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Q&A with Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Jay Ellis

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Freaky Tales.

This is a movie that shows real love for the Bay Area. Where did the story come from?
Ryan Fleck: Well, it starts with that Too $hort song, this really nasty song called Freaky Tales that I heard way too young, maybe nine or ten. I grew up with hippie parents. We had Beatles records and Janis Joplin and then my friends played me Freaky Tales and I was like, What is going on?! I became a Too $hort fan—of course, growing up in Oakland, you have to be. And being a ten-year-old kid in ‘87 and hearing that Sleepy Floyd game on the radio where Greg Papa is calling the play-by-play and he says, Sleepy Floyd is Superman, it always meant something to me that the underdog can still pull it off, maybe once. We had no business winning any games in that series against the Lakers.

I had been pitching Anna versions of a movie called Freaky Tales for years, right? Right. Most of them were pretty bad and not worth exploring here, but once we landed on the chapters I think things really opened up creatively.

The specificity creates the universality

Anna, you’re not from the Bay Area, so what drew you to the project?
Anna Boden: Like Ryan said, he’d been pitching me versions that I was not interested in for years. You know, he listened to that song as a ten-year-old boy! Well, he played it for me when I was a woman in my twenties, it did not have the same effect on me. I was not like, oh yeah, we gotta make this movie! I think what opened it up for me was when I started to think about it more from the young women’s point of view and listening to Don’t Fight the Feelin’ and hearing that song. Thinking about that, we created a fictionalization of an idea of how this song might have come to be and that’s what the second chapter is, into the Too $hort part of Freaky Tales and the underdog storyline. That got me excited. Then we started to think about like all these stories as being these underdogs overcoming the bully and that was the theme that pulled us throughout and that felt more universal. It certainly is absolutely 100% a love letter to Oakland and its culture, but it also had something that felt more universal to me.

There is something familiar about these locations and characters and themes that speaks to this specificity, but also this universality. Can you talk about finding that balance between those two?
RF: When we were writing the script, I wrote in all the places that I grew up going to—Loard’s Ice Cream shop, the Oakland Coliseum for sports, and Gilman, of course, Gilman, which I didn’t actually go to because I was afraid of the punk rock scene at that age. But I learned more about it as I got older and had so much admiration and respect for it. That first chapter is the closest we come to a true story in the movie, which is that they were being harassed by neo-Nazi skinheads around ‘87 and they stood up for themselves and they defended themselves and they had a fight out in front of their venue. The locations were key. And the Grand Lake Theater! I grew up going to movies at the Grand Lake, and we got to shoot there, and then we had a big screening there last week and the roof blew off the place. It was amazing.

Jay, you’ve worked with Anna and Ryan in the past. What made you sign onto this film?
Jay Ellis: First of all, getting the opportunity to work with Anna and Ryan. Seeing how they work, I felt super comfortable, and I really enjoyed the process. When this came around and I read the script, I was already in from a relationship standpoint, from a working standpoint. Then I got a chance to read the creative, and my mind was just blown. I couldn’t visualize anything that was on the page! I was like, how does this happen? What, how does he do this? And how do they do that? It was one of the most original things that I had read in a long time, and that got me really excited. I feel like part of my job as an actor is to fall in line with a filmmaker’s vision. I could very much see the vision and I understood that we were going to be dropped in a place in a time. Like you said earlier, specificity creates the universality because we know people like this in all these cities we live in. People who love their team and have their crazy sports moments. I mean, we were just outside talking about how Toronto was dead quiet when the Raptors won that championship because everyone was indoors watching that game. There’s someone in Toronto who will write their version of that game years from now. That specificity in this story really excited me and it was an easy yes.

