Fruitvale Station has become one of the year’s most talked about films. With its Sundance buzz, The Weinstein Company acquired the film and showed it in Cannes and other prestigious film festivals. While in Cannes myself, I was invited to join some roundtable interviews with the cast. Michael B. Jordan plays Oscar Grant, a young man killed in an altercation with police at the Fruitvale stop on the Bay Area’s BART line. The film, directed by Ryan Coogler, recreates accounts of that night, and dramatizes other aspects of Grant’s life including his prison time and involvement with drugs. Jordan spoke about his take on Grant on the beach in the South of France.
CraveOnline: Oscar seems like an angry person through a lot of the film. How do you deal with playing angry and separating that rage from your real emotions?
Michael B. Jordan: I think that’s one of the fun parts about acting is trying to not keep it separate, kind of blur those lines, dissolve myself and really embody Oscar and who he is and what he represents. He had a quick temper, a quick switch and I think that’s fun to play because it’s not like myself. It definitely lingers after a while. Whenever you embody a character, something that I’m learning to do now in the early stages of my career, it’s one of the things that draws me to acting is being able to let myself go and walk in somebody’s shoes for a little bit so it lingers for a little while after, a little bit depressed, a little bit angry but after a while it goes away.
CraveOnline: Do you have a safe space to explore that, where it became very dangerous for Oscar in real life?
I guess the good thing about that is I was kind of isolated. While I was up in Oakland, it was a 20 day shoot and I wasn’t walking around, traveling places all angry and uptight. He was a very loving person. He cared very much about the people that were close to him and his friends. The way he interacts with complete strangers, as you saw, he treated everybody with humanity for the most part but yet he was very flawed as well.
Michael B. Jordan on the criticism that Oscar is portrayed too heroically in Fruitvale Station.
I think whenever somebody like Oscar’s life is taken away, his personality, his character is polarized. Either [he’s] depicted as a monster or this horrible human being, angry or a complete saint and perfect. He’s being judged by people who don’t know him. So the best thing that me and Ryan can do, and everybody as a film, was get to know him through the people who knew him best – his daughter, his mom and people that really cared about him, people that really knew him – and create that gray area and then leave it up to everybody else to come up with their own opinions.
I don’t feel like we guilted anybody into feeling any type of way about him. We just kind of let him be as flawed a human being as we all are. We all make mistakes and I feel like it’s in the trying. At 22 years old, I’m pretty sure we all made some mistakes and some things that we regret. He just didn’t have the opportunity to make those right and he was trying on that last day. His life unfortunately was taken away a little early.
Michael B. Jordan on the film’s accuracy in portraying Oscar.
I think it’s as true as it can be. A lot of the structure, the skeleton of the script was made up of public records at first before Ryan even got a chance to really communicate with a lot of the family. So after you’ve got your skeleton together, you start layering it up with different facts, different points of view, etc. That’s where we ended up.
Michael B. Jordan on his research material for Fruitvale Station.
We saw everything that the jury saw for the most part. I know I did. Ryan was our key to the family because they were very guarded. It happened so soon, it was very soon. The movie was only four years after the incident so that as a family, I’m pretty sure they were very closed off. I think “The Wire” helped. They were all fans of “The Wire” so it was a little easier to open up to me a little bit. They trusted him because he’s from the same neighborhood. They knew his angle. He’s a very proud Bay Area resident and they trusted him with Oscar’s legacy and his life. The family was very important.
Michael B. Jordan reflects on the night Oscar Grant was killed.
I was living in L.A. at the time. Through Facebook and YouTube and through the black community, it was a conversation that was definitely had. When I first found out, I was outraged, very upset, felt really helpless. I’m from Norton, New Jersey and I used to catch the train all the time from Newark to Manhattan, just going to auditions and whatever, growing up. During the holidays, the same type of thing, me and my friends going over there, going into the city to hang out, West Indian Day Parade, etc. etc. and you would see altercations with a police officer and passengers all the time. It didn’t escalate to that level but it could’ve just as easily been me. Me and Oscar are very close in age, he looks like me, it could have easily have been me. So I felt a certain responsibility for sure. I felt a certain responsibility.
Hopefully the movie sparks conversation between people, regardless of where you from, what language you speak, the color of your skin, how much money you’ve got. It’s about the humanity and how we treat one another.
