Interview: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

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Ryan Gosling (The Believer, The Notebook) gives a tour de force performance as Dan Dunne, an inner city middle school history teacher and girls basketball coach battling the demons of his past, present, and future that have manifested themselves into a serious dependency on drugs and alcohol. The title of the film is Half Nelson, a term borrowed from the world of professional wrestling—a “half nelson” is a hold which is nearly impossible to break free from. Half Nelson marks the feature narrative debut from filmmaking team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (both write, he directs, she edits), who have previously collaborated on Jovenes Rebeldes (Young Rebels), a feature length documentary about Cuban hip-hop groups, and numerous short projects, including the 20-minute Gowanus, Brooklyn (a condensed shot-on-video version of Half Nelson) which won the Grand Jury Prize in short filmmaking at the 2004 Sundance film festival.

Dan is a classic loose cannon, rejecting the established system for his own more effective, more logical method, feeling the moral obligation to those he is responsible for and not to those he works for, even though it brings him unwanted attention from his superiors (you get the idea the principal needs to visit his class to reprimand him more often than she does to reprimand his students). Rejecting the school-approved curriculum for his own somewhat unconventional style of teaching, Dan shines in the classroom. He treats his students as peers, conducting an open forum as opposed to lecturing. He poses questions to his students, treats their responses seriously, and involves them with the subject matter. He understands that to receive respect, he must first show respect, and to be taken seriously, he must take his students seriously.

Though he excels at teaching, Dan is human train wreck outside of school. As the film opens, he’s using cocaine on a daily basis, frequenting bars, and kissing girls young enough to be the slightly elder siblings of some of his students. Feeling the pressure of his inability to change the world while at the same time watching it move ahead without him, his drug use escalates. When one of his students, the street wise but still innocent Andrea (Drey for short, brought to life with a brilliant performance by newcomer Shareeka Epps), catches him getting high on crack after a junior high basketball game, an unlikely bond forms between the two. Dan is educated, well read, and has the knowledge that comes from life experience and failure. Drey possesses the discipline and mental toughness that Dan lacks, and has seen enough of the world to know its dire potential, but is still too naïve to understand much of how it works; she is veering down the same path of her older brother, who is serving a prison sentence after taking the rap for the charismatic and business-minded drug dealer Frank (Anthony Mackie, who brings his own brilliant performance to the film—Mackie is expected to have a breakout year in 2007, with several projects already being prepped for release and production).

Half Nelson is one of the most memorable films you will ever see, and as near to perfect as any film can be. Fleck and Boden execute each scene in the film with precision, intelligence, and emotion in the writing, editing, cinematography, direction, choice of music—everything. Gosling expels more raw, explosive energy than you will find on stage at any rock concert—his performance ranks with Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (or maybe Raging Bull) and Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

I had the chance to sit and talk with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck while they were in New York promoting Half Nelson.

Jameson Kowalczyk: So you guys met at NYU?

Anna Boden: No…

Ryan Fleck: Sort of.

Anna Boden: I didn’t go to NYU, I did my undergraduate at Columbia, but I was taking a summer class there, and he was working at the editing desk, checking out splicers.

JK: How did you hit it off? Did you just kind of start talking to each other?

RF: We had a mutual friend, and she was a PA on a student film that I was ADing.

JK: Had you made films before film school?

RF: Well, little experimental things that were mostly unwatchable [laughs]. But they were fun to make and that’s the thing about learning and editing and that kind of stuff.

JK: Do you remember the first film you made?

RF: [laughing] Why are you gonna like… ‘I’ve seen it!’

JK: [laughing] No…

RF: Yeah, I mean it was for like a class in high school or something…

AB: With the dead guy?

RF: No… Like a sci-fi… probably something on video, sci-fi, pretentious, philosophy, weird… weirdness… bizarre…

JK: [to Anna] What about you, did you make films when you were younger?

AB: I did something in high school, it was like a documentary. It was really bad, I hadn’t quite yet mastered the art of editing, I was still tape to tape editing.

JK: That’s fun though, it’s a fun way to learn.

AB: Yeah.

JK: What made you want to be filmmakers? Was there a certain film, director, person in your life?

RF: I was always a big fan of the “Siskel and Ebert Show” growing up as a kid, and I don’t know, I just got excited about how these guys could argue so passionately about movies. And always thought movies were kind of like… E.T.… kind of like fun escapist entertainment. And I got a little bit older, not much older and Do The Right Thing came out and I saw that and that kind of blew me away in terms of that movie had so much in terms of social impact and dealing with politics and complicated characters, and it was also very funny at the same time, so that had a big impact on me.

JK: [to Anna] And what about you?

AB: I always liked watching movies and talking about movies, but I didn’t really think I wanted to make them until I started doing… I kind of became involved in helping a documentary production for a filmmaker in Seattle that I really liked, and then I ended up taking a class in documentary filmmaking at Columbia, and when I started editing and doing non-linear editing on the computer, that’s when I was like, ‘This is the best thing ever.’

JK: Ryan is credited with directing the film, and you are both credited with writing it, but was there any collaboration on the direction as well?

