspiration for that scene came from an experience my little brother had, when he and my dad were out one day, and the same thing happened. I saw my brother that day, and he was just out of it. He wasn’t engaged. He was quiet and contemplative and not his normal self, which is how [Grant’s girlfriend] Sophina described Oscar. For me, that scene meant a lot of things. The pit bull is kind of like the Bay Area mascot. But the thing that’s interesting about pit bulls is that they mirror us—African American young males. When you see a pit bull, you might think about all the negative things.

You think about dog fighting, you think they’re rabid animals that are about to bite your leg off. There are places where pit bulls are illegal, like Miami-Dade County, where you can’t even have one of these dogs. But people who know these dogs—they love them. They’re the sweetest dogs in the world, but they get the worst rap. And the reason they can become such great fighting animals, is because they’ll do whatever their owner wants them to do. They’re the most people-pleasing dogs on the planet. The dog thinks, “You want me to be a lap dog? That’s what I’m going to be. You want me to attack and kill other dogs that look like me? That’s what I’m going to do, and I’m going to be the best at it.” So in the film, that stray pit bull getting killed in the street is definitely symbolic, because that dog correlates to Oscar, because after talking to Oscar’s friends, I learned that he was a person who cried alone and would never let anybody around him see what’s going on, because he was in constant fear of being rejected as a result. He wanted to please everybody. He wanted to make everybody happy so they’d never abandon him. He internalized his pain, and that scene with the pit bull was very much about him breaking.

BLOOMENTHAL:You talk about Oscar Grant becoming a polarizing figure—how some saw him as heroic while others saw him as a scoundrel who got what was coming to him. Where did you personally land on this issue when you piece together what you know about him?

COOGLER:He was a person. That’s what he was. He was a person. And he was a person that was struggling a lot, and I hope we captured that in the film. People have different opinions about him. But looking at him on this day, through this lens, was what I really wanted to do.

BLOOMENTHAL:To get rights to this story, you had to approach his family. If they hadn’t given you their blessing, could you have still made this film?

COOGLER:I’m really not sure about that, because I’m not a lawyer. Since this was such a publicized case, I’m sure there was a possibility that this story could be used without their permission, but I didn’t want to do it that way.

BLOOMENTHAL:So who made first contact with the family?

COOGLER:When I was in film school, my friend Ephraim [Walker] was in law school at the time, and I told him I wanted to do this film, shortly after the event. He ended up graduating and going to work for one of the Grant family’s lawyers, John Burris. It was just a big coincidence that he was working there. And he hit me back and said, “When you’re ready, you should talk to the family’s attorney, because that’s the only way you’ll really be able to get the family’s blessing.” So I met with the attorney first, and then I met the family after Forest Whitaker’s production company formed a relationship with them after the civil trial, when they were finally free to talk about this stuff.

BLOOMENTHAL:What was it like meeting the family?

COOGLER:It was interesting. I got very quiet. I’m a younger kind of dude. I’m from the Bay Area. And I’m effectively the same age as Oscar. So I’m sure it was a little weird for them to come in and hear me talk about how I’m going to make a film before I’ve ever made a feature. They were open to it, but they were very quiet and reserved at first. I think Forest Whitaker’s production company really helped, as far as them being familiar with his name, initially. But once they signed over the rights and gave their blessing, I had a lot of freedom.

BLOOMENTHAL:Did you learn of any back stories from Oscar’s family that you didn’t know previously?

COOGLER:Absolutely. I learned a lot of things about his back story that were not publicly known. Once I talked to Sophina, his girlfriend, a lot of personal stuff started coming out. Talking to [Grant’s daughter] Tatiana, talking to his friends, I was able to learn a lot more about him.

BLOOMENTHAL:Tell me about the writing process.

COOGLER:I was fortunate enough to be supported by the Sundance Institute’s Creative Writing Lab, and I first took a version of the script there, which was based completely off public records and legal documents. I hadn’t had access to the family yet, so I was writing based on what was said in the trial, and I got the basic structure from that. Then when I met the family, I did a ton of research into his character that made [Grant] more of a dynamic protagonist. At the Lab, I then met with the advisors who helped me sharpen my perspective on the story and get to the bottom of why I really wanted to tell it, so I was able to incorporate both the research and a sharpened perspective that I was provided in that Lab process.