It’s really interesting the way you treat action and violence in the film. What sort of conversations did you have about that?
AB: We started the movie as very grounded and in a very authentic time and a place, and we took the look from a 16mm doc-style Penelope Spheeris The Decline of Western Civilization style. We wanted it to feel very grounded. And then as soon as that fight starts, we wanted it to explode into another sphere and feel like, pow! You take the two feet that are grounded in reality and then have one of them fly off into outer space. There were little clues earlier, that this film had one foot in reality and another foot a little bit outside of reality. But for the people who hadn’t picked up on those clues, now everyone’s going to know that this is not totally grounded in reality. That came with that first moment of violence with the slingshot in the eye and then the blood splashing on the camera. We wanted it to happen that way because we wanted the violence to be fun and we wanted people to be able to laugh at it. We didn’t want it to really hurt. We wanted the neo-Nazis to get their due and for people to be able to feel cathartic about it, but in a safe way. So we can all applaud and have fun with it. The guy gets burnt, but then he gets back in the car, you know? That design has a bit of a comic book-y playfulness to it, but it’s still gory and bloody at the same time. So not comic book-y in a Marvel kind of way, where we didn’t have any blood, but comic book-y in a very different kind of way where we got to have a lot of blood!

Jay, what’s it like playing a character that is based on someone real, but also a completely different version of him?
JE: Yeah, there’s obviously a fictitious side to his story. Ryan and Anna had sent over a couple interviews and specifically the interview that Sleepy Floyd did during that game or after that game. I remember watching it over and over again and trying to get the tilt of my head right and make sure my mustache was thin enough, and he has this big wide smile. I thought about the mannerisms and the physicality a lot. As we were going through the fight choreography, I pitched Ron [Yuan]—our stunt coordinator—that I wanted to do a crossover because Sleepy has this big crossover in the basketball game. So we do this crossover move and then we kind of work it into the choreography. It was this fun moment of trying to blend Sleepy’s quick, wide crossover into this fictitious side of him where he’s also this martial arts master who has all these weapons.

That was a lot of fun. There’s also this big monologue that I have as I walk down the stairs for the Psytopics commercial, and trying to get into his accent was also a fun thing to think about. I wanted to pay as much honor and respect to him because he has a record that still stands today, but then to also make the character very much my own as well. I feel like I got to do that a lot more on the fictitious side, while still honoring who he is as a person.

Could you talk about the collaboration with your cinematographer in terms of approaching each one of these four distinct stories in different visual ways?
RF: Like Anna said, we wanted that punk chapter to feel like a 4:3 ratio, with a grainy 16mm film look. By the end, we really go into anamorphic widescreen, like a Kung Fu movie or old Western. The path along the middle feels like traditional eighties cinema with some 1:85 aspect ratios. In terms of the colors, we wanted washed out for the first one, and when we get to the ladies in the second chapter, the colors are really popping with them and that was fun. Do you remember the specific conversations we had with Jac [Fitzgerald, Cinematographer]?

AB: We pulled a lot of different references from different films and photography and tried to pinpoint one thing for each chapter. I also remember us really struggling about whether we should go black and white for the third noir chapter, with Clint. But also knowing that none of our eighties references were black and white. We wanted it to have a distinct look, but instead we went distinct from the second chapter by choosing a very different kind of color timing and palette— a different color palette in terms of the clothes and the lighting. We tried to keep it more authentic to what our references were in order to maintain that consistency, even though there was this temptation to make each one look very different!

Q&A with Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, and Ryan Reynolds

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mississippi Grind.

What was it about the riverboat casinos in Iowa that compelled you to write this story?

Ryan Fleck: In 2007, Anna and I were making our second movie, Sugar, which was a movie about a Dominican baseball player who spends some time in Iowa for a farm team in the major leagues. When we were shooting, on weekends, running out of things to do in Iowa, we discovered these riverboat casinos that don’t move—for legal purposes they have to be on a body of water. They’re these kind of old classic steamboats that have slot machines and poker rooms. So we would go play blackjack. We had never been to place like that. We’d been to Vegas; we’d been to Atlantic City; we’d been to the big, fancy casinos that are trying really hard to be glamorous. These just weren’t pulling it off. It was really interesting to see the anti-glamorous version of a casino. There was a story in there somewhere that we hadn’t seen on film before. We were also very inspired by films from the ’70s. It’s like John Huston’s Fat City. We always thought that this is to the casino as that movie is to boxing. It’s about that sort of underground gambling world.

“It was really interesting to see the anti-glamorous version of a casino.”

