It's only a few days until this Saturday's Toronto Film Festival premiere of It's Kind of a Funny Story, and already, something feels very different for filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. It isn't just the assurance that Focus Features will release the film in theaters October 8 -- as Boden puts it, "It's nice to be able to go to a festival and enjoy the response to the film without that added pressure of having to sell it" -- but the realization that after making very challenging, independent movies like Half Nelson and Sugar, Boden and Fleck have turned in a third feature that could finally be their mainstream crowd-pleaser.
"We wanted to make sure that when you go to this movie, you're going to have a good time," Fleck stressed to Movieline. "You're not going to come out feeling depressed, you're going to come out feeling uplifted."
You'd be forgiven for assuming the opposite: after all, Funny Story is the tale of a depressed teenage boy who checks himself into a mental hospital, and Boden and Fleck are more known for their gritty bona fides than their funny bones. But the duo have put together a cast of comedic veterans (Zach Galifianakis, Lauren Graham) and bright up-and-comers (Keir Gilchrist, Emma Roberts), and by staying true to the semi-autobiographical novel by Ned Vizzini that the film is based on, Boden and Fleck hope audiences will spark to the material like they did when Paramount hired them to adapt it in 2006.
"It was a really fun movie about serious themes, but handled in a really light way," Fleck said. "We really responded to that, especially after making a very dramatic film like Half Nelson. It felt like we were ready to do something lighter."
Still, says Boden, "Various loopy political things happened at Paramount and we made another movie" -- Sugar, a 2008 film about a Dominican baseball player who immigrates to the United States. Funny Story eventually found its way to Focus Features and the filmmakers started assembling their cast, including Galifianakis (who had wanted to work with Boden and Fleck since seeing Half Nelson) as a helpful mental patient and 17-year-old United States of Tara star Gilchrist as the film's central depressed teen, Craig.
"There's a lot of pressure sometimes to cast older people in these roles because it's easier to work them full days, but we thought it was important to cast somebody who was really Craig's age and a real kid, not a Hollywood actor type," said Boden. "As soon as we met Keir, we got this really great vibe from him, like he was the right person and the right age and had really gone through some of the stuff that Craig was going through."
Though Gilchrist admitted to Movieline that he never thumbed through Vizzini's source novel -- "Keir probably didn't read it because he's lazy," laughed Fleck -- the book already had a devoted fan in Emma Roberts, who had picked it up years before and found herself intrigued by Craig's spiky love interest, Noelle. "I read a lot and I was browsing the bookstore when I was 14 or 15 and saw the book," Roberts told Movieline. "I read it and fell in love with it. I thought all the characters were so original and interesting, especially Noelle."
Roberts pursued the filmmakers and jumped for joy when learning she had booked the role, but the young actress (currently shooting Scream 4 in Michigan) was insistent that Noelle not fall into cliche. "The main thing that attracted me to this role was how Noelle was a totally different character than anything else I'd done," she said. "She's so unique. That's one of the reasons I changed my look for it. I dyed my hair blonde and had it shorter. I didn't want to play her as a typical androgynous teenager with pale skin and dark hair. I wanted her to be different. Anna and Ryan were really supportive about that too, which helped."
Still, Roberts confessed that she was nervous about the heavy improvisation that Boden and Fleck like to encourage -- something that has become one of the directors' trademarks. "The kind of movies we like seem to incorporate that real-life, captured feeling that improv lends itself to," Fleck explained, though the approach did have one drawback. "I just remember shooting this handheld scene where we just let Zach go off and improv," said Fleck, "and he was being so funny that the camera starts to shake because the camera operators couldn't keep it together, they were laughing so hard. It was a room full of spontaneous laughter."
That's a noise you wouldn't necessarily associate with the directors' other movies, but according to Fleck, all three of their films have more in common than you might think -- and it isn't just how personal they feel.
"When it says 'Written and Directed By' at the end, our names will be on all three movies, so there's that," he said. "They're all very unique and distinctly different films, but if you really wanted to latch onto something, you could say that they're all about characters struggling to find their place in the world. They're movies about people who try to make sense of the world and see where they can fit into it."