"Fruitvale Station": How a 27-Year-Old Rookie Filmmaker Humanized an American Tragedy

It was an all too familiar, entirely senseless American tragedy.

The date was January 1, 2009; the time, 2:15 a.m. PST, in Oakland, California. Oscar Grant—a 22-year-old black ex-con from San Francisco's Bay Area—was on his way home from celebrating New Year's with his girlfriend, Sophina, and their closest friends. They were stopped at the Fruitvale Station of the BART, or the Bay Area Rapid Transit, by police officers. Grant and a few of his boys were pulled to the side, told to sit against a wall. Grant, specifically, was told to lie on the ground, on his stomach. After the fact, the cops said he began resisting the arrest; Grant's friends said he did nothing of the sort. Whatever the case, though, Officer Johannes Mehserle, in the midst of the heated commotion, shot Grant once in the back. Mehserle, like everyone else present, was stunned at what he'd done. And it was all captured via several camera phones and mobile recording devices.

Grant died later that day. The video footage circulated to millions of viewers online. Angry citizens violently rioted throughout Oakland, prefacing a peaceful protest on January 7. In July 2010, Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years behind bars (he was released from prison after 11 months, however). And now, over four years after Grant's untimely death, there's an award-winning film about it, Fruitvale Station, that's on the verge of becoming a major awards season contender.

Fruitvale Station (opening in limited theatrical release tomorrow before expanding nationwide) is the feature film debut of writer-director Ryan Coogler, 27, an Oakland native who was one of Oscar Grant's peers at the time of his passing. A graduate of of the USC School for Cinematic Arts, Coogler felt he was the right person to humanize Grant through cinema—rather than allow parts of the media to keep painting Grant as a criminal, Coogler wanted to find out more about who Grant really was: a son, a father, a friend. Through research and many hours spent with Grant's loved ones, Coogler wrote Fruitvale Station. The result: a harrowing, deeply sad examination of someone who acknowledges his flaws, is ready to better himself and those around him, but whom we know—as is made clear by Coogler's use of the real-life camera footage from the BART—won't have the chance to change his life.

At the center of Fruitvale Station is actor Michael B. Jordan, whose scene-stealing supporting work in acclaimed projects like The Wire, Friday Night Lights, and Chronicle were preparation for what's sure to be his official breakthrough—a Best Actor nomination is a definite possibility. Playing Oscar Grant during his final day alive, Jordan, 26, is a revelation. Through Grant's on-screen interactions with his mother (played by Oscar winner Octavia Spencer), girlfriend (Melonie Diaz, who's fantastic as the loving, resilient Sophina), and daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal), Jordan is charismatic and endearing; in Grant's rougher moments, like a flashback to his mom visiting him in prison, the young actor conveys a natural combustibility that's both dangerous and human. By the time Fruitvale Station reaches its unavoidable and gut-wrenchingly staged BART sequence, Jordan's Grant is tragic—you know that a conflicted but genuinely caring man is about be robbed of his shot at personal redemption, and it's profoundly upsetting.

It's also the work of two on-the-rise talents—Coogler and Jordan—for whom Fruitvale Station should turn into major, in-demand Hollywood players. The almighty Harvey Weinstein certainly thinks so, seeing that his major studio brand The Weinstein Company is distributing the film and currently strategizing its hopeful awards season omnipresence.

Complex recently sat down with Coogler and the film's two leads, Jordan and Diaz, to discuss the making of Fruitvale Station. Read on to get to know the young, gifted minds and the motivations behind their emotionally devastating and superlative film.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

"Fruitvale Station": How a 27-Year-Old Rookie Filmmaker Humanized an American Tragedy

It was an all too familiar, entirely senseless American tragedy.

The date was January 1, 2009; the time, 2:15 a.m. PST, in Oakland, California. Oscar Grant—a 22-year-old black ex-con from San Francisco's Bay Area—was on his way home from celebrating New Year's with his girlfriend, Sophina, and their closest friends. They were stopped at the Fruitvale Station of the BART, or the Bay Area Rapid Transit, by police officers. Grant and a few of his boys were pulled to the side, told to sit against a wall. Grant, specifically, was told to lie on the ground, on his stomach. After the fact, the cops said he began resisting the arrest; Grant's friends said he did nothing of the sort. Whatever the case, though, Officer Johannes Mehserle, in the midst of the heated commotion, shot Grant once in the back. Mehserle, like everyone else present, was stunned at what he'd done. And it was all captured via several camera phones and mobile recording devices.

