This is -- I’m being truthful!
BAFTA’s about honesty, isn't it?
Truth in a British way.
*Laughter* I'm sorry, these questions are wild!
My first what?!?
Hi, I’m Ryan Coogler and these are my Film Firsts with BAFTA.
Okay, so the first film that I remember seeing was ‘Boyz n the Hood’.
It came out in ‘91, and I was born in 1986,
so I was way too young to see it but my dad took me anyway,
we went to the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, California.
And I remember it like it was yesterday. Whoooo!
First time I watched ‘Rocky’?
This is going to surprise
people.
But the first time I watched ‘Rocky’, I was actually in film school.
It would have been.
it would have been 2008.
And this is for a very specific reason.
My father's favorite movie in the world is ‘Rocky II’.
So we
as a family watched ‘Rocky II’ you know, I don't know how many times
and we would buy my father
the pack, you know, we bought it for him on VHS,
then we bought it for him on DVD, then we bought it for him on Blu-ray
for Father's Day's whenever they would come out,
and we would have all of the movies, but we really would watch them from ‘Rocky II’ on.
I would leave ‘Rocky’ alone until I started
getting serious about learning how to be a filmmaker.
And I was realising that that was maybe one I should take a hard look at it.
So I watched it. I watched the Avildsen film,
the first Alvidsen film when I was like a grown man, you know?
And was really like profoundly moved by it.
So the first superhero franchise I remember engaging with as a kid
was actually ‘Batman’.
I love the ‘Batman’ movies.
I love the Tim Burton movies and the ones that followed after.
And I remember, you know, watching the films
and then begging my parents to take me to McDonald's
or Burger King and get the Happy Meal with the toy in a cup.
And, you know, those -- I had, you know, very,
very formative experiences for me.
I was introduced to the movies, actually,
before the comic books for ‘Batman’ crazy enough.
But to be honest with you, I loved them all.
I loved all that all of that pop culture stuff like the ‘Ninja Turtles’ movies was,
you know, that was my heart,
‘Power Rangers’ I’d watch that after school and then go to the movies.
‘He-Man’...
you know, all that stuff that was you know that was like
fastball over to plate marketed towards me and my friends.
So I ate it all up.
The first time I think I knew filmmaking would be my career was when I got
my fourth job, which would be the film that just came out.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Before that, I was not really sure.
Each time I was like, “Yo, I’m
gonna get fired from this movie” or “I'll never work in this town again”.
And now I think recently I've been able to feel like, okay,
I might be doing this for an extended period of time.
The first filmmaker that I started looking up to when I was growing up
is a complicated question for me because it was really like two that I admired:
It was Spike Lee and John Singleton, and they were the two filmmakers
whose films I remember seeing first, like my first
theatrical experience that I remember that was formative for me
was ‘Boyz n the Hood’, and it was closely followed by ‘Malcolm X’
and I came up late ‘80s, early ’90s and Spike was kind of like
inescapable at the time in terms of pop culture, black culture.
You see him on the sideline at basketball games and he was actually
in the Michael Jordan commercials in the Nike commercials as his character,
Mars Blackmon.
Like, for us that was what a director looked like.
You know, I had no idea what Steven Spielberg looked like or
Stanley Kubrick
or, you know, Billy Wilder or any of these folks, you know,
I mean, like these are people who like at that time, if they were like,
next to me buying
something at the grocery store, I'll walk past them, you know But with Spike
Lee and John Singleton, we knew what those guys looked like, Spike especially.
But with John, me being from California, we felt like he told our stories.
So he was who
people would talk about.
The first film I ever shot is a tricky one because I actually didn't
remember shooting, but it was when I was in about the eighth grade.
We had to do a project on George Orwell's ‘Animal Farm’.
One of my buddies, Terrence Tyrell, had a video camera
and I somehow convinced him to let us shoot a movie
and we shot it at my parents house in Richmond, California.
And I did like a stop motion thing, crazy enough, with little army characters
for when the Animal Farm was raided by the humans.
I think I put a volcano in there with naking soda and vinegar for no reason.
There was no volcano in ‘Animal Farm’, but it was definitely in the movie, I
remember that
because the film went on to be in stop motion
and then it became like regular motion and a volcano exploded for some reason.
I might have just wanted to impress my classmates I guess.
That would have been like ‘98.
I can't remember not knowing that cinema and film would be an influence on my life.
Like my family would engage in the ritual of going to the movies
and sitting on a couch watching stuff for as long as I can remember.
One of my favourite memories
with being at home, my parents, my brothers would be over the holidays.
We had the Sci-Fi Channel
back in the States, and whenever it was New Year's Eve and Day,
they had this tradition of playing a ‘Twilight Zone’ marathon.
You know, the Rod Serling
‘Twilight Zone’ was magic, just brilliant, brilliant, brilliant
filmmaking
and film language just in the tradition of Hitchcock.
And you know, that suspense with that science fiction bend,
and social commentary that Rod Serling brought, we would just be glued
to the TV man, like for those days while that was happening as a family unit.
And it kinda never changed for us.
You know, this is way before I knew filmmaking
would be a career and why it was something that I was engaging with.