A short film titled Gowanus, Brooklyn earned writer/director Ryan Fleck the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Short Filmmaking Award and, as significantly, opened the gates for the contacts and cash required to make Half Nelson, the prescribed feature upon which the short had been based.
Dealing with a drug-addicted junior high school teacher (Ryan Gosling) whose friendship with a student (Shareeka Epps) crosses common classroom boundaries into mutual respect, protection and bewilderment, Nelson decisively dodges any inkling of cliché and proves to be a personally arresting an politically poignant piece of cinema.
Now one of the past year's most decorated movies (the Gotham Award' Best Film, five Independent Spirit Awards nominations, NY Film Critics Best First Film), Half Nelson began life as a Grand Jury Prize nominee in Park City last January, where it picked up distribution from ThinkFilm.
Following a meeting at the Bahamas International Film Festival (where the film won the New Visions Award), Ryan Fleck and his co-writer/editor, Anna Boden, put their deadlines on Do Not Disturb for a Hollywood minute to provoke each other on Moving Pictures' pages...
Anna Boden: Hey, Ryan.
Ryan Fleck: Hey, Anna.
Boden: I'm going to ask you some questions about the process of making Half Nelson. Is that okay?
Fleck: Yes. Can I ask you questions as well?
Boden: No.
Fleck: Fine.
Boden: So this film premiered at Sundance about a year ago. What was that like?
Fleck: It was super fun and super exhausting. Like, it was great having so much of our cast and crew there, and...
Boden: Minus Gosling.
Fleck: Please don't interrupt me.
Boden: Sorry.
Fleck: Minus Gosling. He had another movie or something going on. But the Broken Social Scene concert was amazing.
Boden: It was so awesome!
Fleck: I had to leave after three songs to go introduce an 11 p.m. screening of Half Nelson, but I hustled back in time for the last three songs.
Boden: You missed out, man.
Fleck: But I caught the finale.
Boden: How great was "It's All Gonna Break"?
Fleck: So great! They're the best band.
Boden: What else do you have to say about your Sundance experience?
Fleck: It was very stressful, you know, because we were trying to sell a film, which we finally did on the last day of the festival, right before the awards ceremony.
Boden: Which we didn't win.
Fleck: Right. But we won distribution. Which is a really great prize, right?
Boden: So what happened after Sundance?
Fleck: More festivals. Which were a lot of fun. They're a great way to travel and see parts of the world that I probably would never see if it weren't for the movie.
Boden: Like where?
Fleck: Like Stockholm or Sarajevo or Minneapolis.
Boden: Nice. How expensive was London?
Fleck: So expensive.
Boden: Okay, let's go back a second... Remind me how Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps came aboard the project.
Fleck: Well, Anna, as you already know...
Boden: It's not for me; it's for the reader.
Fleck: Please don't interrupt.
Boden: Sorry. Go.
Fleck: We found Shareeka when we were casting the short film version of Half Nelson, which was called Gowanus, Brooklyn. That was back in 2003. She had never acted before.
Boden: She's amazing.
Fleck: Yes. And we were lucky enough to get her again two years later for Half Nelson. Gosling got hold of the script through our casting director and we thought he might be too young for the role. But we met him, and he felt older than he was, and we could believe he had a dark past, and he's such a great actor, so...
Boden: Did your directing style change to suit those actors?
Fleck: I don't really have a style yet.
Boden: That's true.
Fleck: But, yes, the actors brought so much of themselves to the roles. It was a lot of fun to see Ryan and Shareeka and Anthony Mackie inhabit those characters. They all understood what we were doing, and it made my job incredibly easy... and fun.
Boden: It was so fun!
Fleck: Making movies is fun, right?
Boden: How was the film received when it came out?
Fleck: Really well. Most people who saw it really liked it a lot.
Boden: But not everybody?
Fleck: Not everybody, no.
Boden: What didn't people like about it?
Fleck: Some people don't like handheld camera work.
Boden: Aren't those people stupid?
Fleck: Yeah, pretty dumb.
Boden: How do you and I work as co-writers?
Fleck: It's a little like this.
Boden: Like what?
Fleck: I don't know... You tell me.
Boden: Oh, I get it now... Congratulations on your New York Film
Critics Circle
Award for Best First Film.
Fleck: Thanks. Congrats to you, too.
Boden: Thanks, but my name won't be on it.
Fleck: Probably because you didn't direct it.
Boden: But it's my first film, too, right?
Fleck: That's true, but it was also Shareeka's first film... along with some production assistants and interns.
Boden: Moving on... What are you working on now?
Fleck: I'm writing two new scripts with you. One is an adaptation of Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story and the other is about a Dominican baseball player. I hope to be shooting one of those sometime in 2007.
