Ryan Coogler's directorial debut, Fruitvale Station, was an amazing film and one of the strongest debuts in recent memory. His next directorial feature would be Creed before heading to the MCU for Black Panther. The jump from indie to tentpole filmmaking can be tough — just look at Barbie — but Coogler nailed it.

During his conversation with ClutchPoints about his latest producing credit, the documentary Stephen Curry: Underrated, Coogler opened up about the processes of indie and tentpole filmmaking. You may think that due to the big budgets and large personalities, a blockbuster like Creed or Black Panther may put more pressure on a filmmaker to get things done on time — something that is not one of his strong suits as he also revealed in our chat. However, that may not be the case.

“Honestly, bro, my most condensed time crunch was [on] my first movie, actually,” Coogler revealed. “I got more time with bigger movies.”

I guess that makes sense — MCU productions do go on for months, but perhaps it's the post-production stages that are placed under more pressure with VFX work and whatnot.

Speaking of VFX, Coogler named it as something he didn't know much about coming out of college. He graduated USC's master's program and made a number of short films during that time. VFX was not his expertise, but he said he “learned a lot [about VFX] on each [film].”

You may be surprised to learn that Fruitvale Station, a small-budget drama, has some VFX shots.

“Fruitvale [Station] surprisingly had, like, 100 VFX shots,” he said.

That number jumped with each film, though. He said Creed had “several hundred” VFX shots and that both Black Panther movies had “thousands.” Ryan Coogler compared this experience to slowly scaling a case of stairs. It ended up working out, though, as the VFX in Creed and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever looked good (we'll overlook the third act of Black Panther).

Stephen Curry: Underrated will be released in select theaters and streaming on Apple TV+ on July 21.