How Ryan Coogler Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels

INTRODUCTION

“Making a film is something that involves a lot of technicalities, you know. And it is hard work. And it is something that’s systematic to me that I’ve learned. Going up against time and money you know you never have enough of either one when making a film and I hear it’s still like that on films of higher budgets.”  - Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler’s career has seen a progression all the way from shooting a low budget indie movie that became a festival smash, to directing one of the biggest blockbuster Marvel films in the world. 

As you may have seen in this series, directing films at different budget levels has an inevitable impact on how movies are made. Despite this, Coogler’s work is all bound by characters and stories told through an empathetic lens, made by a close knit team of collaborators, which are thoroughly researched and to a large extent shaped by how he writes his screenplays.

So, let’s take a look at the low budget Fruitvale Station, the mid budget Creed and the high budget Black Panther to see how his approach to making movies has evolved over time and identify some commonalities that are present throughout his career. 

FRUITVALE STATION - $900,000

“The biggest thing that I walked away with from film school is just a lot of my colleagues. You know, like, I met the composer that’s done all of my films at film school. One of my editors has worked with me the whole time. The community was the most valuable thing that it gave.” - Ryan Coogler

Coogler first became interested in screenwriting during a college creative writing course, where his teacher recognised his talent for his visual writing style and proposed he try writing screenplays.

After undergrad he got into film school at USC where he made a number of short films that did well at festivals with some collaborators who he would continue to work with through his career. 

During his studies he mentioned to a friend who was studying law about potentially making a film about the Oscar Grant case. Later, when his friend began working on the case, he introduced Coogler to the Grant family who gave the rights to tell the story. 

After the festival success of his shorts, and getting the script for Fruitvale Station into the Sundance Screenwriters lab in 2012, Forest Whitaker came on board to produce through his production company Significant Productions. A production budget of $900,000 was secured to make the film. 

“Being in the Bay area at the time and being the same age as the guys who were involved and seeing myself and a lot of my friends in them. Then shortly after seeing it become politicised. Seeing his humanity get split in two different directions. And the fact that he was a human being whose life was lost kinda got glossed over. You know, ,my outlet, my artistic outlet is filmmaking, so, oftentimes, when I see things or think about things I think of them in that format.” - Ryan Coogler

He compiled as much research as he could from a combination of legal documents as well as talking to the friends and family of Oscar Grant. His goal was to treat the story with a sensitivity by humanising the characters on screen through portraying an intimate, personal portrait of their relationships.

 Letting the story play out in a world which was as true to life as he could make it. To create this visual world encompassed in realism he turned to a close collaborator, cinematographer Rachel Morrison.  

“Fruitvale’s a really interesting scenario for a cinematographer because you have tons of films that are based on true stories but very few that are based on true stories that happened three years ago in locations that still exist exactly as they were. So it’s not this interpretation of something. It was really important to be really, really authentic.” -  Rachel Morrison, Cinematographer

She pushed this idea of authenticity visually by shooting on a grainier, more organic Super 16mm film, using a handheld, exploratory single camera and by keeping the lighting as naturalistic, motivated and as true to life as possible.

The smaller gauge film size meant that they shot on wider lenses and therefore had a deeper depth of field than a 35mm film plane. 

Morrison shot the film on an Arriflex 416 with Zeiss Ultra 16 lenses which were donated to the production by Arri. The Ultra 16s are probably the sharpest Super 16 primes on the market and since there were going to be a lot of low light scenes, Morrison wanted lenses that would be as sharp as possible when shot wide open at T/1.3 on the lower fidelity 16mm Kodak 500T film.

An idea that the cinematographer discussed with Coogler was finding a middle ground between a deconstructed documentary realism and a fictional, elevated cinematic gravitas - where visual tweaks were made to elevate the story.

An example of this was how they used the colour grade in post production as a low budget way of changing the colour balance of the lights in the real shooting location. 

