Hollywood Filmmaker with Local Roots Returns for ‘Freaky Tales’
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. (2022)
By Nate Smith (Brooklyn, NY) Drivenbyboredom.com
If you happened to be in San Leandro this Thanksgiving break, you might have noticed a camera crew at Dick’s Restaurant & Cocktails on Alvarado Street. That’s where noted Hollywood writer/director and Castro Valley High School graduate Ryan Fleck could be found.
The Bay Area native is teaming up again with his creative partner Anna Boden to produce, “Freaky Tales,” a movie based on Fleck’s experiences of growing up in the East Bay. The film includes top names like Pedro Pascal (“The Mandalorian”), Ben Mendelsohn (“Top Gun: Maverick”), and Jay Ellis (“The Game”). Up-and-coming stars like Jack Champion, Angus Cloud, Dominique Thorne, Keir Gilchrist, and Michelle Farrah Huang are also cast in the movie.
Currently in pre-production and slated for release next year, the film is set in Oakland and loosely based on a 1987 rap song by Too Short that tells four interconnected stories, “about the love of music, movies, people, places and memories beyond our knowable universe.” Short and his manager David Weintraub are executive producers on the film.
Fleck was born in Berkeley and lived there and in Oakland for much of his early life. He graduated from Castro Valley High School in 1994 and then took classes at Diablo Valley Community College in Pleasant Hill for a time. He then moved to New York to attend New York University Tisch School of the Arts to study film.
Fleck and Boden met in New York in the late 90s and began making short films together. The duo had critical success with their early works including “Half Nelson” with Ryan Gosling, the sports-drama film “Sugar,” “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” which was adapted from Ned Vizzini’s 2006 novel, and “Mississippi Grind,” a movie about gamblers in New Orleans starring Ryan Reynolds.
“Anna and I are interested in movies that explore complicated characters struggling with something inside themselves,” Fleck told an interviewer with the BBC Collective in 2007 about his film “Half Nelson.” “We don't like typical movie heroes that aren’t flawed and are perfect people. That’s just not interesting to us. Although those people in life if they exist are terrific… but, it’s something to strive for. I don’t think that most of us are perfect people anyways.”
But it was 2019’s “Captain Marvel” starring Bre Larson that garnered their biggest success. The pair was lauded for their directing and scriptwriting skills and for helping bring a more human dialogue to the Carol Danvers character in the midst of a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) action-adventure summer blockbuster.
As for his advice to young filmmakers, Fleck handed out this career advice in an interview at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles in 2010.
“When we were getting out of school there were different routes that people in my film school were taking,” Fleck said. “Some were getting like development type jobs at studios or with production companies. And those were full-time jobs, and they took up a lot of people’s time. What I ended up doing was doing a lot of production assistant work on commercials. You could get a job on a commercial and you work maybe three days, four days a week, and really have enough to get by… and also have time to write. That was what was important. If you want to be a writer-director you’ve got to do those things and have time to do those things. So, that's what I did. I don’t know if it’s what I would suggest for everybody, but you’ve got to figure out a way to get by pay the rent, and also do what you want to be doing.”