Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are back on the big screen with Freaky Tales, their biggest swing yet.
The longtime creative partners haven’t released a film since Captain Marvel grossed a cool $1.1 billion in 2019. The duo then went on to helm four episodes of the Cate Blanchett-led FX miniseries, Mrs. America, after promoting their MCU installment’s spring release that year. And by the time the political drama premiered in April 2020, Boden and Fleck were stuck inside like the rest of the global population, providing them with the bandwidth necessary to finally develop Fleck’s long-gestating passion project about his memories as an 11-year-old Oaklander in 1987. The film isn’t as semi-autobiographical as Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or James Gray’s Armageddon Time, but it’s equally personal for Fleck.
The title of Freaky Tales is based on the “Freaky Tales” song by celebrated Oakland rapper, Too $hort, whose fingerprints are all over the film and its soundtrack. He’s not only an executive producer and appears in a cameo role as the partner of Ben Mendelsohn’s cop character; he’s also a character played by Bay Area-born rapper Symba. Boden, having grown up in Massachusetts, wasn’t privy to the Oakland culture that Fleck remembers so fondly. In fact, she admittedly had a tough time wrapping her head around Too $hort’s explicit lyrics and attitude toward women at the time.
However, she had a major breakthrough when she discovered his track, “Don’t Fight the Feeling,” which features a back-and-forth between Too $hort and the female rap duo, Danger Zone, regarding his treatment of women.
“These women [from Danger Zone] really take him down in the song. There was something inspiring about that, and it felt like there was more to this guy if he was willing to put this song on his album,” Boden tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So it made us think about fictionalizing our own kind of fantasy of what could have gone into the creation of the song and how it came to be.”
From punk rock kids and neo-Nazis to aspiring rappers and a sword-wielding NBA star, the film is a four-chaptered story where a number of varying characters cross paths with one another in 1987 Oakland. The film’s structure takes a page from the playbook of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and several other nonlinear, character-driven pictures. But it’s also a tonal grab bag à la the work of Tarantino in that there’s drama and comedy one minute and cathartic bloodshed the next.
Despite the capital they’d gained from their billion-dollar-grossing Marvel movie, the ambition of Boden and Fleck’s Freaky Tales meant that its green light was anything but a slam dunk.
“No matter what, a movie as ambitious and unconventional as Freaky Tales is hard to get off the ground. It doesn’t have one lead character. It’s an ensemble cast. It has a lot of different elements that need to come together, and we really wanted to shoot it in the Bay Area, which is not a particularly inexpensive place to shoot,” Boden explains. “That said, I do think it was helpful to have had something like [Captain Marvel] on our résumé, but it still took us probably a year or more to get all the pieces together after we had the script.”
In 2019, Tom Hanks regaled Jimmy Kimmel Live with the story of how he was twice robbed as a 14-year-old vendor at Oakland A’s baseball games. Boden and Fleck later decided to thread the Oakland-area native’s story into Freaky Tales, making indirect references to “the guy from Splash” and “that actor” from The Money Pit. But as fate would have it, Boden and Fleck’s first post-pandemic job ended up being two episodes of the Hanks-produced Masters of the Air. That’s when they gauged his interest about a musical-based cameo or a meaty scene as a video store clerk who’s appropriately named Hank.
“He was mentioned in the musical section as Oakland legend Tom Hanks, so he said, ‘Sure, I’ll do that.’ And then we were like, ‘Oh really? You’re going to come to Oakland and be in that? Well, maybe we should write something more substantial,’” Fleck recalls. “So we wrote this monologue for him in the video store, and we said, ‘Hey, you can either be in the musical or you can do this.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that looks like fun. I’ll do that role.’”
Freaky Tales does have some superhero-adjacent elements, namely through Jay Ellis’ Golden State Warriors character, Sleepy Floyd, but it remains to be seen whether Boden and Fleck have any desire to revisit the superhero genre someday. It was once reported that they were exploring a possible Disney+ series with Marvel Studios, but that thought seems to be in the rearview mirror now.
“I don’t know how to answer that question [regarding more superhero work]. I just know what we’re thinking about next, which is definitely more of a grounded character piece,” Boden says. “It’s not exactly Freaky Tales vibes, but it’s back in the realm of real emotional drama.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Boden and Fleck also discuss their good luck charm, Mendelsohn, before realizing their one regret involving his Freaky Tales character.
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Freaky Tales is your first film following the success of Captain Marvel in 2019. Was it difficult to figure out what film to do next, or did the pandemic and strike have their way?
RYAN FLECK This is a movie that I’ve been thinking about making for literally decades, but not really knowing what it was going to be about. Over the years, I kept pitching Anna a movie called Freaky Tales, based on the Too $hort song, and I was like, “It could be like this, and it could be like this.” And frankly, none of those versions were very good. After Captain Marvel came out, we made Mrs. America, and then the pandemic hit. So that’s when we really had time to meditate on what Freaky Tales could be, and that’s where it really came together.
Now that you have a billion-dollar-grossing Marvel movie on your résumé, does that make an independent like Freaky Tales noticeably easier to put together?
