The entire film was shot on hand-held cameras (except for one flashback scene set in prison, in which Coogler said he used a fixed camera because “Oscar had reached the lowest point in his life - a point at which he was standing still”). For me, what makes the film hard to watch at the end is the relationships - all the love that you see in them at the beginning.”įrom the moment Grant wakes up, until after he is pronounced dead, the camera stays close. “What happens on the platform - what happens in the last few minutes of the film - that’s not the film for me,” said Coogler. We see Grant in scores of mundane interactions with the people close to him - the sort of interactions that most films have no place for. Like the script, which doesn’t hesitate to examine Grant’s flaws, Coogler’s camerawork is intimate and personal. I wanted to be able to tell the story that humanizes it.” I felt a certain obligation to play this role. “Wallace could have been me,” said Jordan, in a telephone interview. “I think ‘The Wire’ is one of the more important artistic works since I’ve been alive,” Coogler said. Fans of “The Wire” will remember him as Wallace, a 16-year-old drug dealer at the center of the story arc in season 1. What we wanted to do was to show him as they knew him. The other side was kind of lifting him up, to the point that he was like a god. “His character had gotten split at the trial,” Coogler said. Whitaker’s backing helped Coogler earn the confidence of Grant’s family in 2011. “When I told Forest what I was thinking about, he said, ‘I really want to help you make this film,’ ” Coogler said. The shorts drew the attention of Forest Whitaker’s production company, which was looking to mentor young filmmakers. The most recent, “Fig,” which has made the festival rounds, is about a prostitute trying to take care of her daughter. After graduation, he enrolled in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts, where he made a few award-winning shorts. And I started to write my own.”Īt Sacramento, he switched his major from chemistry to finance, because he wanted to spend less time in labs and more in film classes (the school did not offer a film major). “I found an old copy of ‘Pulp Fiction’ just to see how one looked. “I had never seen a screenplay before,” he said. “I think you could go to Hollywood and write screenplays.” “You should think about writing for a living,” she told him. But the school dropped its football program, so he transferred to Sacramento State on another scholarship.Īt Saint Mary’s, his creative writing professor, novelist Rosemary Graham, had called Coogler into her office. Through the sport, he found acceptance, eventually winning a scholarship to Saint Mary’s College of California. He overcame that feeling by playing football. So I was kind of an outsider in both worlds.” And then I would go back to my neighborhood and I wouldn’t fit in with the kids there because I had on a Catholic school uniform, I had two parents, and I talked different. So I didn’t fit in with the crowd I was going to school with. “My parents didn’t buy me a lot of material things. “I never really fit in to where I was at as a kid,” he said. “My parents wanted us to have good educations, so they made that sacrifice for themselves to send me and my two brothers to Catholic schools.” While this schooling had its intended effect - Coogler said he excelled in academics, despite a few behavioral issues - it also set him apart. “In the areas we lived in, the school system was terrible,” Coogler said.
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