Grant died later that day. The video footage circulated to millions of viewers online. Angry citizens violently rioted throughout Oakland, prefacing a peaceful protest on January 7. In July 2010, Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years behind bars (he was released from prison after 11 months, however). And now, over four years after Grant's untimely death, there's an award-winning film about it, Fruitvale Station, that's on the verge of becoming a major awards season contender.

Fruitvale Station (opening in limited theatrical release tomorrow before expanding nationwide) is the feature film debut of writer-director Ryan Coogler, 27, an Oakland native who was one of Oscar Grant's peers at the time of his passing. A graduate of of the USC School for Cinematic Arts, Coogler felt he was the right person to humanize Grant through cinema—rather than allow parts of the media to keep painting Grant as a criminal, Coogler wanted to find out more about who Grant really was: a son, a father, a friend. Through research and many hours spent with Grant's loved ones, Coogler wrote Fruitvale Station. The result: a harrowing, deeply sad examination of someone who acknowledges his flaws, is ready to better himself and those around him, but whom we know—as is made clear by Coogler's use of the real-life camera footage from the BART—won't have the chance to change his life.

At the center of Fruitvale Station is actor Michael B. Jordan, whose scene-stealing supporting work in acclaimed projects like The Wire, Friday Night Lights, and Chronicle were preparation for what's sure to be his official breakthrough—a Best Actor nomination is a definite possibility. Playing Oscar Grant during his final day alive, Jordan, 26, is a revelation. Through Grant's on-screen interactions with his mother (played by Oscar winner Octavia Spencer), girlfriend (Melonie Diaz, who's fantastic as the loving, resilient Sophina), and daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal), Jordan is charismatic and endearing; in Grant's rougher moments, like a flashback to his mom visiting him in prison, the young actor conveys a natural combustibility that's both dangerous and human. By the time Fruitvale Station reaches its unavoidable and gut-wrenchingly staged BART sequence, Jordan's Grant is tragic—you know that a conflicted but genuinely caring man is about be robbed of his shot at personal redemption, and it's profoundly upsetting.

It's also the work of two on-the-rise talents—Coogler and Jordan—for whom Fruitvale Station should turn into major, in-demand Hollywood players. The almighty Harvey Weinstein certainly thinks so, seeing that his major studio brand The Weinstein Company is distributing the film and currently strategizing its hopeful awards season omnipresence.

Complex recently sat down with Coogler and the film's two leads, Jordan and Diaz, to discuss the making of Fruitvale Station. Read on to get to know the young, gifted minds and the motivations behind their emotionally devastating and superlative film.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Ryan Coogler's Background

Only 27, Ryan Coogler is already living the dream. Namely, the dream that all aspiring filmmakers have during those sleepless nights, wondering if their first passion project will ever be seen by anyone outside of their inner circle. Coogler, though, submitted his independently produced debut, Fruitvale Station, into the prestigious, career-making Sundance Film Festival, watched it premiere to rave reviews and immediate buzz this past January, and walked on stage to accept to major Sundance awards for his work, the Audience Award for dramatic features and, even bigger, the Grand Jury Prize for dramas. Then, in May, it won Best First Film at the even more esteemed Cannes Film Festival.

Harvey Weinstein—the Hollywood heavyweight whose distribution company, The Weinstein Company, purchased Fruitvale Station for a reported $2 million out of Sundance—and everyone else who's been enamored by his film might be surprised to learn that the Oakland, CA, native didn't initially set out to make movies. At one time, he was just a Chewbacca-loving gridiron star.

Ryan Coogler: "I played football when I was younger, but before I started playing football, I didn't really fit in anywhere. I was having trouble finding myself. I lived in a rough neighborhood in Oakland. My parents were both really forward-thinking, even though they didn't have much money between them. But they were really focused on raising me and my little brothers right. They're just really great people. They put me in private school, so back in my neighborhood I didn't fit in because I had two parents and walked around with Catholic school clothes on, and in the private school I didn't fit in because I didn't have any money.

