Interview: Ryan Fleck Talks Mississippi Grind

With longtime collaborator Anna Boden, filmmaker Ryan Fleck has made four narrative features, including Half Nelson, Sugar, and now the lovely, funky caper Mississippi Grind, all marked by a humane interest in characters struggling along the edges of the American dream. An homage to the gamblers, ruffians, and confidence men of the Hollywood Renaissance, Mississippi Grind, largely filmed in New Orleans, also bears the imprint of The City That Care Forgot—its seedy dives, its threadbare venues, its slightly off-kilter hospitality. When Gerry (the excellent Ben Mendelsohn), in debt and divorced, meets Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), a charmer always on the lookout for his next game, the two embark on a topsy-turvy road trip downriver, stopping in other unremembered outposts of middle Americana: St. Louis, Memphis, Tunica. It is, like all of Fleck and Boden’s films, admirably scratchy in stretches, not unlike the world in which it’s set, or indeed the movies to which it pays tribute. On a cool, cloudy French Quarter morning, I spoke to Fleck about learning to play poker, his love for “old-school American characters,” and his work on the HBO series Looking.

We traditionally associate gambling movies with Vegas, or maybe California. Why the Mississippi River? What was interesting about that for you and Anna?

We hadn’t seen it before, first of all. Maybe there’s something out there that we haven’t seen. I haven’t seen every movie, obviously. When we were making Sugar in 2007, we spent a lot of time in Iowa, in the Quad Cities, which is right on the Mississippi River up there, and we stumbled across these riverboat casinos, which, just like you said, were sort of the opposite of Vegas, the opposite of glamorous, and didn’t even seem to be trying that hard to be glamorous. We were just fascinated by the locations. We had a good time playing blackjack, and off in the distance there was always a poker room that felt very mysterious, felt very unknown. I didn’t know how to play poker. It seemed like something was happening in there, and I wanted to learn what was going on. We finished making Sugar, filed that location away in the back of the brain, and then a few years later popped up again and said, “Hey, remember those poker rooms? Remember those riverboat casinos? What if two guys meet in one of those poker rooms right on the Mississippi and decide to take a road trip, in an old-fashioned, romantic, Old West kind of way?”

I read that you all did a road trip of your own, starting in New Orleans and then going upriver. It seems like in the process you fell in love with this kind of tattered, post-industrial landscape, with the montages that introduce each city.

That was important, to get the feel of the road trip, because, as you probably guessed, we shot most of the movie here in New Orleans. But we did take a little trip to get those locations, which were important to the film, to make audiences feel like they were on the road with these guys. We’re really proud that we were able to make that happen, because it’s not the most efficient way to make a movie. We got the crew up to St. Louis. We got the crew to Memphis. We went to Tunica. We had small units go up to Iowa and get those exterior locations. You see snow on the ground at certain points. It’s nice to sort of feel the landscape shift as you move south. When the guys leave St. Louis, and the two of them are in a car driving south from St. Louis, that’s the actual highway you would be driving on from St. Louis heading down to New Orleans. It’s a small thing, but it’s something I’m proud of.

You and Anna have talked about being influenced by films like California Split and Fat City, among others. What about those movies is so attractive to you?

I don’t know if the people have changed, or if it’s just that the movies about the people have changed, if that makes any sense, but the characters back then just felt so much more unpredictable and volatile and spontaneous and of the moment than they do in movies nowadays. The movies didn’t dwell on backstory. The stories didn’t try to tell you everything about the characters. They were loose. They were freewheeling. Not every movie, but the movies we gravitated to, like Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, The King of Marvin Gardens, Scarecrow. Have you ever seen Scarecrow? Gene Hackman’s character in that is telling jokes one minute, punching somebody in the face the next. There’s a scene where he and Pacino are sharing a little motel room, and he starts disrobing, getting ready for bed, and he takes off about 10 shirts. I don’t know if you remember, but it’s such a weird character trait. There’s no reason for that, and it’s not explained in the movie. He’s just a bizarre character. I struggle with the idea of, have people changed? Have people become less idiosyncratic and less like real, old-school American characters? Have we become sort of corporatized, or is it just the movies? And I don’t know the answer. But I feel like when we took this trip, we were still meeting really interesting characters and hearing stories, and we tried to put a piece of that in the movie.

It’s funny that you bring up Gene Hackman in Scarecrow, because I would say that Ben Mendelsohn is almost a kind of Hackmanesque actor. There’s a grizzled quality to him, but also, as Gerry in Mississippi Grind, he brings a warmth that you only see in flashes in his performance in Bloodline, on Netflix. How do you craft a character who experiences such quicksilver changes of not just mood, but also goals, ambitions, interests?