“In the BART station the fluorescent lights up above, actually they’re warm light - which is sort of a yellow, warm feeling to them. And it’s this terrible, terrible event and for me I always, the second I saw them I’m like, ‘Well we’re going to time it cool right?’ And then we got into this dialogue about will it still feel like the BART station if we time it to feel a little cooler instead of being warm. That was the dialogue which was so interesting. Most films I think are much less beat for beat interpretations of things.” -  Rachel Morrison, Cinematographer

By shooting with no large production design builds, being quick, flexible, handheld and using a lot of the ambient light that was naturally present on the real locations Coogler pulled off the shoot with his tight knit crew on a budget of $900,000. 

CREED - $35 Million

“I’m a big Rocky fan. You know, I kinda inherited my love for those movies through the love for my father. So I knew the movies really well. I knew the world really well. I kinda came up with this idea where a young guy interacts with basically my dad’s hero at a time in his life where he’s ageing and dealing with his own mortality in a way that we’ve never seen him deal with it before. It’s really about me and my dad. As much as I could bring of my own, you know, partial inexperience. Really, my dad, my relationship with him, as a heartbeat for the creative tensions there.”  - Ryan Coogler

Contrary to what some may think, the idea for Creed was not one that was conceived by a studio. Instead, Coogler had been toying with the concept for a Rocky spin off with his USC friend Aaron Covington, just as a fun spec script while he was working on Fruitvale Station.

At the Sundance Screenwriting lab for his first film he was able to secure an agent who asked him whether he had any ideas for projects beyond Fruitvale. After explaining his concept for Creed his agent set up a meeting where Coogler pitched the idea to Stallone - the original writer, and of course, lead actor in the Rocky franchise.

After securing Stallone’s buy-in to get a script written, MGM paid for him and Convington to write the screenplay. Appreciating the fresh perspective on the story and his character, Stallone gradually agreed to come on board until MGM greenlit the project with a production budget of approximately $35 million.

In Stallone, Coogler found a new collaborator to work with.

“He’s also a producer on the film. He was comfortable taking a backseat here which is a big thing. He had written all the scripts, every single last one, for these types of films. What really made him excited was seeing this from the millennial perspective. You know, we’re talking about a 68 year old dude who is showing up in the cold everyday. And shows up for a day where we’re shooting four pages and he’s got 10 pages of character work that he did the night before. It was amazing and it was energising.” - Ryan Coogler

One example of Coogler’s openness to collaborations from his cast and crew happened when instead of Stallone throwing water in Michael B Jordan’s character’s face to wake him up as it was written in the screenplay, Stallone proposed that his character play old records instead, as it’s what he felt his character would do. They went with this suggestion and it made the cut.

To create a visual language for the film which was a little bit ‘slicker’ than Fruitvale Station, but which was still grounded by a similar photographic feeling of realism he turned to cinematographer Maryse Alberti - whose naturalistic work on The Wrestler he admired. 

Rather than something more stylised like Raging Bull, they decided on a camera language which was more realistic and which at the same time paid subtle homage to the original Rocky film with its famous early use of the Steadicam - but didn’t copy the look.

“We looked back more at what not to do. Do you like this colour? Do you like this? No? Well, me neither. And taking the good things like the iconic thing of the steps and things like that. But, yeah, he was reinventing.” - Maryse Alberti, Cinematographer 

One way that they reinvented the film visually was by making the final boxing match look more like it would be presented realistically on a modern TV broadcast by shooting at a deeper stop of T/5.6 and using a higher key lighting style.

They did this by building the ring on a soundstage and surrounding it with a 600 foot greenscreen wall which they could then replace with a composited crowd using visual effects. Her team lit the ring by rigging up square truss above the space from which they suspended 120 tungsten par can lights with different lights focused at different distances, to provide an even overhead lighting.

Because it’s tiring for actors to repeat these choreographed boxing scenes many times in a row and maintain the same level of energy, they shot with multiple cameras to get better coverage - in a slightly similar visual style to how big fights might be shot for TV.
This scene was covered with one camera on a technocrane, getting telescoping movement and wider shots, one camera on a steadicam which could roam around the ring, and two handheld cameras getting on the ground reactions.

