The Transformation of Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson: Gosling has a stack of terrific performances to his credit, but it’s his performance as teacher Dan Dunne in Half Nelson which may catapult him into the award show world and really make people sit up and take notice. Fleck says he can’t take credit for Gosling’s performance. “You know, I didn’t have to do too much, really. He, for some reason, he feels comfortable in very uncomfortable psychological places. I had to do very little pushing as a director. He was very willing to go as far as the role required.”
Gosling stuck fairly close to Fleck and Boden’s script. “It’s pretty close but all the actors had a lot of freedom. They always had the freedom to sort of do something, follow their impulses, and so I think there’s a fair amount of ad-libbing and improvisation but it’s pretty close to the script. I think more in the rehearsal process he had ideas for scenes that may go a little bit differently than the way we wrote them, so we rehearsed them and incorporated them into the script beforehand.”
Casting a Name Actor in the Lead Role: Was Fleck worried that casting Ryan Gosling might have been a distraction for audiences? “You know, it was definitely a concern. We always knew we were going to need a name actor in that role, sort of because we want people to see the movie. You know, he’s a great actor but to get people in the seats in the theaters, you need somebody that they recognize. It’s sort of the nature of the game these days - independent films. But so no, I think there’s a potential for a movie star to be distracting in a movie like this but I feel like it’s… Somebody told me, he gets so lost in the role you don’t even realize you’re looking at him, looking at Ryan Gosling, after a certain point.”
The Focus of the Film and Balancing the Story of the Two Lead Characters: “For us it was always about this really uncommon friendship and the movie was - as long as we stayed focused on that - we could sort of venture off into other places. But in that friendship, we really wanted to sort of push the boundaries of what people, what audiences, would accept from these friends. Like you would probably be outraged if you heard about this drug-addicted teacher bringing a student over to his house after school, but for some reason when you see it - it’s a little uncomfortable - but when you see it, you root for these two people to help each other out. And that was what we were trying to do with it.”
Fleck Deliberately Didn’t Dwell on the Backstory: By the end of the film, the audience knows only slightly more about how Gosling’s character Dan became dependent on drugs than we do at the beginning of the movie. “We were always very careful not to [explain too much]. That was one of the things we wanted to do with the movie, or not do with the movie, is over-explain anything. I don’t think it’s unsatisfying; I think it’s just sort of the mystery of the world of the movie.”
Fleck added, “There’s little clues. There are clues, I think, in that family sequence. Sure his parents seem to be alcoholics, but there’s also like - he’s an idealist, and he has all these political ideals and they used to have those, but now they feel they’re ineffectual. They don’t feel like they can make a difference in their own family’s life even. It seems like they’re just sort of giving up, and he’s kind of at that crossroads as well. But I don’t know if that’s the reason. I don’t know if there’s one reason.”
The Audience for Half Nelson: Fleck says he was never pressured to tone the film down in order to make it more commercial. “No, because we never went to a studio with the movie. It’s definitely an independent film and our financiers knew they were making an independent film, and they read the script. I think it wouldn’t be true to the story if you sort of lightened it up a little bit and went more the Dangerous Minds route.”
The Positive Reaction of Critics to Half-Nelson: Kevin Smith (substituting for the ailing Roger Ebert) and Richard Roeper gave the film two thumbs up and urged moviegoers to seek out Half Nelson. Their enthusiasm for Fleck’s film is right in line with most of the major critics, a reaction that’s pleasantly surprised Half Nelson’s first time feature film writer/director. “Yeah, definitely. I mean, those of us who made the film were proud of it and we thought we made a pretty good movie, but we thought it would be a little more mixed. We thought people would really like it or really not like it, but it’s been overwhelmingly positive so it’s been a great.”
Up Next for Ryan Fleck: “Anna and I are adapting a book called It’s Kind of a Funny Story, which is a young adult novel. We just turned in a draft of that. Hopefully we’ll be shooting next year some time.” Fleck plans on directing Funny Story. “Yeah, hopefully. If we can all agree on the script!”
