Creed, the seventh film in the Rocky film saga and the movie many have been talking about, isn’t only getting tons of buzz due to the history of its brother films or its handsome lead actor, Micheal B Jordan, but also due to it’s amazing directing. And the man to thank for that is the ,fairly new to the game of directing, Ryan Coogler. His first feature film, Fruitvale Station, was released in 2013. The story detailed the last 24 hours of the life of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed by a police officer at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, California on New Years day in 2009. The film which exemplified the current issues of injustice, gained what seemed to be the start of Coogler’s great journey in storytelling. The film earned the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
Ryan Coogler, 29, was born in Oakland, California and he wasn’t always a writer. His freshmen year of college he went to Saint Mary’s College of California on scholarship where he red-shirted as a wide receiver and planned on majoring in chemistry. It was his English professor, Rosemary Graham, who encouraged him to pursue screenwriting as a career. A blessing in disguise came in 2004, when Saint Mary’s cancelled it’s football program, causing Coogler to transfer to Sacramento State. While there, he played football and majored in finance but took as many film classes as he feasibly could. Later he attended USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he would then direct four short films, which went on to either be nominated or win awards.