I would just read a lot, since I didn't have many friends, and when I did hang out with kids, I hung out with the nerds. [Laughs.] I had this one friend who told me about Star Wars; he was the only white kid in our school, and I hung out with him. We'd have these little air-lightsaber fights, just real nerdy stuff, but it was fun for me at the time. Once I started playing sports, though, I fit in everywhere. I fit in back in the hood, I fit while I was in school. Stuff changed for me through sports, but I still remained a geek on the inside. I hung out with a lot of different types of people.

For college, I got a scholarship for football, for this small liberal arts school in the bay, called Saint Mary's College. They actually have a really good hoops team, they go to the NCAA tournament a lot. I went there to play football, I was a wide receiver, and I majored in chemistry. I figured, if the football thing didn't work out, I would try to become a doctor. My freshman year, I had this creative writing class, and the teacher, I'll never forget, she starts talking about how she hates football and how it's barbaric. [Laughs.] We got into an argument, but then she assigned us a project where we had to write about our most emotionally intense experience. I wrote about something I hadn't told many people about before, I turned it in, and after she read it, she asked me to stay after class one day.

I thought I was in trouble. I went in, sat down, and talked to her, and she was basically like, 'So, what do you want to be when you grow up?' I told her I wanted to be a doctor, and she hit me back with, 'Why do you want to do that?' I said, 'Well, I'm good at it, and I think I can use to do positive things in our community.' She's like, 'That's cool, but I read your paper, and you write really visually. I felt like I was right there with you. Would you ever think about becoming a screenwriter?' At that point, I thought she was crazy. I didn't even know what a screenplay looked like. I left, though, and I stayed up thinking about it all night. I went online and found the Pulp Fictionscreenplay, that was the first screenplay I'd ever looked at. So I opened up Microsoft Word and I started trying to do my own mock version of it.

I quickly fell in love with it, and I started writing my own scripts from there. That school, St. Mary's, dropped their football program because it wasn't financially stable, so I then got a scholarship to Sacramento State. I went there, switched my major to finance, and started taking all of the film class electives, on the side. I was taking, like, 24 credits a semester. I completely fell in love with filmmaking. Once I was done playing ball, I applied to film school at USC, got in, went there, and made filmmaking my primary focus.

I still love different genres like science fiction today as much as I did when I was a kid, but where my deepest interests lie are in providing three-dimensional perspectives of people you don't normally get to see three-dimensional perspectives of. I think film has that power to bring you into worlds that you'd otherwise not be able to go into. I realized that when I started to watch foreign films, cinema out of Europe and Latin America. I loved it, because here were these worlds that I'd never been to, probably would never go to, watching the kinds of people I'd never get the chance to meet, but I related to them so much by the end of the film.

I realized, man, film really has this power, and I have access to certain types of people in intimate ways. I always like to tell detailed stories from the inside out. People can be from Schenectady or, say, Rochester, and go see a film about somebody from the area where I'm from, who they probably never met anyone like, but then leave the film with some insight into who that person really is. There's more to the human condition that's relatable than not relatable, I think, and films can bridge that gap. Like with my film and Oscar Grant, someone from the suburbs can see Fruitvale Station and, I hope, relate to how he's really trying to become a better man, a better father, a better partner for his girl."

Humanizing Oscar Grant

There was no way for Ryan Coogler to ignore the Oscar Grant tragedy back in January 2009. The similarities between the budding filmmaker and Grant were numerous: They were the same age at the time, 22, from the same San Francisco Bay Area, hung out with the same kinds of kids, and regularly used the BART. When Coogler first heard about Grant's death, and then watched the startling YouTube footage, he couldn't help but think about Grant's family and friends—how badly must they be hurting after this horrible thing happened? Coogler could only imagine how his own loved ones would react if he'd been the one to get shot on that BART platform.

Before the Fruitvale Station explosion of publicity, appearances, and Weinstein-backed baby-kissing, Coogler worked as a counselor at a San Francisco juvenile hall (a job he still holds, though with less on-site frequency). He's also made three short films—Locks (which played at the Tribeca Film Festival), Gap, and Fig (the recipient of an HBO Short Filmmaking Award and a DGA Student Filmmaker Award)—rooted in the human condition, about people from his own real world that don't often get fair shakes. Fig, for instance, follows a young female prostitute who's trying to end her sexual street-corner profession in order to properly raise her daughter.

