Ahna O’Reilly – Way Too Indie

Fruitvale Station

Bernard Boo — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

On New Year’s Day 2009, Oscar Grant, a black 22-year-old Bay Area resident was pulled off a BART train and taken into custody by a police officer. Unarmed and defenseless, he was shot in the back and killed on the Fruitvale BART station train platform in front of dozens of passengers. The incident was captured on a cell phone camera and went viral, making national news. The shocking footage opens director Ryan Coogler‘s debut feature, Fruitvale Station, a dramatization of Oscar Grant’s last day on earth which aims to humanize the shamefully under-discussed news story by spotlighting quiet, ostensibly meaningless moments in his final hours. This intimate, personal perspective on Oscar’s story illuminates the magnitude and cultural significance of his death in a way no news story ever could.

The decision to open the film with the raw footage is brilliant, providing weighty context for every scene that follows. After the clip, we loop back from New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve and the beginning of Oscar’s (Michael B. Jordan) day. He’s bickering with his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz) in their bedroom, trying to convince her that a recent affair was a one-time-only mistake. Diaz and Jordan have real chemistry, and their speech dynamic feels natural. When their daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal) knocks on the door, and Oscar hurries to hide a zip of weed before letting her in. He clearly ain’t no saint, but who is?

Coogler’s unobtrusive camera follows Oscar throughout his day as we’re introduced to the pile of mistakes he’s accumulated. He’s lost his job at the grocery store, he’s an ex-convict (which we discover in an unforgettable flashback scene), and he’s got an explosive temper, but he clearly loves his family and is trying hard to shake his demons for their sake. His life is a mess, but he’s determined to clean it up.

Jordan respects the role and convinces us that he was born to do it. He embraces the ugliness of his mean streak while convincing us that he’s a caring family man deep down, a challenge that would be easily flubbed by most young actors. He’s got the chops to be truly great. Octavia Spencer is characteristically captivating as Oscar’s mother, Wanda Grant, a soft-spoken, caring matriarch with an exhausted patience for his bullshit (she’ll never forget how Oscar going to jail affected her granddaughter.) Still, she loves her son, so when he tells her that he and Sophina are going to San Francisco to watch the fireworks she thoughtfully suggests they take BART instead of driving.

Coogler’s passion for his subjects is felt throughout the film, and he shows that he’s a director of taste and discipline. The key to the film’s success is making sure we get to know Oscar as a person, and he keeps his priorities straight. There are occasional moments of high drama that jar the tone of realism (Tatiana clairvoyantly asking her dad not to get on the BART train is totally unnecessary), and the post-Fruitvale scenes feel a little bloated, but for the most part Coogler makes all the right moves.

Returning to the titular train station for the film’s third act is as terrifying as you’d imagine. Watching the raw footage the first time was hard enough, but now we feel like we know Oscar inside and out, which makes the reenactment of his death simply earth-shattering. The fact that this dramatization is somehow more gut-wrenching than the raw footage is a testament to the power of cinema.

When I got out of the San Francisco press screening for Fruitvale Station, all I wanted to do was rush home, kiss my wife, and tell her I love her. I darted out of the theater in a panic, a sense of urgency compelling me to walk faster, faster, faster. I wanted to get home so bad I could burst. Then, I remembered something that stopped me cold. My ride home? A BART train. Fruitvale Station will rattle you to the core.

Interview: Michael B. Jordan and Octavia Spencer of Fruitvale Station

Bernard Boo — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We spoke to Michael B. Jordan (The Wire, Friday Night Lights), who plays Oscar in the film, and Octavia Spencer (The Help) who plays Oscar’s mother, Wanda Grant, in a tiny roundtable interview the day after the film’s premiere in Oakland. They spoke to us about their reactions to the shooting, meeting Oscar’s family, learning to curb their expectations in the movie industry, and why the film is able to touch the hearts of people across the globe. Check out the edited transcript below.

**Read More Fruitvale Station Interviews:**

Ryan Coogler
Ahna O’Reilly
Melonie Diaz

Before you were approached for the project, how knowledgeable were you on the Oscar Grant story?
Octavia Spencer: I did hear about it when it happened, but to put it in context, that was also the year that Barack Obama had been elected, so I was in more of a jubilant state of mind and decided since I was in that celebratory state of mind, I wasn’t really going to allow anything else to permeate that. I didn’t, unfortunately, revisit it until it was brought up as a project.