They made the decision to shoot digitally on the Arri Alexa XT in 2.8K Arriraw with spherical Cooke S4 primes and some wide angle Angenieux Optimo zooms. She also used the Alexa Mini on a Movi for some scenes which need nimble camera moves through tight spaces such as when the camera tracked from outside the ring, through the ropes into the ring - which they did by passing the Movi off in the hand to a new operator. 

Alberti chose the S4s as they flattered skin tones and rendered them nice and softly, which counteracted the digital grain they planned to add in post which roughened up skin a little bit.

Creed was therefore pulled off on a much larger production budget of around $35 million that leaned on established franchise characters, while also invigorating the series with a new perspective that used a larger crew to run more gear, involved building sets, shooting more time-consuming action sequences and incorporating more visual effects work in post. 

BLACK PANTHER - $200 Million

“The biggest difference actually wasn’t in the restrictions. It was actually, like, in the lack of restrictions. When I was making my first film, dealing with not a lot of money you have a lot of limitations and it helps you actually move faster because you can’t do just anything. Maybe sometimes there’s only one place you can put the camera. You can only be in this location for two hours and then you have to go. It makes it easier. When you can do anything and that’s kinda what happens with a film like this. That’s what I found made it a lot harder.” - Ryan Coogler

A lack of limitations means that more preparation time can be put into the project during pre-production. As with all his movies, Coogler’s role as a director began with him being involved in writing the script. 

An extensive period of prep time was necessary for this Marvel blockbuster undertaking which involved far more scope, intricate scenes and visual effects than any of his prior work had.

This required input from multiple heads of departments. For this he brought together many of his prior collaborators who’d worked with him since Fruitvale Station, and some even since his student short films days. This included editor Michael P. Shawver, production designer Hannah Beachler, composer Ludwig Göransson and cinematographer Rachel Morrison. 

 The director and cinematographer had many discussions with Marvel’s VP of physical production and with Geoffrey Baumann, who oversaw a team of 16 different visual effects vendors that were working on the film. 

Practically, this prep work involved doing things like creating a previs - a rough animated version of the entire cut of the film - and mapping out how they would cover a scene using a 3D printed scale model of a set for a casino scene they would be constructing.

One of the moves that they came up with for this fight scene was a shot where the camera transitioned between different characters on the set’s two floors by flying through the air. They rigged a Movi gimbal onto a cable rig, which lifted the camera to the second floor. From there, another operator could grab the camera off the line and begin operating it.   

While they were working on building this set, Morrison drew up a detailed lighting plan which involved rigging multiple overhead 8x8 and 4x4 blanket lights from SourceMaker, using higher output LRX Scorpion tungsten units to backlight and then using Varilite VL1000s which could be remotely swivelled to hit specific spots with targeted light. All of these fixtures were effectively ‘built into’ the set and rigged to a DMX board so that the levels could be adjusted quickly on the day of shooting.

Coogler turned his attention to detail for each character by focusing on things such as their costumes, which in the Casino scene were designed to take on the Pan African flag colours of green, red and black.

Since seeing all the costumes, even in the backgrounds of shots, was a priority to the director, Morrison needed to shoot at a deeper stop. This meant that rather than shooting on a large format Alexa 65 camera, Morrison chose to shoot open gate on a smaller sensor Alexa XT - which would yield a slightly deeper focus than a large format camera, with the Panavision Primo spherical lenses set to a stop between T/2.8 and T/4.

Coogler shot Black Panther with its larger scope story that involved more actors, preparation, visual effects, action sequences, stunts, bigger set builds, and even larger technical camera, lighting and grips setups.

However, he maintained his fingerprints on the project by co-writing the screenplay, using real world research to provide a level of depth to each character, working with his same close knit pool of collaborators, creating a deliberate visual style which was true to the tone he wanted and carefully telling the story through a lens which is empathetic and does justice to his characters.