In Oscar Grant, Coogler saw a flawed young man who was also a loving father, a well-meaning boyfriend, and a warm-hearted son. Most people who read the newspaper reports, however, couldn't get past the facts that Grant was also a drug dealer and wore baggy jeans and black hoodies. Fruitvale Station is about breaking through those surface-level perceptions.

Coogler: "I've been working in a juvenile hall for the last six years. That job has had more of an effect on me than anything else. I've been doing that since I was 21, but over the past year, because of this film, I haven't been able to work in there as much as I'd like to. When I'm there, though, it's important for me to let the kids know that they don't have to give up, that they're just as worthy of life's good things as people on the outside. They just have to find it within themselves to earn those things. That's what Oscar Grant realized, but unfortunately he wasn't able to see that through."

"When this tragedy happened, I was the same age as Oscar. I had such a close proximity to it. I've been in similar circumstances before. My friends look like his friends; I actually cast my friends to play his friends in the film. That was the initial attraction to the subject for me. Then I started seeing the fallout afterwards, and how people were making Oscar into this fallen icon."

Michael B. Jordan: "There wasn't even a second of hesitation when this project came my way. I knew I had to do it. I remember when this happened, and how helpless I felt, how I couldn't express myself the way I wanted to. Then a few years later, the whole Trayvon Martin thing happened, and I was feeling upset. I was like, 'Man, again?' I wanted to express myself but I didn't really know how to. Literally a week afterwards, I get the call making the Oscar Grant story, and I remember thinking, wow, this is fate. This is exactly what I need. I felt a certain responsibility to take this role, so I had to take it."

"I was surprised by Ryan's take. It's genius, the more I think about it, to approach this story as "a day in the life of…" It's always easy to judge somebody that you don't know, but if you walk a mile in somebody's shoes, you'll get to know that person a little bit better. You'll know how it feels. A day in the life of, the last 24 hours—sometimes I feel like that's a little bit more compelling than movies that take place over four or five years of a person's life. You really grow fond of somebody in a day. Spend a whole day with somebody, be a part of their daily routine—by the end of the day, you'll really get to know what that person is like and get to know their character."

"Ryan's script was incredible. I remember crying the first time reading it; I still have the tear stains on the pages of my script. I waited 20, 30 minutes before reading it again, and I cried again the second time, just as much."

Coogler: "Some people wanted to make him out to be this saint, this perfect person, this activist who was slaughtered, but on the other side, other people wanted to use the bad things he did to say hurtful things about who he was and people like him. They'd call him a thug and a criminal. He cheated on his girl, he sold drugs. But none of those things made him deserve the death penalty, not in my book. He was a human being. Everybody has made mistakes. He didn't deserve to die."

Jordan: "The thing that stand out to the most about this story, and Ryan's script, to me, is the tragedy itself. The loss of life, and thinking about the fact that, if this wasn't caught on camera, then what would have happened? Would it have even been a thing?"

Melonie Diaz: "Ryan's script hit me hard. It was about second chances, and trying to do the right thing. That's the most heartbreaking thing about this story. He was at this point where he was going to move forward with his family and try to be a better man, but then this happened. That's what I always leave the film thinking: What kind of man would he have been?"

Coogler: "It was really about that in-between, and nobody was really looking at the true tragedy of the situation. Oscar was a human being, with people he loved and who loved him, and he had big hopes and dreams of becoming a better man, but he was robbed of that opportunity. That's what I wanted to get across. The most important person in his life was the person who was affected by his death the most: his daughter, Tatiana. She's still here. She turned 9 a couple of months ago. She has to grow up without a dad."

Spending Time With Oscar Grant's Family

Even though he and Oscar Grant lived in the same area and shared similar experiences, Ryan Coogler had never actually met the late Bay Area native or any of his friends. He'd written a first draft of Fruitvale (the film's original Station-less title) only using his own secondhand research, but to fully understand the man, Coogler needed to spend as much time as possible with those who were closest to Grant: his mother Wanda Johnson), girlfriend (Sophina), and he and Sophina's daughter, Tatiana, who was 5 when her father died.

The same went for Coogler's actors, Michael B. Jordan and Melonie Diaz, though further opening emotional wounds, merely three years after Grant was killed, wasn't easy.