BLOOMENTHAL:Did certain elements of the story have to go by the wayside?

COOGLER:Where I actually lost stuff was in the production process. We had twenty days that were actually more like sixteen. We had these BART night shoots that were limited to four hours a pop. We had very limited finances, so scenes shrunk.

BLOOMENTHAL:What embellishments, if any, were added for dramatic purposes? For example, was there a Katie character in real life?

COOGLER:She’s an amalgamation of two different characters, from two different events. The grocery store conversation where Oscar puts her on the phone with her grandmother really happened.

BLOOMENTHAL:And the prison-room scuffle with the other inmate?

COOGLER:The prison scuffle was based on a real situation, and the incident on the train really stemmed from someone he was incarcerated with.

BLOOMENTHAL:That serendipity is interesting. Oscar could have been on a different car on the train that night, and this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

COOGLER:The thing is, in the Bay Area, everyone goes over there for the fireworks. There are like two places you can go in the Bay to see fireworks in Frisco, so if you jump on the BART, you’re guaranteed to see someone you know.

BLOOMENTHAL:Did you actually film fireworks? Or was that a found shot?

COOGLER:We actually shot fireworks. Thinking about it, because this is Creative Screenwriting Magazine, the fireworks scene was much more elaborate in the script, but we didn’t have time to shoot what we wanted with our 20-day schedule. We tried to shoot the Fourth of July fireworks, but it didn’t work out because of technical issues. The way it was originally written, if my memory serves, a countdown happens, we see the guys on the fireworks truck loading the fireworks in, and you see them get shot off, and it’s this magical moment. But looking at the film now, it’s perfect what we did. It was just me, one of our picture editors, and one of the producers, and we went out to Treasure Island, which is right in the middle of Oakland in San Francisco, and we shot the actual fireworks in 2013 and cut that into the film.

BLOOMENTHAL:This is a very personal story, but it definitely speaks a larger commentary about racism and excessive police force. Did you look to tell a smaller story about this guy’s experience, or did you want to shine a light on a broader issue? Or was it both?

COOGLER:For me it was both. First and foremost it was about this guy and his relationships. I figured if we could get that part right and give some truth to that, and get audiences to buy into that perspective, it could potentially speak to the larger things. But for me, when things get larger, I tend to shut down. If I turn on the news, and I see that 50 people have been washed away by a natural disaster, I say, “Wow, that’s crazy,” but I go on with my day. But if one person close to me, who I know and love, isn’t feeling good, or God forbid, gets into a car accident, it’s just one person, but it stops your whole world, because you know that person on a personal level. So I think that in making a situation personal, it can speak to those other things.

Creative Screenwriting also interviewed producer Nina Yang Bongiovi on producing Fruitvale Station on a limited budget. Click here to read her interview.

 BART Speaks Out

“This tragedy rocked BART to its very core and the repercussions shattered this community,” said Bay Area Rapid Transit system Communications Officer Luna Salaver, in a quivering voice. “I still get upset thinking about it.”

But when filmmaker Ryan Coogler sought permission to use BART’s Fruitvale Station platform to shoot scenes of his film Fruitvale Station, about the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle, BART was initially reluctant to give the nod. “We were concerned this would bring back all of those tragic and angry memories,” said Salaver. But fears were soon quelled when Coogler met with general manager Grace Crunican, and explained his intention to heal a community—not to inflame one. “Ryan was authentic and respectful, and when Grace met with him, she believed him,” recounts Salaver. “He’s a remarkable young man,”

Of course, permission was contingent on Crunican approving Coogler’s script for factual accuracy—typical protocol for any filmmaker looking to use BART facilities. But unlike other films, Fruitvale Station is bound to attract a tidal wave of fresh scrutiny to the organization, as the story becomes more widely known. But Salaver says she’s prepared for a PR maelstrom, and is in fact eager to spread word of sweeping improvements that have happened since the tragedy. Following an independent audit, BART cleaned house of top brass, replacing its general manager, chief of police and three deputy chiefs of police. Furthermore, all BART police officers must complete a taser training course, and must wear body cameras to ensure accurate records of their civilian contact. Thus far, 82 of the audit’s 131 recommendations have been satisfied.

“Folks around the country will see this film and say, ‘What happened is horrible,” predicts Salaver. “But I want them to know that BART is not the same organization it was the night this happened.”