Photo courtesy of THINKFilm
Anna Boden
Issue #28
From making safe-sex films to releasing her first full-length feature, the young filmmaker rakes in critical acclaim with the release of Half Nelson
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
At the age of 26, Anna Boden has achieved, with her debut feature, the kind of critical admiration that eludes most filmmakers for years. Half Nelson, which Boden edited, co-produced, and co-wrote with her partner, Ryan Fleck, is the intelligent and honestly observed story of a white, idealistic, and crack-addicted middle-school teacher who forms a friendship with one of his students. Deftly avoiding the kind of clichés found in such teacher-as-savior tearjerkers as Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver,Half Nelson instead offers complexity and excellent performances from Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps as teacher and student, respectively.
Half Nelson was an audience favorite at numerous festivals, including New York’s New Directors/New Films series in March. Its upcoming August release is the culmination of more than four years of work for Boden and Fleck, who had previously collaborated on both short films and a documentary about Cuban hip-hop artists called Young Rebels.
“When we started writing [Half Nelson], Ryan [Fleck] and I were not very happy with the state of our union,” Boden says ruefully. “We were feeling very frustrated, and so were our friends. We wanted to do something to make a difference — people were talking about taking up arms in a joking kind of way. There was a feeling that we couldn’t do anything. So that’s where the seed for Dan [the teacher] came from. He’s a guy who’s very disturbed with the way the world’s going and wants to do something positive. That’s why he got into teaching. But he’s also lost a lot of his idealism and in some ways can’t get anything together in his own life. He feels like a hypocrite.”
Once they started writing, Boden and Fleck realized they didn’t have the resources to make a feature-length film. So they made a short that focused on Dan’s student, Drey, whose own family has been torn apart by drugs. After finding Epps, who attended school in one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods where Half Nelson was shot, they made a 19-minute short called Gowanus, Brooklyn. It won the Short Filmmaking Award at Sundance in 2004, which paved the way for Boden and Fleck to secure enough funding to make Half Nelson.
Working with an almost $1 million budget, Boden and Fleck shot the film over 23 days in various Brooklyn locations that looked like anything but the brownstone settings to which audiences are accustomed. “We didn’t want it to look like typical New York,” Boden says. During the shoot, they played plenty of Broken Social Scene, who ended up supplying the film’s score. “We listened to a ton of their music while we were writing, and knew we wanted them even before we had financing” Boden says. “After we finished a rough cut [of the film] we flew to Toronto and met with a couple of the band’s members, showed them the cut, and crossed our fingers.”
If Boden has a very clear idea of what she wants, she’s lucky to have found a partner who shares her vision. Originally from Boston, Boden was a film theory major at Columbia when she met Fleck, who had just graduated from NYU’s film school. “I was taking a summer class at NYU and he was working there. He checked me out some splicers at the editing desk, and thus it all began,” she recalls with a laugh. The two first collaborated on Have You Seen This Man?, a short about an eccentric artist. To make ends meet, Boden worked for a time as a receptionist, and, with Fleck, wrote safe-sex films for the Centers for Disease Control.
A big fan of directors like Hal Ashby (“Harold and Maude” is one of my favorites”) and Stephen Soderbergh, Boden’s now writing and researching her next project with Fleck. “It’s an immigrant baseball story,” she says. “Very character-driven. And both Ryan and I like baseball.” If Half Nelson is any indication, Boden is set for another home run.
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