Coogler: "I ended up having a lot of access to Oscar's family, but initially I didn't. For the first draft of the script that I wrote, the one I turned into the Sundance Labs, I just used the publicly available documents from the criminal case and the municipal case, and what was cool about that was that everything that was said in court was publicly available. It's similar to what's happening with the Treyvon Martin case right now. Everybody was under oath, so I was able to read about what all of the cops said, what all of Oscar's friends said."

"So I wrote that draft, and once Forest Whitaker was backing the project, the family started to engage with the project more and sign over the life rights. Forest Whitaker's production company, Significant Productions, reached out to my mentor at USC film school asking about young talent, and that's how my name came up. I went in to meet with the head of Forest's production company, Nina Yang Bongiovi, and she was saying Forest was working on a TV show called Criminal Minds at the time, and that they were interested in television. I showed them some things I had written, and since she liked my stuff, she got me in a room to sit down with Forest and talk about some projects. When he asked about projects I was interested in making, I mentioned Fruitvale, and he really responded to it. That was in spring 2011, when he came on board as a producer for the project. That was my last year in film school, too."

"That was when I was able to sit down with all of Oscar's family to interview them. I talked to Sophina, I talked to his mom, I talked to Tatiana, I talked to his friends. From there, I was able to pepper into the script everything I'd learned about Oscar from their stories, and that's when Oscar started to come alive as a character. He started taking on the three-dimensional qualities that I was looking for."

Jordan: "Talking to Oscar's family was a little awkward at first. I was a little hesitant. You're thinking about what they're thinking about you. You know it's still fresh for them, it's only four years old. I know, me personally, I wouldn't be over it yet. I sat down with his mother, Wanda, first, and then I had the chance to talk to Sophina and hear about their relationship and how they treated one another. Then I got to hang out with his best friends, and go to the park, order some BBQ, play some Dominoes, drink a little bit. The stories just flowed from there. It helped that I was on The Wire, too, because they were all huge Wire fans. [Laughs.] That definitely broke the ice a little bit and made it more comfortable."

"I can't talk to Oscar, you know? That couldn't happen. So it was important for me to hear the different perspectives of Oscar. He was different around everybody, so I heard about different versions of him. And thankfully, through Ryan's due diligence of researching so much, he really did most of the heavy lifting for us actors."

Diaz: "It was really intense for me, meeting Sophina for the first time. When we first met, it was more about getting to know her as a person—I didn't want to have her talk about the most terrible day of her life right away. I wanted to earn her trust, and soon after, we started hanging out some more. We got our nails done together, we went shopping. It was serious bonding time. I wanted her to be involved with my Sophina's physicality, the way she dresses, to make it more authentic."

"The more we hung out together, the more she opened up, and we were able to start talking about her relationship with Oscar. It's still extremely painful for her, and she's still angry. She hasn't seen the film yet, and I doubt if she ever will, to be honest. I totally respect that. It's still weird for me—I know this is a movie, and I'm playing a role, but it's also someone's life, and someone's real pain."

Coogler: "The story of Oscar Grant was always very clear to me, even before I started speaking with his family. I was always focused on the fact that he died unnecessarily, and the fact that his death had an impact. Not the impact that came from the media, or from the results of the trial, but the impact on the people who knew this person, who expected him to come home and were deeply hurt when he didn't. It's the fact that so many young black males die at the hands of a gun, no matter whether it's a white person or another young black male pulling the trigger. These young lives get ended before these men get a chance to become the people they truly want to be. I found the tragedy in that."

"It was important for me to end the film with his daughter, and not with any of the trial or what happened after his death, because that was what I was more interested in. It's more about the intimate impact, because those are the people who are affected the most by these tragedies. Those are the people who get glossed over, especially when a case gets publicized as much as Oscar's has. When people hear about this case, they're hearing about the trial, about how much time the cop is getting, about the riots and the protests—that's what's publicized. That was what there was footage of and reports on. There wasn't reports about how his girl had to tell his daughter that he daddy wasn't coming back."

"The most important people in Oscar's life were his mom, his girlfriend, and his daughter—three women. For me, his mom represented his past, his girlfriend represented his present, and his daughter, who was the most important person in his life, represented his future. It made perfect sense to end the film with his daughter, because his future got cut short."

