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Ryan Fleck

Ryan Fleck's impressive feature film debut Half Nelson recently received a handful of Independent Spirit Awards nominations, including Best Director, Best Feature, Best Male Lead, and Best Female Lead. The Spirit Awards recognition is just one example of praise that the drama, starring Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps, has gotten lately. The movie, about a high-school teacher's struggle with drug addiction, and the unlikely friendship he forms with one of his students, has been a critic and audience favorite since its first screening at Sundance about a year ago, and has since been the subject of numerous awards, including the NY Film Critics Circle Awards (Best First Film), Philadelphia FF (Jury Award), SF International FF (FIPRESCI Prize), Locarno International FF (Special Prize of the Jury), and the Boston Society of Film Critics Awards (Best New Filmmaker). As I'm writing this, Half Nelson is at 91% on the Tomatometer, making it the 7th best reviewed "limited release" of 2006 in America.

At the recent Stockholm International Film Festival, I sat down with Ryan Fleck and talked to him about Half Nelson.



Film International: One thing that struck me immediately with the film was that the subject matter - a high-school teacher at a troubled school bonding with one of his students - could have been handled so differently. Were you ever concerned about going down the cliché-ridden route?

Ryan Fleck: We were never concerned about it, but we were aware of those clichés, and those inspirational teacher movies, the ones we've seen before. They're not bad, they've just been done before, and we weren't interested in doing that kind of movie. We wanted to deal with very flawed characters, all of them, all people trying to do the right thing, but making the wrong decisions along the way. I think that the clichés were never an issue, because the nature of this story that we're telling kind of diverted from them.

FI: Yeah, you certainly stayed clear of most of them. Half Nelson is based on a short film you made a couple of years ago, right?

RF: The feature we wrote first, and then we made a short film version of the feature, in order to raise financing.

FI: Oh, because that was going to be my question: why did you turn it into a feature? But it's the other way around.

RF: Yeah. Because we - when I say 'we' I mean me and my partner Anna Boden, who co-wrote and edited the film - didn't have an agent, we didn't have any means, we didn't know what to do with this script that we had. But we had a video camera, and we had friends who could help us make a little short movie. We cast Shareeka Epps in that short, and it played at Sundance and won the short film prize there. That got us an agent, and we started to get the script out there to the world. So the short film really helped us get the movie made.

FI: So what was that process like? Having an idea for a feature, then having to strip it down to a short, and then again expand it to a feature?

RF: Well, it was difficult figuring out how to tell it in a short film, because this character is so complex, and is so difficult to deal with in a feature length movie, so how are we going to talk about him in just nineteen minutes? But the answer was to focus on [the student], so we don't get into any of Mr. Dunn's personal life, it's all about this girl discovering her teacher's secret, and what she does with that information. And how she starts to relate to the adults in her life after having that experience of her teacher hiding in the bathroom. So it's very different, it's very sparse - there's no drug dealer character in the short, and so on. But once we figured out that that was the answer, to focus on her, then it kinda came easily.

FI: Moving on to the Mr. Dunn character - could you talk a little bit about the dialectics aspect of his teachings? It's very clear that he's into using dialectics in his class, and the more he falls apart, the more didactic he gets.

RF: He's a very smart guy, he's very self-aware about his dual life, the fact that he's a self-destructive drug addict by night, and this brilliant teacher by day. That's not a mystery to him, but it is a mystery to him as to why he is like that. And I think he's found something in dialectics that embraces that, the fact that we can be two things at once, it's not either-or, it could be both. It's something that he struggles with, and in some ways, he's using it as a tool to teach himself more than he's teaching his students at times. He's fascinated by it as a theory, and thinks that these philosophical concepts can be applied to history aswell.

FI: And at the end he doesn't even need the discussion, he just rambles on by himself.

RF: He's in the back of the class, nobody knows what he's talking about... (laughs)



FI: This leads us to Ryan Gosling. At what point did he get involved?

RF: We were looking at older actors at first, because we'd written the part for someone in their thirties, so we didn't really think of Ryan Gosling, but he got hold of the script, and he liked it and was interested in the role. So we looked at his other movies. The Believer was terrific, he was so young in that - but we looked at all his movies, and he's such a good actor. It felt like this guy has a history. Even though he's not as old as we'd originally thought the character would be, Ryan's got an older presence. And he was only 24 when he made the movie, but he feels a lot older. I think that's what was important - forget the age number.

FI: He is turning out to be one of the finest actors of his generation, I think. It's an amazing performance in this movie too. But Shareeka Epps certainly holds her own. How did you find her?

RF: She's fantastic. We got very lucky - we were casting the short film, and we just went to local Brooklyn schools, inviting kids to come to our audition, which was not really a formal audition, just kind of like this, we talked to the kids and got a sense of who they were, and she was not just charming, but she had this incredible face--

FI: Really expressive.

RF: Very expressive, and this presence that, same thing with Ryan Gosling, that you felt she had lived through something. The most important thing to her role is that she's able to communicate a lot without talking, cause she's always looking at things, she says very little in the movie, yet she communicates so much.



FI: How come you almost exclusively used Broken Social Scene for the soundtrack?

RF: Well, all the music is existing music from their albums, they didn't really create any new music specifically for the film. But Anna and I were just fans of their music, and we were writing to their music, and it hit the same kind of emotional chord that we were going for. So we played it on set for certain scenes, to set the vibe for the actors. Then, we cut the movie to their music. We didn't know them, but eventually we got in touch with them and showed them the movie - and lucky for us, they liked it and let us use the music very cheaply.

FI: So it was more a question of you using so much of their music so that eventually it became like they scored it.

RF: We scored it with their music, yeah.

FI: That's an interesting way to go about it, I guess. It just happened.

RF: Yeah, I like that too - using a band to score an entire film, like Cat Stevens with Harold and Maude, Aime Mann with Magnolia, Leonard Cohen with McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

FI: Speaking of other films, what are your influences in general, and for this film in particular?

RF: There's a lot. Certainly those films we just mentioned, American films from the seventies, which reminded more of European films. Back when people in the United States were making movies with a lot more complicated and flawed characters. I really like Hal Ashby's films, most of his early films are great. Altman. And documentaries too - vérité filmmaking, like Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, that style of shooting is very interesting to me.


FI: Half Nelson first screened at Sundance [in January 2006], and then it opened in theatres in August, to pretty great acclaim--

RF: We got very lucky. We thought we had made a pretty good movie, but the press really got behind it, which helped a lot, because we had little advertising money.

FI: So now you're doing the international festival circuit?

RF: Yeah, it's a fun way to travel.

FI: Where else have you been so far? Around Europe?

RF: Yeah, Vienna, London, Deauville, Sarajevo... it's been fun.

FI: So what happens next? What's in store, are you working on something new?

RF: Just writing, different projects - hopefully we'll start shooting one of them this spring. We're adapting a book for Paramount, and we're also writing some more independent stuff.

FI: Have you moved to LA yet?

RF: No, no, still in New York. I don't think we need to move any time soon.



Martin Degrell is one of the editors of Film International.