AB: I mean, we work very collaboratively and I was always on set, but Ryan definitely worked more with the actors, and you know… I was there primarily I guess as an editor, because I also edited the film, and you know, making sure we were getting the right coverage and stuff like that.

JK: What about collaborating while writing the film? How do you divide the writing process?

RF: There’s no real science, but so far it’s just been we’ll talk and then outline… have a loose outline of how the movie’s going to go, and then usually I’ll take a crack at just going through the whole thing, get to the end, but as I’m doing that, she’s sort of looking at the scenes everyday and making notes, and then we’ll rewrite together. I think that’s so far how it’s worked.

JK: Did you strongly disagree on anything while writing?

RF: [to Anna] More on the editing, right?

AB: Yeah in the editing stage. Sometimes in the writing stage, but usually we feel the same way in writing, but in the editing stage we got into a bunch of nail biting arguments… pens flying…

JK: Where did the character Dan come from? What inspired you to create this character?

RF: We were interested in this guy who is really just frustrated with the state of the world, you know… and the leadership of the country and the world and really just feels compelled to make a difference somehow… and yet he’s deeply flawed, and he’s teaching to make a difference in his students lives and his community, but at the same time he can’t get his own life together. And we were just sort of interested in pushing the boundaries of his friendship that he has with one of his students, and what the audience would accept.

JK: What drew you to the subject matter of drug addiction?

AB: I think that it was how this guy was dealing with… it’s not so much a move about addiction, or an addict…

JK: It’s a part of his character…

AB: Yeah. But it’s how he’s dealing or not dealing with what’s going on in his life and his ability to make a difference in the world.

RF: Yeah just sort of his frustration with is inability to make change just sort of leads to this self-destructive behavior.

JK: How did you do the shot where Dan snorts a line of coke off a table… you don’t cut away… Was it faked, did Ryan Gosling snort some kind of white powder up his nose?

RF: Yeah…

AB: I think it was vitamin B.

RF: Was it vitamin B?

AB: Vitamin B.

RF: I don’t know if Ryan would admit that it wasn’t [laughs]… yeah I’m pretty sure it was vitamin B, because sometimes people…

AB: But it can’t be comfortable.

RF: Yeah because when you do it repeatedly, I mean we did maybe eight or nine takes of that, so…

AB: That had to burn.

RF: So every time he was like [cringes]… and we were like, ‘Oh, man!’

JK: What was Ryan Gosling’s approach to his character? I’ve heard he gets very into his roles.

RF: Yeah. He’s a very serious actor, but he’s also a lot of fun. And he really got along well with the kids, especially in the classrooms. He felt like he really was a teacher and he had to work hard to keep these kids involved, because it was so hot in there, the kids started losing interest fairly quickly, and the kids didn’t know what he would be saying, so he would just start doing things to surprise them, and it was just a lot of fun to see him work that way.

JK: What was the first film you saw him in?

Both: The Believer.

JK: Did you have him in mind when you wrote this, or did you see him as the actor for the role after you had written it…

RF: Kinda. We had only seen The Believer and he was only 19 when he made that, so he wasn’t really on our radar at all, until we heard that he had gotten a hold of the script and was interested in at least talking to us. And at that point we had looked at his other movies and he was so like raw and just spontaneous and volatile, and thought he was perfect.

JK: Do you have a favorite shot in the film? A favorite scene?

AB: My favorite scene, for me, is…

RF: ‘Shampoo…’

AB: ‘Shampoo Suicide,’ which is when she finds him in the motel room at the end, and that song is playing… ‘Shampoo Suicide’ by Broken Social Scene… I don’t know… I love that song and I love the way that Ryan plays that scene, and Shareeka too is pretty sound… I mean… they don’t even say anything, it’s all silence…

RF: For me it’s a toss up between that scene and the scene where he confront Frank, Anthony Mackie’s character in the street, and they have this verbal…

JK: I love that dialogue in that scene, I think you avoided every cliché it could have…

RF: Yeah I love how you think you know where it’s going to go and then it completely does a 180…

JK: It didn’t lose the characters at all, which I think happens in a lot of films where there is a confrontation between two main characters…

RF: Yeah, thanks… we worked really hard on that.

JK: Can you tell me a bit about your father’s website, www.dialectics4kids.com, and the influence that had on the film?

RF: Yeah, yeah… my dad is a long time political activist his hobby basically is dialectics… and he has a website where he tries to teach it to kids, it’s a very abstract, philosophical context kind of simplified, and… it’s kind of weird, but it’s also interesting. It can fit into a lot of the themes of the film.

JK: What’s next? Do you have another project lined up?

AB: Yeah, we’re adapting a novel right now. It’s a book by Ned Vizzini who’s a Brooklyn author, called It’s Kind of a Funny Story.

JK: Where did you find the novel, are you fans of the author?

RF: A producer gave it to us and wondered if we were interested, and we liked it.

AB: We both really responded to it, and we were hired for it. It’s the first thing we’ve been hired to do.

TH!NKfilm released Half Nelson on August 11th.