Taking Creative License

Fruitvale Station, for the most part, comes from all of Coogler's research and the personal anecdotes he acquired from Grant's family and friends. It's not a documentary, though, so the writer-director did need to tell an engaging, cinematic story; meaning, there was room for creative, though reality-based, writing.

One such moment of creative license has been questioned by the film's less fawning critics for, as they see it, being manipulative. In the middle of his last day alive, Oscar Grant comes across a stray pit bull while stopping at gas station. He quickly and affectionately pets the friendly, lost dog, but then it heads off across a busy highway and gets violently struck by a speeding car. As the dog lies on the road, dying, the driver keeps on down the road. Nobody around stops to help the run-over pooch, except for Oscar. The dog clings to its last breath, then dies right in front of a shaken, visibly upset Oscar.

It's a powerful scene, one of many in the film. It's also easily susceptible to claims of being unsubtle. But for Coogler, it came from a real place.

Coogler: "It was something that came out of researching what Oscar did that day before he was killed, but it also came from my own experiences and creative choices. It's a very important scene for me, but it's also a very divisive scene for a lot of people. They watch it and say, 'Oh, this filmmaker is trying to make this guy seem as sympathetic as possible here,' like I'm trying to manipulate you into liking Oscar because he'd care for a dying dog. It's funny, because the literary term for that is 'the save-the-cat moment,' but it wasn't that for me. People who are moved by it, it's not that for them either.

For me, it came from a couple things. Oscar was the kind of guy who would always put his guard up, put a pier face on, and always try to make the people around him happy. He was always trying to be the strong guy, the tough guy, the guy who'd never let things bother him. While he was in jail, one of his good friends was killed. He never really got a chance to grieve over that when he came out, and he was going through a lot. That day, he was by himself a lot; that day was more about concealing all of this pain and not being able to handle it emotionally, and finally breaking, but he had to put that poker face back on, that armor back on, and go back out into the world.

I have a little brother who actually did some music for the film. He's very much that guy. He's a bubbly person who could come into the room right now and make everyone feel good, often to the expense of himself and what he's dealing with. One day, he came home, while I was working on the script, and he was out of it. Sophina had talked to me about how, the day that he was killed, Oscar showed up by her and he was out of it. He picked her up from work, and she was picking at him and picking at him to find out what was going on, but he wouldn't tell her. He stayed reserved and introspective. That's what my brother was like that day he came home and seemed out of it, so I asked him what was up. He told me about how he was at a gas station, saw a dog get hit, he picked the dog up, and the dog shook and died right in front of him. He didn't know what to do with the dog's body, and people were just going on about their day. That messed him up.

When I heard that story from my brother, I thought about Oscar. I thought about pit bulls and black males, and how pit bulls are seen as these really vicious creatures, but people who own them will tell you how they're the best dogs in the world. That's why people see black males with pit bulls all the time—we feel like they get us, and we get them.

I was definitely conscious of the fact that I was adding an event to Oscar's day that didn't actually happen. It's a trick. His family didn't read the script, they just saw the film when it was done. I talked to Sophina a lot, and she told me about how one of the things Oscar would always talk to her about was wanting a house. He wanted a house with a backyard and a family dog. He wanted a pit bull really badly. That was a sign of the American dream for him, to have a house with a dog and backyard for his daughter, Tatiana, and with Sophina. That was something that we talked about.

I didn't want to make a documentary, so, by making it a narrative feature, my first duty is to not only tell a story the right way, but to tell a story that's a rewarding narrative experience, that people can lose themselves in. And for me, with every choice that I made during the screenwriting process, I looked at the research and really made sure that it was right choice to make. Then, I'd just go with it."

Jordan: "It's important to have a scene like that because… What do you do when nobody's looking? What do you do when nobody's around? You see a pile of money on the street—what do you do? Do you grab the money and run? Do you take it, or do you figure out who it belongs to? Moments like that define you as a person—those moments define your character.

That was a way to really describe Oscar, and what he would do in this moment in his life when he's trying to things around, when he's trying to put things back in order."

Shooting at the BART

There's a feeling of dread, paired with inevitability, permeating throughout Fruitvale Station. The first image seen is the actual video footage from January 1, 2009, reminding the viewer of exactly where this story is heading, which lends every tender family moment and scene of levity an underlying sadness. And once Jordan's Grant, Diaz's Sophina, and their friends hop onto the BART train, near the film's end, you know what's about to happen.