Ben brought a lot of that. I think the character was actually written as a little more uptight, a little more still, and Curtis is the one who’s supposed to come in with all the energy and movement. But Ben Mendelsohn is anything but still. I mean, this guy is just a mountain of energy, and I think he brought that sort of unpredictable, volatile thing to the character, and I like that you compare him to Gene Hackman. I’ve heard other people compare him to Dustin Hoffman in Straight Time. I love hearing these comparisons. Somebody else compared him to young Pacino. He’s one of those great ’70s character actors, only he happens to be living in the present. I forgot the original part of your question. I don’t know if I even touched on it.

It was about how you structure the direction so you get that kind of looseness without losing the thread of the story. Because, to me, one of the most important things about the movie is that the story beats have to hit at the right moment for it to build your expectations, and then, in most cases, to undercut those expectations.

Listen, I wish I could take credit for it being some master plan, but I think it’s really just encouraging the actors to put as much of themselves into the parts that they play. So you’re seeing pieces of Ryan Reynolds, and it’s not just the charismatic side. He’s got a really thoughtful, vulnerable, gentle side, too, that he’s not able to put on display in movies that often—he’s not asked to—and we wanted that to come out. Ben, like I said before, was written as a much more still character, but we wanted him to bring everything that he has as a human being to the part. And so just encouraging that on set and letting the guys have fun and play was, I think, crucial to the chemistry they have on screen.

It was interesting to me, watching Mississippi Grind and then going back and watching Half Nelson, Sugar, and It’s Kind of a Funny Story. It seems like you and Anna are attracted to characters, mainly men of varying ages, who I would describe as being poised on the edge between success and failure. That, to me, is a pretty clear through line.

Then you found it. Because I don’t pretend to know that there’s a through line. But that makes sense to me. I don’t think we’ve thought it through. I think maybe we’re attracted to those stories, and you’re right, they do tend to focus on men. I don’t know why. I think we’re going to try to shift into female territory for our next thing, just because we asked ourselves, “Why are we doing this? Why are we focusing on men? Let’s focus on a woman.” Maybe we’ll learn why we don’t focus on after focusing on a woman. We’ll say, “Oh we’re not very good at telling female stories.” But I’m getting lost here. I don’t really know. I though you put it pretty interestingly.

You said that you didn’t even know how to play poker going in. I’m not much of a gambler myself, but I bought into the kind of seedy, garishly lit backwater casinos and private games that Gerry finds as they go down the river. What kind of research goes into getting that right?

A fair amount. Anna and I took the trip, basically, that the guys take in the movie, and so we stopped into these places along the way and took pictures and made notes. We knew the places we wanted our guys to be in. And we had a poker consultant here because we didn’t know much about poker. We had a guy named Anthony Howard, who’s a professional poker player. He hangs out in the Harrah’s. He was there any time we were shooting a poker scene. He was there helping make sure it all looked right, and he helped with casting so that the guys at the table, who were all experienced poker players, knew how to hold their cards, knew how to raise a bet, knew how to fold. Because we were fairly new to it, we weren’t able to say exactly how it should be. Sometimes we’d have a table that had a few extras that weren’t experienced, and he would sort of whisper to us, “These guys don’t know what they’re doing,” and we would swap them out for somebody from another table that did know. Everybody who’s playing on a featured poke table in the movie knows what they’re doing. Hopefully that adds to the authenticity on screen.

How’s your poker game now?

I haven’t really played since we finished making the movie, but I think I got pretty decent while we were doing research. I started from awful, like literally just not understanding how the game was played, to the point that people were sort of whispering and laughing at me at the table. But people couldn’t read me and I was making strange decisions that were out of the ordinary, and basically winning quite a bit because of that. And then people learned that I was a novice and they started to take their money back.

Do you have an obvious tell?

I don’t think I do, but I’ll tell you, Anna, she is the worst, because when she gets a good hand, she giggles. You would think that was misdirection. You would think that she couldn’t possibly have a good hand because she’s acting like a person who’s so pleased with their hand that it can’t be the case, but sure enough—she has trouble with the lying aspect. A game that’s inherently about misleading people, I think that doesn’t come easily to her.

I recapped Looking for Slant this most recent season, and I’ve been dying to ask you about the two episodes you directed, particularly two specific sequences. First, though, how did you become involved in Looking?