Michael B. Jordan: Same here. I remember being on my laptop and somebody posted the video on my wall. I remember looking at it and being disgusted by it, watching it over and over again trying to make it make sense, rationalize it, or justify it, but there was no justification. I felt helpless and a little bit angry. It feels like there’s nothing you can do in the moment, so life goes on. Four years later, this project pops up and I had to jump at the opportunity. I felt a certain responsibility to get the story out there.

What attracted you to the project?
Michael B. Jordan: The opportunity to express [myself] as a person of color, as a person from the inner-city who’s been put in situations like that before. Also the opportunity to give this guy some of his humanity back that was kind of lost over the [course of the] trial. To tell this guy’s story and hopefully prevent it from happening again.

Octavia Spencer: It resonated with me as a woman. I’m not a mother, but I have nephews who would be contemporaries of Oscar’s and Michael’s. I almost didn’t take the part because when I saw the video I felt that all I had to offer it was anger. Because the Trayvon Martin case was so topical, I felt like anger was the wrong emotion to associate with it because it was so public and it was so volatile an issue here in the Bay Area. My agent made me read the script and I found it refreshing to learn that Ryan Coogler—who is also an African-American male—could have written a movie that was an indictment of our judicial system, an indictment of our public service, but he didn’t. What he did was choose to—as Michael said—restore some of Oscar’s humanity, showing his flaws and showing him doing regular human interaction with his family. That was really profound.

How did you approach the movie already knowing the fate of Oscar Grant?
Michael B. Jordan: Honestly, you have to put yourself in that position. That’s the last 24 hours of his life. His death is such a small fraction of the film. I think the movie is about this young man who’s trying to do right by the people he loves, trying to figure out this thing called life that nobody seems to have the blueprint to. You have to make mistakes. You have to get to know him through the family—through his daughter, through his mom, through Sophina, his best friends—and kind of live in the moment, honestly. That’s all this movie [is]—Oscar’s moments.

Octavia Spencer: It’s acting 101. You can only deal with the given circumstances. Wanda has no idea that her son is going to die at the end of the day. Neither does he. You have to really immerse yourself in the world.

Neither of you have kids, so what did you channel to portray such loving parents?
Octavia Spencer: I am not a parent, but I do have family members that I love. It’s about the truthfulness of the relationship and the bonds that we feel with our family members. That was the toughest part for me. It’s about being true to the relationship.

Michael B. Jordan: I love kids. I’ve got little cousins running around, so I’m always interacting with younger kids. Honestly, I can’t wait to be a dad one day. Sometimes when you deal with so many adults in this industry with ulterior motives it’s like one big chess match. You’re always trying to figure out somebody’s angle. When you’re around a kid who has no bad habits, still learning good from bad, it’s refreshing to be around that. Playing with that relationship was a lot of fun.

How was it when you met Oscar’s family for the very first time?
Michael B. Jordan: My approach was meeting everybody and getting as much information up front, before I started doing this thing. Then, just building this guy up. You have the skeleton, then you have to keep layering up, layering up. By the time we actually started filming, you have a pretty good idea of who this guy is, and then you just live with him throughout the rest of the film. That was my approach.

Octavia Spencer: I second that. We had different windows of opportunity to do that, for me much more limited, but I’m also not carrying the entire film as Michael is. It was important to meet Wanda because there’s only so much you can gleam from the information provided via the internet. Ryan is a prolific researcher and he viewed her a lot, so I was given those tapes. When I actually had the chance to sit down and meet with her and realize that we were so different…those are things you can’t possibly know. It was about trying to emulate the essence of Wanda because I had a truncated window of prep time. I knew all that I needed to know except for those intangibles, and meeting her filled in the blanks.