Coogler and his cast shot the BART incident on the actual Fruitvale Station's platform, within the four-hour downtime during which all trains ceased running for the evening. The unnerving sense of location wasn't lost on the actors.

Jordan: "We only had four hours to shoot that night, and we only had one camera, so we had very few takes in order to get that scene and do it right. It was a vast array of emotions. With all those elements combined, from the amount of people that were there, to the limited time we had to shoot, to the lack of resources at our disposal, and then the emotional situation that I was in, that all added up to make the hardest scene to shoot in the entire movie."

"The energy that was in the air while we were shooting that scene helped me get through it. Everyone there was focused. There were no egos. Honestly, if I did get distracted, or didn't feel like I was emotionally there, I would talk to Oscar, man. I was standing in the place where he got shot and lost his life. His presence was there. I just asked him to be around me. I prayed to him. I talked to him. That really helped me stay on track if I lost my focus."

Diaz: "We were actually supposed to shoot that BART sequence at the beginning of production, so I was kind of ready for it. But I'm so lucky that it didn't happen that way. I got to know Mike so well, and we got to shoot all of our heavy, weighty scenes together. My affection for Mike grew everyday, which made it that much easier to imagine how I would feel if that happened to my loved one. And also, Ryan was really supportive."

"Before we shot that scene, I wrote Ryan this really long email talking about how I was scared, and he wrote me back this great email where he talked about the many reasons why I shouldn't be so scared. I got to that place knowing that I had the cast and crew who were really supportive of me and where I had to bring myself for that moment."

The Time is Now

Oh, that clever marketing and distribution genius Harvey Weinstein—he sure knows how to effectively release his movies. Originally, Fruitvale Station was scheduled for a mid-October release, but in April, The Weinstein Company pushed its release date up to mid-July. Now, it's debuting theatrically in the midst of the hot-button, televised Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial. Like Oscar Grant in January 2009, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American male, was shot dead in February 2012, and both victims have been the subjects of immense, widespread sympathy but also questions about respective character.

Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin are two of countless victims of unlawful gun violence, a sad fact that, with Fruitvale Station Ryan Coogler hopes to bring to more people's attention. That's why he didn't want to wait any longer to write, direct, and release the film. The immediacy was too strong.

Coogler: "Young black males are losing their lives at a rapid rate in this country right now, with no signs of slowing down. I felt that, to make something that dealt with that and talked about that, was a priority to me. I wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible. If it gets people talking about these things sooner rather than later, that's a good thing. If people hadn't been recording with their camera phones at that very moment, people wouldn't be talking about Oscar Grant. Nobody outside of those folks who read the local Bay Area newspapers would have known anything about a young man named Oscar Grant getting killed."

Jordan: "In 2013, especially with what's going on in Chicago, there's a rapid loss of life. People are dying at an amazing rate. It's ridiculous. A message like the one in this film can get people, especially young people, to open their eyes and really start appreciating life. It doesn't matter who it is, or who's on the other side of the trigger, whether it's black-on-black violence or an officer and a civilian, or it's internal family drama. It's very important and very timely to get this message out there and make people reconsider things and hold themselves accountable. People then start asking questions and spark discussions, and become better moving forward."

Coogler: "If we hadn't made this film, the film industry might not be talking about these situations that happen to so many young black males, and this problem we have in our country as a whole. But it's a conversation that we all need to have more often. I just hope that this film can help spark that in whatever capacity possible."

"At the juvenile center where I work at, I work with a lot of kids like Oscar, kids his age and from his world. I hope that if they see my film, it will be an experience that's positive, but will also make them come away thinking. I think what Oscar was thinking during that day was how the choices he made affected the people he loved. I hope that kids who see Fruitvale think about that as well."

"Fruitvale Station": How a 27-Year-Old Rookie Filmmaker Humanized an American Tragedy

Learn the inside story behind the raw, heartbreaking indie film that's already generating heavy Oscar buzz.

"Fruitvale Station": How a 27-Year-Old Rookie Filmmaker Humanized an American Tragedy

Ryan Coogler's Background

Humanizing Oscar Grant

Spending Time With Oscar Grant's Family

Taking Creative License

Shooting at the BART

The Time is Now

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