Anna Boden: We made another movie after Sugar, and then came back to, “What are we going to do next?” That location stuck with us. We decided that it should be this road trip and it should start in Iowa and go to New Orleans. The first thing we did was we took the road trip ourselves and explored all the places from Iowa to the south. We met people, took notes, and kind of created the textures of these two characters. It was from observation, and then invention on top of that. Then we went and cast our two actors. That was the final thing that brought it together and brought the two characters to life.

Can you talk about the preparation for the role?

Ryan Reynolds: The preparation was easy. It was really just to spend time as much time as possible with Ben [Mendelsohn] at the tables and keep him out of as much crippling debt as possible. Ben, he’s in it, in some sense he’s a method actor, and working with method actors can be interesting at times because their process suddenly becomes your process, and you’re kind of held hostage by it. But Ben has this unique ability to be method but also inclusive and incredibly generous with his work. We just hit it off from the moment we met. To be totally frank, I was kind of in love with Ben. I still am. I’m fascinated by him. He’s such an interesting creature. We spent days at these tables and it was very easy—the poker part was very easy—but what I loved the most about it was just those characters. You think these people who sit at these tables for twelve hours a day are the real grinders. That’s their job is to sit at a casino with that fucking slot machine sound behind them for twelve hours a day and never see the sunshine. You think they’re not going to have anything to say or any kind of opinion, but they’re fascinating. They’re there to talk as much as they are to play, these guys love sharing stories, and they each have their little kind of succinct wisdoms they want to impart, these little effervescent witticisms. It’s nonstop entertainment. You had to drag us away from those tables. We loved it, we loved learning about it, we loved being in their world. You go down to the Deep South and sit at these riverboat casinos, and these aren’t people who have a tremendous interest or access to pop culture. I swear to god Tom Cruise could have sat beside them and they’d have no idea who he was.

It can be hard to hold down a conversation during poker because you have to focus, but the more you do it, the more adept you become at it.

Reynolds: That’s the game though. They want to talk to you, they want to see what you are, who you are, and what your tells are.

Boden: We didn’t know anything about poker when we started researching this project, but when we were on our research trip we had to force ourselves to sit down in a tournament. You pay like $65, and you play until your chips run out, which is the cheapest way to be a bad poker player in the world. I would play extremely conservatively, so I was slowly bleeding my chips the entire time, but I got four hours at the poker table with these people for $65. The whole theme of rainbows came out of one of those trips. One of the guys at my table kind of said to himself, but also kind of to everyone, “I drove to the end of a rainbow once, there wasn’t anything there, it just faded out into the trees.” It felt like it was this beautiful little metaphor for Curtis and Gerry’s whole journey, but also gambling in general. It was just this beautiful weird piece of wisdom that one of these guys said and it stuck with us, it stuck with the writing, and influenced the whole script.

Fleck: A bunch of stuff that Ryan says in the movie we learned from people on our journey. In St. Louis, there’s a guy that actually appears in the movie on the steamboat. Ben beats him in the hand where they’re kind of one-upping each other and he ends up folding. That guy, Paul Harris, told us a story about the disassociated person, the person who puts on a disguise, goes into a casino, ends up winning a ton of money, and has to sneak away.

What were some of the biggest challenges and how did you deal with them?

 Reynolds: I can speak to one. We shot in three states in one day. If I remember correctly, the driver motorcade was driving around. I thought it was really charming and funny. Ben and I would just jump in that Subaru. When he was driving, I could only see death on the horizon, because he’s Australian—he’s just not a big driver, certainly not a big driver on this side of the road. But I found that so refreshing and so much fun for all of us to travel around like a family, just like a big gang slugging our way up to Mississippi or back down.

Fleck: And we mounted two cameras on the hood of the car in a very old school way, 35mm film cameras, driving on the highway, the same stretch of highway from St. Louis to Memphis. It was really nice to not have to worry about faking the landscape in Louisiana. We primarily shot mostly in New Orleans, but we took this trip to St. Louis and Memphis and Tunica so we could have those shifting landscapes be accurate as they’re driving in the car.