Michael, you played a character on Friday Night Lights, Vince, who is, similarly to Oscar, trying to turn his life around. What’s it like creating a character over seasons as opposed to a single day, as in Fruitvale Station?
Michael B. Jordan: I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some very talented writers that seem to write human relationships so well. With Vince, it’s a different pace because it’s a longer arc. With this movie…I feel like if you spend a day with anybody, from sunup to sundown, through their day to day routine, you can get a pretty good idea of who somebody is. I think that formula works very well with Oscar because that day was so eventful for him. He interacted with a lot of people that he cared about the most and was putting them in a vast number of situations that show different sides of him. You got a chance to see him when nobody was looking…which I think really defines somebody’s character. Then, you see him through different flashbacks and different tools of storytelling. You got a chance to see this guy when he didn’t have such a handle on his temper. You see him in moments with his daughter. You see all these different, complex sides of this guy all compacted into one day. You try to do the best you can to make him as real as possible. You just want to make it real and relatable.

How do you suppress expectations before you begin a project like this?
Octavia Spencer: You don’t have them! You can’t have expectations because the reality of Fruitvale Station, when you look at all the independents that people shoot—usually, they don’t get to go the festival route. Sometimes, they sit in a can and nobody ever gets to see them. You can’t enter into anything like that with expectations. At least, I don’t.

Michael B. Jordan: From a young age of acting, going to auditions and getting your hopes up all the time…you think you did a good job. “I’m going to get it!” When you’re young, you don’t understand that there are so many other things that come into play. When you have a few letdowns, you start to mentally train yourself to not have expectations. You learn how things work in the system. You realize how not in control you are. Once you understand that, it’s easier for you to put your all into [something], walk away and say, “Whatever happens, happens.”

The film is about a specific community, the East Bay Area, that’s generally unfamiliar to people across the country. Why do you think it touches people across the globe, like it did at Cannes?
Michael B. Jordan: It’s universal. Everybody knows what it’s like to lose a loved one, lose life, or to care about somebody, or to love somebody. [Fruitvale Station] is like a love story in so many ways. It’s about Oscar’s love for his family and his family’s love for [him.] Anybody who’s had a best friend or a mom or a daughter who they care about can relate to somebody being taken away from them. I think when [someone’s] taken away in such a fashion that [Oscar] was, it hits people and they’re affected by it. That’s one of the many themes that people relate to no matter what language you speak or where you’re from.

Octavia Spencer: Absolutely. A mother’s love, a father’s love—those are universal themes. Injustice is a universal theme. We all can understand that and I think that’s why the jargon that might not translate into another language…you still see the human emotion on the screen, and it reads.

Was there a particular scene that you read in the script that made you think, “I really have to do this.”
Octavia Spencer: The script as a whole captured my heart. That’s the other thing that you learn as an actor: Don’t fall in love with scenes! It may not make it to the final cut.

Michael B. Jordan: As a whole, I read the script and I was very moved. I cried while reading, which was not an easy thing to do. Favorite scene? There’s a couple, but probably the prison scene. The scene with the dog I had fun reading and shooting at the same time. After shooting, I thought, “That was one of my favorite scenes.” Those two really jumped out at me.

Octavia Spencer: At my second viewing at Cannes I got the profundity of [the dog scene.] I don’t even know if Ryan intended to do this, but the pitbull is a symbol of fear and terror—marginalized. Then, he’s killed and the driver never slows down. It’s not a stretch to say that the character of Oscar Grant was viewed in the same way. It was this beautiful harbinger use of foreshadowing by Ryan. I just thought it was a dog the first time, but when I saw it the second time, I was like, “It’s a pitbull!” It really affected me. You know, I’m an English major, so you always have to look for, “What’s the metaphor?” and all that stuff. I thought that was very profound.

What has the feedback from people in the Bay Area been?
Octavia Spencer: We just got her last night, but I can tell you the feedback in the theater that we were in was very positive. Usually, when you have Q&A’s, a lot of people leave, but they stayed. I guess time will tell, but gauging from the audience last night it was very positive.

Michael B. Jordan: That was the first time anybody from up here had a chance to see it, so we’re curious to see how it affects the community who lost [Oscar.] Time will tell.

Fruitvale Station opens in theaters this Friday.

