[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson (right) had just begun production last summer when pedigree and background made it a fairly tough film not to see coming at this year’s festival. In an intriguingly cosmic (if not necessarily new) style of adaptation, Fleck and creative partner Anna Boden attended the Sundance Screenwriters Lab to flesh out their 2004 jury prize-winning short Gowanus, Brooklyn into a feature-length screenplay. Except that the feature was written well before the short, and Gowanus was an adaptation of that. Got it? Great.
Anyway, now that the concept has come full-circle, with their story of an unlikely friendship between a junior-high school student and her drug-addicted teacher expanded as a feature with Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie and Gowanus‘s young star Shareeka Epps (reprising her role as Drey), it makes sense that the filmmakers’ closure would sort of interlace with the festival’s. Pretty much everybody wants to see how this thing is going to end.
Of course, anticipation is just one part of the features game played in Park City. “It’s definitely different,” Boden said. “We’ve been to Sundance with two shorts (Gowanus and 2002’s Struggle) now, but I imagine it’s going to be a really different experience there. There are different expectations when you have a pretty good deal of someone else’s money at stake. There is a lot more pressure to find a distributor for the film. It was just really fun having a short there, and we just saw lots of really good movies and met other filmmakers. There was very little pressure.”
Fleck agreed. “We have a publicist for the first time,” he said, “which is a strange thing, but great because we would never know how to arrange any of this stuff on our own. It’s a new kind of experience.”
Half Nelson is even a risky project, to some degree, if only because its celebrated bloodline confers a higher level of expectations than most feature debuts contend with. I asked the filmmakers about the advantage–or possible disadvantage–of reimagining a story that audiences so took to heart in 2004.
“I don’t think it’s an advantage,” Fleck told me. “I think the only thing that could be perceived as an advantage is that anybody who saw and liked the short will go see this. I think in terms of getting people into the theaters–whether it’s a distributor or general audience or press or whoever–not a lot of people saw the short, but anyone who did and liked it, they’ll go see it again and I think they’ll like this. It’s just different enough to make you think you’re not watching the same thing. But you know the characters in some way, and hopefully liked the characters in the short. I think in that sense it’s an advantage.
“But in terms of selling the film, or winning any prizes?” he asked. “I really can’t see any kind of advantage to having a short. I don’t think the jurors are going to be aware of that. You still have to make a good movie to impress distributors. I don’t think it matters.”

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