Just 27 years old, Ryan Coogler has already won major awards for his debut movie, Fruitvale Station . It’s only a small part of his story.
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He doesn't talk about it much, but both before and while he was making his first feature film, Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler was also working as a youth guidance counselor at a juvenile hall in San Francisco. He was part counselor, part security guard at the home for troubled Bay Area youths, and even after sweeping the awards at last winter's Sundance and being catapulted into the rarified air of acclaimed young filmmakers, Coogler, now 27, is still employed at the juvie center across from his hometown of Oakland. These days, even though he hasn't worked there in a while because he's been promoting his movie, he says, "I can't wait to try and get back."
Fruitvale Station, which won both the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, is about the last day of Oscar Grant's life. Grant was the 22-year-old Oakland kid who on New Year's Eve 2009 was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officer in a guilty-until-proven-innocent power-trip scuffle that was caught on cell phone video and sparked local riots. Grant, played in a star-making turn by former Friday Night Lights standout Michael B. Jordan, had been in and out of jail and was trying his best to get his shit together, with a mother (played by Octavia Spencer), girlfriend (Melonie Diaz), and young daughter he adored waiting for him on the straight and narrow path.
It's likely that no one else could have made a movie as honest, intuitive, and gut-punch devastating about Grant as Coogler, whose life has played out like a mirror image of his subject's tragically shortened one.
Ask Coogler what he was like in high school, and he shakes his head, smiles, and says, "I didn't have anything figured out." Crack open his St. Mary's College High School yearbooks (class of 2003) and you'll find that he's being more than modest; he was the star captain of the football team, elected to the homecoming court, and voted the guy with the best smile and physique.
We're sitting in a Midtown hotel, the latest stop on the tour to promote his film, which starts a rolling release on Friday. The yearbook, which I procured from a friend who happens to be one of his former classmates, is a surprise blast from the past. "This is intense, man," he says, laughing. "I don't even remember this stuff."
Looking at those pages, Coogler's face lights up, he calls in his fiancée, Zinzi, and they giggle at the throwbacks; he waves off awards he had long forgotten and quickly moves on to discussing some of the other kids in the photos, high school teammates and buddies that he actually cast as Oscar's friends in the movie. He points out Kenny Grimm, who played Grant's dreadlocked pal Jason, and then one of his female classmates, whose 5-year-old son Coogler met at a 4th of July barbecue last week.
Between Oakland and his other childhood home in nearby Richmond, he's got a lot of friends, and he has no plans of ever leaving — the place will never leave him, either.
As Diaz says, "He was like a kid on a playground" while making the movie.
