Ryan Coogler. A man's death, a career's birth

'The New York Times'It had been nearly a year since Ryan Coogler last stood on the arrival platform on the upper-level of the Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, where 22-year-old Oscar Grant III, unarmed and physically restrained, was shot in the back by a BART transit police officer in the early hours of New Year's Day 2009.

The last time he was there, in July 2012, Coogler, a 26-year-old first-time feature director, was filming pivotal scenes for "Fruitvale Station," a heart-wrenching and hauntingly detailed portrayal of Grant's last day alive. The film, starring Michael B. Jordan ("Friday Night Lights"), took the Grand Jury and Audience Awards in its category at this year's Sundance Film Festival and received the Prize of the Future at Cannes. Acquired for distribution by the Weinstein Co. for a reported $2.5 million, "Fruitvale Station" opened July 12 in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, two weeks before its nationwide release .

"It's still very unnerving to me, man," Coogler said, pacing across the same floor tiles , one of them still nicked by a bullet mark leaning against the same smooth gray concrete walls where Grant spent his final living moments, frightened, angry and confused. It's also where, amazingly, BART allowed Coogler to film his re-creation of the incident, a chaotic and harrowing sequence that, even though audiences know it's coming, has left them in tears.

"We shot here for three nights after the station was closed," Coogler said, "and every night we had to take a moment of silence before we started those four hours of work. Everybody was there with us: BART employees, safety monitors, train drivers, all the cast members and crew. Some of us would pray; others would just keep to themselves. The energy of it hit everybody."

"It was the hardest thing I've done in my life, making this movie," he added, the emotion evident in his shaky , subdued voice. "Having to see Oscar die so many times. And having to see the people react to it. That never gets easy, man. Never."

Coogler, a former college football player, was a graduate student at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts when Grant was shot. Because it happened on a platform crowded with New Year's Eve partyers returning from San Francisco, the incident was captured on dozens of cell phone cameras, the videos quickly going viral, uploaded countless times to YouTube and broadcast repeatedly on Bay Area television stations, setting off an uproar that led to protests across Oakland and the East Bay.

"It really caused an identity crisis here in the Bay Area because we think of ourselves as the most progressive place, the most diverse place, the most accepting place in the country," he said. "I grew up with white friends, Asian friends - Vietnamese, Chinese, Pacific Islanders. I had Hispanic friends, not just Mexican friends, but Guatemalan friends, Honduran friends, and we knew the difference, you know? So when we saw that happen to Oscar, and we saw it on video, it was like the wind getting knocked out of us . I was questioning who we were as a community."

The phone-camera footage that Coogler uses to open his film shows white BART officers confronting and attempting to restrain a small group of young African-American men, Grant among them. There had been a fight on the BART train arriving from San Francisco, and officers, clearly on edge, were making arrests. After several tense moments, one officer, later identified as Johannes Mehserle, pulled his revolver and shot Grant, already face down on the floor.

Mehserle, who claimed in court that he meant to draw his Taser instead of his gun, was eventually charged with second-degree murder, convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months of a two-year sentence before being released in 2011.

"You hear about urban violence, people our age getting shot, being killed by each other and by the police," Coogler said. "It's something you're constantly aware of. But this time, we were witnesses to it. The video made all of us witnesses."

Within weeks of the incident, Coogler, who had made two well-regarded short films at USC, was telling friends he wanted to make a movie about what had happened at the Fruitvale Station. And he had the structure in mind: to follow Grant through his last day, the mundane and the exciting, the good and the bad, to paint a portrait of a life about to be lost.

"I wanted the audience to get to know this guy, to get attached," he said, "so that when the situation that happens to him happens, it's not just like you read it in the paper, you know what I mean? When you know somebody as a human being, you know that life means something."

Even before he graduated last year, Coogler had meetings with the Grant family attorney, John Burris, and, fortuitously, with the Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker, who was auditioning promising young filmmakers for his production company. After one meeting and seeing Coogler's short films, he offered to develop and produce the project.

"I've worked with a number of truly unique voices, true auteurs, and I can tell when I'm talking to one," Whitaker said. "You can see a subtle hand, even in the short films. You could recognize he was going to view this story in a special way."

Coogler, who after graduation returned to the Bay Area to work as a counsellor at a juvenile corrections facility, continued the work he began as a student, going over court records, getting to know Grant's family and friends and gaining their trust, trying to assemble as complete a portrait as he could.

"We talked about it; we prayed about it," said Wanda Johnson, Grant's mother, "and in the end we understood that Ryan really did care about humanizing Oscar. He really wanted to learn who Oscar was. He spent so much time with us that we really think of him as part of our family now.''

But Coogler also warned the family they might be uncomfortable with parts of the film, scenes that involved Grant's committing crimes, losing his temper, being unfaithful to his girlfriend, Sophina - the mother of his daughter, Tatiana, who was 5 when he was killed. "We understood," Johnson said, "that some of it would be difficult to watch."

The same went for audiences. Coogler said he wanted to be sure they came to see Grant's good qualities and his f laws , that he could be irresponsible in one moment and a loyal, loving father in another.

"The people that know somebody the best, they know the good and the bad about that person," he said. "They know the truth, which is complicated. And that gray area is where the tragedy lies.

"That's why I wanted to make a film where you spent the day with this guy, just spend time with him in a way that you can only do in a film.''