I grew up in the Bay Area. I grew up in Oakland, California, and my agent sent me the pilot. It was set in San Francisco, and I saw that it was really in San Francisco; it wasn’t one of these New Orleans productions pretending to be somewhere else. It just felt so authentic and so real, and I was a big fan of Andrew [Haigh]’s Weekend, and I just thought these guys were onto something really special. Andrew was a fan of Half Nelson, so we had a conversation, and I just expressed how much I loved the potential of that show. The first season, I did the Folsom Street Fair episode. I live in New York now, but it was just so great to go back to the Bay Area and work with that cast and crew. The experience of working on Looking is the closest thing to the experience of my own movies, where we try to create a family and create a fun working environment for the actors and the crew. Andrew and Michael Lannan, with that show, have created something that just feels safe, feels like the kind of working environment I crave. I was devastated when I found out it wasn’t renewed. I should be there right now. I should be doing season three, and I’m so mad about it. I’m happy that they’re going to be able to finish it out with a movie version, but I’m really bummed that I can’t be there.

It ended up being a more controversial show than I expected when I heard it was in development. I’m wondering if you followed that at all, and what you make of the criticisms.

I didn’t. I didn’t really follow too much what was being said about it. What was even controversial about it?

A number of critics, the ones that I read, predominantly gay men, argued that it offered too-limited a perspective of the gay experience. My take was that that was a little unfair, to expect a single half-hour television series to carry the whole of it. I also think in the second season, there are characters who go beyond the baseline of Kevin and Patrick and Dom that I think most people were critical of.

I think that any show that deals with a specific culture that hasn’t been represented much before in movies and TV is going to be under a microscope. People look for their own experience, and when they don’t find the exact experience that they’ve had, they react negatively. I mean, I don’t really know what it is, but it’s a shame more people didn’t watch that, gay or straight. I’m a straight male, and I love those guys. I love those characters, those stories. I know I’m biased because I worked on it, but I responded to the pilot. They captured something really beautiful about those guys. And you know what? Yeah, a show set in San Francisco probably should have another Asian character on it, but I wish it had time for that to happen. I’m sure it was going to continue to grow and expand, and I wish it had an opportunity to do so.

I felt like this season in particular the series really hit its stride, and it happened around the time of the two episodes that you directed. I wanted to ask you about two scenes that I wrote about extensively: One is the scene between Richie and Agustín in the barbershop at the end of “Looking Top to Bottom,” because of the architecture it creates with the mirrors, and the other is the rooftop scene between Patrick and Kevin in “Looking Down the Road,” which I think is amazingly romantic. How did those come about?

The mirror was an accident. You get into a location and you block out the scene: Agustín’s coming in to apologize, and he’s got to stand in the doorway. Xavier [Grobet, the director of photography] and I are standing there watching, and he’s got a viewfinder, and we just found this beautiful shot that seemed to tell the story. It’s an accident. I don’t think we could’ve planned it that way, necessarily. The rooftop, it had just rained. It was sunny, but there were all these clouds, so we were kind of battling time because we were worried that it was going to rain again and it wouldn’t match because of the sun. We were shooting it fairly traditionally. I wanted to hopefully do it in one shot, so we did this kind of roaming thing, maybe four or five takes of that. The plan was to then do the close-ups, the coverage, in case we wanted to cut into that shot. So it wasn’t conceived as a one-shot thing. But Andrew always encouraged me when I came into the show, he likes to do things that could play in one, so he sets up most scenes to do it in one and then also shoots creative coverage just so you can trim it in the editing room. And then the sun changed. It wasn’t going to match anything. Xavier and I looked at each other, and Michael was there, and we said, “You know, let’s go for it.” We did four takes of it, in different ways, so you could still cut into it if you needed to, but we didn’t do that close-up coverage. In my cut, I just left it as one, and thankfully they left it as one too. That’s what I love about those guys. Often, in TV, the executive producers get in there and start chopping to hell what your director’s cut is. And those guys, I think they ended up having to trim down for time a little bit, but they left the integrity of what I did.

I think it’s telling that in the season finale, there’s a scene in the parking garage that’s also all one take, which seemed to me like a perfect opposite of that moment on the rooftop.

Yeah, it was kind of like a horror film. You’re stuck in this weird sort of sci-fi world. That strange concrete building that they moved into was a cool location.

Speaking of TV work, how did you end up getting involved with the documentary for ESPN’s 30 for 30, The Day the Series Stopped?

I came onto that very late. That was actually in motion already, and the producer Jamie Patricof, who produced Mississippi Grind, was involved with doing that. They needed a director, and he asked if I would come on. As a huge baseball fan, I was around in ’89 when that happened, so it was personal to me, but there’s not much of a story there. I conducted a few interviews and oversaw some of the cuts. I didn’t micromanage that one. I was on and off of it pretty quickly. It won an Emmy! This Emmy shows up at my door and I’m like, “Oh, wow, okay. I’ll take that.” Dan Marks, the editor and producer, he really put that thing together, and anything you like or don’t like about it, he deserves a lot of the credit. I’m happy to have my name on it and be involved, but the details were not necessarily my decisions.