Interview: Ahna O’Reilly of Fruitvale Station

Bernard Boo — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We spoke to Ahna O’Reilly (The Help) who plays Katie, a girl who meets Oscar by chance, shares a pleasant interaction with him, and later becomes a witness to the horrific shooting in a tiny roundtable interview the day after the film premiered in Oakland. She talked to us about her friendship with The Help and Fruitvale Station costar Octavia Spencer, her first time watching the film with an audience, shooting at the titular train station, and more. Check out the edited transcript below.

**Read More Fruitvale Station Interviews:**

Ryan Coogler
Michael B. Jordan and Octavia Spencer
Melonie Diaz

How was the premiere?
It was wonderful. I felt more excited for this premiere in Oakland than any one we’ve had.

How familiar were you with the story of Oscar Grant?
Embarrassingly, not enough. I lived in LA at the time it happened, but my parents still lived here. I remember talking about it with them vaguely. One of the things that is most crazy and upsetting about this is that I didn’t have one conversation with people about it in LA. Most people that see this movie, this is the first they’re going to hear of it. One of the main differences between the premiere last night (in Oakland) and the other premieres we’ve had—at Sundance, at Cannes—is that most of those people had no idea who Oscar Grant was. When I’m talking to people about this movie, it’s rarer that they know who Oscar Grant is. That is tragic.

You don’t work with her on the film, but talk about your friendship with Octavia and how she got you involved with the film.
Octavia and I worked together on The Help, but we actually worked together before that. She and I have been friends for years. She’s one of my best friends. I was working on a film in Savannah, Georgia at the time they were shooting Fruitvale Station. She called me and she said, “Can you come be a part of this movie? We need someone to play this part. Please please please?” I was like, “I would do anything for you!” I read the script and I thought, she’s giving me such a huge gift. She’s acting like I’m doing her this huge favor, but she’s just given me such a gift. Being from the Bay Area, to be a part of telling this story, to be working with such an incredible group of artists—it doesn’t get any better.

Is your character is based on anyone?
Ryan told me that [my character] was a combination of a lot of different people. Because it was a combination of people, I didn’t feel I had to base my character on someone 100 percent real. There wasn’t someone I had to go interview. Because this movie came to me so last minute, I was kind of thrown into it. I watched the Youtube footage, I read up on it, but I was kind of thrown into it, which was perfect, because that’s what it was on the train—everyone was just thrown into that dramatic and heart-wrenching and horrible situation. It worked for me to just show up. The grocery store scene is just someone talking to me out of the blue. I actually had no real preparation to do other than I wanted to do my research on Oscar Grant.

Your scene with Oscar in the grocery store goes a long way in showing what kind of a guy Oscar was.
I think the scene is so lovely in that we see Oscar being a great dad, we see him in this moment with this dog, and then we see him having a total random act of kindness with a stranger, and that is such a beautiful trait in him to just want to lend a hand to a community member. Ryan was talking last night about how a lot of what this movie is about is community. I love that little random act of kindness. I think we’re increasingly closed off to the people around us—we’re always on our phone, we’re not looking up and taking people in. That’s what I’m doing in the scene. I’m totally ignoring him, kind of hoping he’s not going to keep talking to me. That’s how I often feel in life, and I have a sense of shame about it. Why didn’t I just say hello to the person helping me out? Why didn’t I just ask them how their day was going? Those little things matter so much. It shows a beautiful side of [Oscar.]

How was it was it watching the movie for the first time with an audience at Sundance?
[It was] incredible. You could hear a pin drop towards the end of the movie. All you heard was people being emotional. [It] didn’t matter—age, sex, race—everyone was shocked. I was a mess. I was sitting next to Michael, gripping him. I knew [the film] would be powerful, but what Ryan did with it really bowled me over. When you have a film going to Sundance, the fact that the film is going to Sundance is exciting, so I was already like, “This is great! We’re here! We made it!” I had no idea [the film] would have the life that it has. I think everyone’s pinching themselves, and it couldn’t happen to a greater group of people who are in this for the purest of reasons—to tell honest, socially relevant stories.

How was it working with Ryan Coogler?
The first scene I shot was the grocery scene, and it was a night shoot. I remember being in [the store] and seeing how he was interacting and talking with everybody and thinking I would literally serve coffee to people on set on his next movie. I want to be around him. He has such a quiet, powerful presence. I think one of the greatest qualities a director can have is finding the balance between being collaborative and wanting to hear everybody’s ideas, but also having a very clear vision. He totally embodied that.