ANNA BODEN No matter what, a movie as ambitious and unconventional as Freaky Tales is hard to get off the ground. It doesn’t have one lead character. It’s an ensemble cast. It has a lot of different elements that need to come together, and we really wanted to shoot it in the Bay Area, which is not a particularly inexpensive place to shoot. It doesn’t have a big tax credit. So there were a lot of things that were challenging about it. That said, I do think it was helpful to have had something like [Captain Marvel] on our résumé, but it still took us probably a year or more to get all the pieces together after we had the script. We then went and shot a couple episodes of Masters of the Air while we were still trying to get the financing together.
FLECK And that introduced us to a key element by the name of Tom Hanks. It’s not like Tom Hanks got the movie greenlit, but it was certainly nice to have his involvement as well.
I remember seeing the Kimmel episode where Tom Hanks talked about being robbed as a 14-year-old vendor for the Oakland A’s, and you proceeded to pepper that story into your script. Did that end up being the key to landing him in the role of the video store clerk?
FLECK Even when we weren’t sure Tom was going to be in it, we always had characters referencing him throughout the movie. There was a through-line where people talked about the famous actor from Oakland, and while they didn’t mention him by name, it was Tom Hanks. And when we were working on [the Hanks-produced] Masters of the Air, we wrote him more directly into the script. He was mentioned in the musical section as Oakland legend Tom Hanks, so he said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” And then we were like, “Oh really? You’re going to come to Oakland and be in that? Well, maybe we should write something more substantial.” So we wrote this monologue for him in the video store, and we said, “Hey, you can either be in the musical or you can do this.” And he said, “Oh, that looks like fun. I’ll do that role.” So that’s how that came to be.
Ryan, at 11 years old, did you and a parent walk out of Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre criticizing the grandpa in The Lost Boys? Did you hear about Sleepy Floyd’s 51-point game on May 10, 1987? How many actual memories were you able to smuggle into this?
FLECK The Lost Boys’ reaction didn’t happen while coming out of the Grand Lake, but it was always a reaction after the movie, which I love, by the way. It’s not a criticism. It’s just a fun little comment on a great movie. The Sleepy Game, I heard on the radio live while it was happening, and I heard Greg Papa’s play-by-play when he literally said, “Sleepy Floyd is Superman!” And when you’re listening to it on the radio [as a kid], all kinds of imagery comes out of hearing something like that. So it evolved over the years from these strange memories of real events into something more cinematic and hypnotic and hallucinogenic. That was the key to unlocking it all.
BODEN That whole play-by-play is so infectious. Besides calling him Superman, he said, “He’s unconscious out there.” That leads into the whole Psytopics element and the meditation element and the whole idea of what’s going on with Sleepy Floyd and what could be happening on this other level. That leads into his superhero thing that we invent.
There is a cosmic green force that is channeled by Sleepy and certain other characters. Does this represent Oakland’s underdog spirit?
BODEN 100 percent.
FLECK 75 percent. There’s something else going on there, too, but it’s hard to explain.
As mentioned, you named the movie after Too $hort’s song, “Freaky Tales,” and his music is prominently featured on the soundtrack. He’s also involved in the movie as a producer, cameo and character, played by Symba. Would this movie exist without his direct involvement?
FLECK It wouldn’t exist without his music. We wrote the script before he was involved, but then we thought, “Why not have him involved? He should be involved with this.” So we pitched him on it, and thankfully, he was like, “Yeah, that sounds cool. Let’s do it.” He didn’t even want to watch the movie until it was done. He came to Sundance, and he said, “I like it.” And thankfully he said that because we weren’t changing anything. (Laughs.)
The Too $hort character wears Oakland Raiders and Athletics gear. Could you not resist those costume choices since those teams have now relocated to Las Vegas?
FLECK It’s actually based on a photo of Too $hort wearing those things, and we shot it while the A’s were still the Oakland A’s. I won’t wear A’s gear anymore. I can’t do it. I’m not even a baseball fan. I’m announcing it today. (Laughs.) The Raiders were always in and out, and I think they’ve maintained some of their Bay Area loyalty just because of who they are. But A’s fans aren’t going to Vegas with them.
Was the real Too $hort a good sport about his character losing a rap battle?
BODEN Absolutely. He was behind the movie. He loves the spirit of the underdog in this movie and the underdog having their day in the sun. He appreciated the fact that his former self is not the underdog here and doesn’t get to win. Part of what inspired that section of the movie is the song itself [“Don’t Fight the Feeling”]. It’s a song that Too $hort chose to put on his album when he was in his twenties, and that’s amazing in and of itself, because these women [from Danger Zone] really take him down in the song. There was something inspiring about that, and it felt like there was more to this guy if he was willing to put this song on his album. So it made us think about fictionalizing our own kind of fantasy of what could have gone into the creation of the song and how it came to be.
Lots of filmmakers have good luck charms that they cast in most of their movies. Has Ben “Mendo” Mendelsohn become yours?
FLECK Yeah, for anyone who’s seen Mississippi Grind, we joke that Ben Mendelsohn is like the Ryan Reynolds character, and we are like the Ben Mendelsohn character. He’s become our lucky charm, and he’s the guy that we want to follow down the Mississippi to some mysterious poker game. So we’ll follow him anywhere, and he really is our good luck charm.