Would you consider doing a nonfiction project of your own? I feel like your films with Anna have a documentary or realistic quality that is close kin to nonfiction.

We started out that way. Our first project together was a short documentary called Have You Seen This Man?, which is about a Brooklyn artist. We kind of followed him around and then submitted it to festivals, where it won some audience prizes. It’s a cute, fun little movie. And we went to Cuba and made a documentary [Young Rebels] about hip-hop in Havana, which also played the festival circuit. I think what we learned from those movies is that we don’t have the patience to make the kind of documentaries we love, which are those like Hoop Dreams, the stories that are told over time that you just need to get mountains of footage for. We start to want to write things, for things to take a certain shape, rather than the Frederick Wiseman approach, where you shoot and give it a shape later. I do love documentaries and would hope to make one again someday. So much has been going on with Cuba since we made that movie in 2003. Did you ever see a movie called The Same River Twice? It was a documentary that came out in 2003, I think. It was at Sundance. Robb Moss is the filmmaker. He made a very experimental movie, shot on film, in the ’60s, as part of his commune of friends that were living up on a mountain or by a river or something. They were living a carefree, hippie existence, free love and all that stuff, and he documented their experiences together. Thirty years later, he interviews his friends again, and you see where they all are in their lives now, and how people have changed over time. It’s a beautiful little movie that I highly recommend. I think this Cuban hip-hop documentary is sort of ripe for that treatment now. We made this movie 12 years ago and so much has happened in Cuba, and all of our subjects, their lives have changed so dramatically. Someday, it would be nice to incorporate the original footage from that movie, which nobody really saw, and go back and have a revisit.

Speaking of lives changing over time, it’s been almost 10 years since Half Nelson. Has your approach to filmmaking changed since then?

That’s a tough question, because I’m in it. I feel older. I feel like I’ve aged 20 years in those nine years. There’s a big difference between making films in your mid and late 20s than your late 30s, at least for me. It’s not even about being more tired. I think that we were really naïve and fearless when we were younger. We thought we could just go to Cuba and make a movie illegally, and we just did it, without really thinking about it. We look back on it now and we’re like, “That was weird.” We just went to Cuba and made a movie without getting permission from either government. There were all kinds of risks involved. Our stuff could’ve been confiscated. We never had a problem, but our naïveté sort of worked to our benefit. We didn’t think of the reasons why we couldn’t do something. Now I just think that all of those experiences have added up, so I might be a little more cautious than I was when I was younger.

I’m a huge fan of Half Nelson because I ended up going on to teach high school here in New Orleans, and I think anyone who teaches in a tough school or a tough neighborhood has a fear that they have Dan’s dark side in them as well as his bright side.

That’s nice to hear. We were sort of attacked by a small contingent, like when you talk about Looking being attacked. I remember, because it was our first movie, I read a lot more comments than I do now, and there was this fringe element of teachers that were really angry at me and the movie because of the way teachers are portrayed. I just thought, “Wow, that’s so shortsighted,” speaking of people who say, “That’s not my experience.” I remember I got into a fight at a Q&A with a teacher who was like, “That’s not what happens! He has to go through training! He would never have a student in his car!” And I’m just like, “Lady, oh my God! You’ve missed the whole point of this movie.”

It codes with my experience. Well, not the drugs, but the kind of bond that you forge with students and, you know, if they don’t get picked up at the end of the day, am I going to leave them there?

The movie’s pushing buttons on purpose, obviously. He’s not the greatest teacher, clearly. He’s smoking crack in the girls’ locker room, so I think that should give us a little leeway from that moment on. Teachers are, rightfully, proud of their profession, and protective of how it’s portrayed, so I get it.

Do you have an idea what your next project is?

No. In the past we’ve been lucky enough to have something teed up and ready to go, which I’d totally talk about, but we’re a little bit behind, so we’re starting multiple things. We’re going to see which one sticks, which one has legs, and follow that one, but we’re not sure what it is yet.

Finally, in the film, Curtis describes “Machu Picchu time,” the phrase he uses when he’s about to leave one town and move on to the next, as referring to “a place you just get lost and never come back from.” Where did that phrase come from, and what does it mean to you?

I like this question, and I wish I had an answer for you that was equal to the question itself. I think it was just one of those things where you’re like, “We need something that Curtis is striving for,” and we were thinking of a place, and here’s this place that’s mysterious, that’s filled with questions and mysteries. It seemed appropriate for a guy like him to gravitate toward that. And it’s fun to say! Literally, Anna and I were like, “Machu Picchu! Machu Picchu! We have to write that into the movie!”