The Title Sparks Debate: At the screening I attended people came out of the theater discussing the meaning of the film’s title. Fleck admits he and his co-writer Anna Boden get asked the significance of the title quite often. “We knew we were intending to make a very subtle and evocative movie and one that doesn’t over-explain everything, and we thought the title should match that,” explains Fleck. “It’s just a metaphor. A half nelson is a wrestling hold, as you may or may not know, but it’s something you can escape from, even though it’s very tricky. It’s just like a metaphor for struggle. It works for like addiction or political struggle or anything and that’s sort of it. It’s also a Miles Davis song that’s probably about the same thing. That’s it. (Laughing) But I’m starting to think with the success of Snakes on a Plane that we should have called it Crack in the Classroom or something like that.”
While it’s the title Snakes on a Plane that sells that film to moviegoers, Fleck believes it’s the performances in his film that will draw in audiences. “We sort of always knew that this movie wouldn’t work if it didn’t have really great performances. I think people are going to get really knocked out by some amazing acting when they come and see this movie.”
The Evolution of the Script and the Casting of Shareeka Epps: Half Nelson took a roundabout way in becoming a feature film. Fleck and Boden wrote the script for Half Nelson then made it into the short film Gowanus, Brooklyn before returning to work on the feature length movie. During that process the screenplay for Half Nelson went through a series of changes. “It changed a lot because we… I don’t know if it was four or five years ago that we wrote the first draft, but during that time it wasn’t like we had an agent or anybody who was curious to know what we were doing. We were trying to get it off the ground so we had plenty of time to keep writing and rewriting. I think the time was valuable because I think we made it as good as we could. But making the short, I think, in casting Shareeka Epps in the short was great because we really started picturing her in the role. She shaped Drey’s role in the feature a little bit, having worked with her in the short.”
How much impact did Epps have on the character’s development for the feature film? Fleck can’t pinpoint anything specifically but says, “I think it was just picturing her was really great. Knowing how much she could communicate without talking, I think, was helpful in terms of knowing that, ‘Well, we might not need this line here.’ That type of thing.”
During the casting process for Half Nelson, Fleck knew he wanted Epps to reprise her role from the short in the feature film but wasn’t sure she’d still fit the part. “We wanted her but it was about two years after we made the short that we got financing. She lived in Brooklyn but she moved upstate so we hadn’t seen her in a couple years and thought she may have grown or aged too much. But when it came time to start casting, we met with her again and we had her audition with a whole bunch of other girls. We had a casting director who saw a lot of ‘actor’ kids but it turned out she hadn’t aged that much. She had matured and I thought she did a great job with the auditions.”
It was important to Fleck and his collaborator, Anna Boden, that the age of the kids portrayed in the film would be 13. “It was important that she was 13 to us just because of that age’s so, I don’t know, kids go through a lot of changes that year.” Fortunately for Fleck, Epps was able to portray 13 without a problem.
Collaborating on the Screenplay: Fleck and Boden have a system for working together on screenplays. “It’s usually back and forth. We’ll outline together usually and then I’ll write a draft. Then as I’m writing, she’ll look at the stuff that I’ve been working on the previous day. There’s no science to it, really, it’s like a back and forth thing. We re-write each other’s work.”
Fleck says that so far the writing process has worked, but admits that it’s actually during the editing process where the two sometimes clash. “She also cut the film so we had more of our fights in the edit room than we did writing the script. It changed a lot [during editing]; it’s like a whole new stage of writing. It’s like the final draft in the script, cutting the movie, and we experimented with a lot of things. It was fun but we had a lot of disagreements, as well.”
That doesn’t mean there’s an alternate director’s cut somewhere out there. “No, this is it. (Laughing) Maybe there’s an alternate editor’s cut somewhere…”