Dominique Thorne and Normani’s Danger Zone characters serve Ben’s character at Loard’s Ice Cream shop, which also had milkshakes on the menu. Were the two of you ever tempted to keep Ben’s Captain Marvel milkshake gag going?
BODEN & FLECK (Laugh.)
FLECK This never occurred to us until this moment. How fun would that have been?
BODEN Oh my gosh, that’s so funny. That’s really good.
FLECK He could have done the same thing.
Talos’ milkshake moment was inspired by Reservoir Dogs, but did Pulp Fiction inspire Freaky Tales’ nonlinear chaptered storytelling involving disparate characters who collide with one another?
FLECK It’s definitely one of the movies that inspired it. We’d be lying if we said it wasn’t one of them, but there were also movies like Go. I’m a big Jarmusch fan, so Mystery Train was right up there, too. There’s a whole collection of that kind of movie that we really love.
Pedro Pascal is a hard man to book these days. Did your schedule have to contend with all the other high-profile projects he’s been juggling?
BODEN He was busy when we booked him, actually, but he wasn’t as busy as he is now. The Last of Us hadn’t come out yet, so he hadn’t quite soared into that Pedro-is-everywhere moment, post-SNL [in 2023]. But he was still busy; he was working. One of the most challenging things about this was scheduling everybody. Ben was also busy, and trying to get Ben and Pedro on set for a day together was really challenging. We cast this absolute dream cast, and then we had to figure out how to get them all in the same place at the same time.
If people compare the selection at Late Night Video to the selection at Blockbuster Video in Captain Marvel, will they find any overlap?
BODEN Ryan is the person to ask because he worked at both the real Late Night video and at Blockbuster Video.
FLECK I didn’t work at Late Night Video, but that was my store as a kid. That’s where we went.
BODEN Oh, I thought you did. Did you work at another mom-and-pop store?
FLECK Yeah, I worked at another mom and pop. But is there overlap? I think the selection is more curated in Freaky Tales because we’ve not only got the VHS cases, but also the “coming soon” that’s on the wall behind Tom Hanks. That was really fun to put together. In a shot of the character who’s trying to manipulate Pedro’s character as his eyes start to glow, we’ve got Scanners and Re-Animator in the frame. It was written into the script that those two VHS tapes needed to be in the same frame as that shot. So it was fun to have all that stuff in mind from the get-go.
BODEN It’s challenging, and expensive, to find real VHSes now, and so we wished that we had kept some of the VHS from Captain Marvel to make our set dressing a little bit easier on this one.
Operation Ivy plays at the Gilman, and lots of notable bands got started there including Green Day. They actually launched under another name in 1987, so did you ever consider a nod to them as well?
FLECK We did. In early versions of the script, we were thinking about how to get that band in as well, but they were new kids on the block. They came in right after that peak 1987 period, and it felt like we weren’t being honest to what the Gilman was if we put Green Day in there. It really needed to be Operation Ivy; they were one of the founding core groups that would play at Gilman.
BODEN Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid cameos as a client in the Psytopics commercial.
Is your next movie about Anna’s time in the Boston area? It’s only fair, right?
BODEN & FLECK (Laugh.)
FLECK That seems fair, right?
BODEN Yeah, we’re going to call it Freaky Tales 2: Electric Boogaloo or Freaky Tales: Newton, Massachusetts.
FLECK It should be called Wicked something …
BODEN Yeah, Wicked Tales.
Have you scratched the superhero itch by now? Are you going to be sticking in mostly original territory?
BODEN I don’t know how to answer that question. I just know what we’re thinking about next, which is definitely more of a grounded character piece. It’s not exactly Freaky Tales vibes, but it’s back in the realm of real emotional drama.
FLECK But that’s not what he asked.
BODEN Yeah, it’s what he asked.
FLECK It might have an explosion, but there won’t necessarily be superheroes.
BODEN It’s not superheroes. It’s a grounded human character.
Lastly, Anthony Mackie recently told the story of the stray cat in Half Nelson. Apparently, Ryan Gosling picked it up after it randomly wandered into the scene. Is that true?
BODEN That is 100 percent true. It was just this stray cat. What was so beautiful about it is that Ryan not only picked it up, but Ryan’s character’s cat had also just died. He accidentally killed his cat. So it was this emotional moment and callback to [the Dan character] having just lost his own cat. When he picked up the stray cat, our DP [Andrij Parekh], who was also the cameraman, instinctively followed him. Anthony’s character then says, “You can’t bring that shit in my house, man. Put that cat down.” So he has to put the stray cat down, and as Ryan and Anthony go into the house, the cameraman follows this poor little cat as it scurries off. So it was a really beautiful improvisational moment for all three of them: the camera guy, Ryan and Anthony. I just loved that moment.
Amazing. Well, congrats on Freaky Tales.
FLECK Thank you. We appreciate the thoughtful questions and the milkshake idea that’s going to haunt us.
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Freaky Tales opens in movie theaters on April 4.
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