(On the film’s script)
I think it’s brilliant that he started the movie with the real footage. Even if you’ve never heard of Oscar Grant, you know how it ends. The fact that he keeps us glued to the screen, knowing how it’s going to end—that’s an incredible accomplishment.

What was it like filming at Fruitvale Station?
That was one of the most powerful days of work I will probably ever have. On any day of work, you get there and it’s a little chaotic. Who’s going to hair and makeup? Who’s doing what? People are being rushed to where they need to go. Then, we all got [to Fruitvale Station] and it’s like, oh yeah, we’re here. We can see the bullet hole. Ryan took a moment of silence and a prayer circle. It was very, very powerful. Then, you have to get going because you have only until sunlight to make it happen. You’re dealing with a moving train. Those are technically difficult things to have to shoot. It was wild on many levels.

Not all of the train stuff was shot on the same day. The interior train stuff we did down at the Bart repair station. When we were on the Fruitvale Station platform it was a separate shoot.

Why is this film, about such a specific Bay Area community, able to touch people across the world?
I personally wondered how many Europeans watching [the film would know] what Oakland, California is. They know San Francisco, but will they know Oakland? It’s a really American story about a very specific place in our country. You wonder how it will translate [and if] the humor will resonate with them. When [the screening] was over, it got a 10 minute standing ovation. That was incredible. For this [tiny movie]—in terms of budget and scale—[to touch] people from around the world…I’m speechless thinking about it. It’s a universal story. Ryan is asking us, the audience, to think about how we treat each other as human beings. [Can we] erase our ideas about what you are because you’re black or you’re from Oakland or you’re 22 or you were in prison? Can we try to push all that aside and try to look at the heart of this person? People from anywhere should be able to think about that. I think that’s why it succeeds.

The French know about the American South. That’s something people have ideas about. They know about New York, Boston. Oakland? I doubt [it.]

Fruitvale Station opens in theaters this Friday.

As I Lay Dying (Cannes Review)

Dustin Jansick — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

At the very least, you must credit James Franco for even attempting to film what some consider to be a near impossible story to tell. William Faulkner’s classic 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying, features 15 different characters, each telling a part of the story in their point of view. Director James Franco does a marvelous job of recreating this by showing many parts of the film with a split screen that often shows one character speaking on one side and the reaction of the other character on the other side. Franco can now mark another tally under his growing collection of experimental films.

The overall plot of As I Lay Dying is a fairly simple one; a family travels on a journey to the town of Jefferson in order to fulfill the requests of recently deceased family member named Addie Bundren. The real story lies within all the details and burdens each character brings to the table. But the details are rather long-winded, which makes following what exactly is going on a bit challenging.

The biggest obstacle comes on the first day of their long-haul. The group must cross a river with their wagon that is carrying the coffin without the use of a bridge due to massive flooding. Their only option is to try crossing with the aid of an improvised ford, but it does end smoothly. One of the traveler’s leg gets badly injured during this mishap and requires some serious medical attention. I will spare some of the gruesome details that ensue when they attempt to treat the wound themselves.

I must confess that I did not read the novel before seeing the film and I think it was a real challenge because of that fact. There are indeed many films that you can get by just fine without having read the literature beforehand, however, I do not believe As I Lay Dying fits into that category. Not helping matters is a character named Anse (Tim Blake Nelson) who would give Bane (of The Dark Knight Rises) a run for his money at being more incomprehensible. The combination of his rotting teeth and extreme Southern drawl made it difficult to understand more than every tenth word he spoke. Even though As I Lay Dying is an English speaking film, the French speaking audience members at this screening likely better understood what was being said because they at least had subtitles to read.

James Franco came on stage to introduce the film at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and bluntly said, “This is a weird film.” Indeed it was. For better or worse, As I Lay Dying certainly felt like a literal interpretation of the novel, but as I mentioned before I have not read the book, therefore I cannot say that with absolute certainty. The acting in the film was very strong but the obvious standout is the film’s poetic and Malick like cinematography. Whether or not the film works may very well come down to one simple question, did you read the book beforehand?