. The latter became friendly with Cole during their collaboration and volunteered to interview him over the phone aboutRYAN COOGLER: So, how are you doing first of all? You good?I’m hanging in, I’m hanging in. I’m doing well, hunkered down in this time. You know, we lost a giant hair stylist, Charles Gregory Ross to COVID-19 a couple of weeks agoYeah, I was blessed to have the opportunity to work with him. So, for me, I'm hunkered down.
Yeah, I lived all around the Bay while I was in college and I spent a lot of time between classes and semesters with people from there. During that time, I really fell in love with the heart, the honesty of the entire Bay Area, that sense of community, family. And we shot across the street from people you know. Just that idea of family and how amazing that is, the history of the city. Also while I was there I saw the struggle. It was a formative time for me and shaped who I am in a lot of ways.
That's a good question. The world of this movie is one I've navigated at different times in my life as a fly on the wall. We’ve talked about this, right? I view that as a gift because of the perspective those experiences gave me.
I wanted to really embrace the crime movie genre while staying true to that humanity. You need really strong actors to do that. And so, working with my casting director Kim Coleman, our focus was to find actors who could embody the nuances the vulnerability that exists in humanity, the sense of intelligence that exists, and the frustration, and how someone might respond to being under the pressures of this sort of environment.We saw some folks in some quite different roles.