How Freaky Tales Became The Anti-Nazi Epic We Need Right Now
Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck break down the influences for their new film and the “cathartic experience” of setting Nazis on fire.
Freaky Tales is a unicorn in the best of ways. The quasi-anthology, directed by Captain Marvel’s Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, delivers the kind of form-pushing narrative you don’t see every day. The writer-director duo have crafted a potent cocktail of resilience and ‘80s nostalgia out of four interconnected stories. It’s inspired partially by the figures that shaped Fleck’s youth, like the Oakland rapper Too $hort or Lakers point guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, and bolstered by the strength of his imagination.
“These sorts of things echoed through my mind for a long time,” Fleck tells Inverse over Zoom. “I thought, ‘Freaky Tales is going to be a movie that Anna and I are going to make one day.’”
A Bay Area native, Fleck has been toying with Freaky Tales on and off for years. It took a while to convince the Massachusetts-born Boden that this particular story was worth cracking, but ultimately the duo landed on the perfect theme to unite their disparate storylines.
“For me, that is this theme of these underdogs that are kind of all colliding in this moment in time and having their moment to rise up against bullies of various kinds,” adds Boden.
Said bullies take many forms, from Too $hort’s objectifying song lyrics to a gang of Nazi skinheads terrorizing the Bay. It falls to unlikely heroes like Floyd (Jay Ellis), the hip-hop duo Danger Zone (Dominique Thorne and Normani), and a reluctant hitman (Pedro Pascal) to save the day, and each does so in spectacular fashion. Given the rise of fascism we’re battling in real life, the film couldn’t be timelier — and with its scrappy protagonists so eager to defend their turf, it couldn’t be more satisfying.
Ahead of Freaky Tales’ release, Boden and Fleck sat down with Inverse to talk about their influences, the serendipitous casting of Pedro Pascal, and the catharsis of setting Nazis on fire.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Fleck and Boden with the cast of Freaky Tales at its Oakland premiere.
I was really struck by the way this functions almost like an indie superhero movie. I’d love to know how you and the team cracked the story of these interconnected vignettes.
Fleck: One of the inspirations for this movie that we don’t talk about a lot is actually Hollywood Shuffle, which is a movie from 1987 that I grew up loving, and it has all these wonderful, sort of episodic, fantasy elements. There’s a moment where Robert Townsend is imagining himself as a superhero flying in a super cheap lo-fi way — and throughout the prep, when we have a little sequence of Danger Zone in their music video flying at the end, I was like, “Look, make it look like Hollywood Shuffle. It’s an ‘80s music video.”
It was movie influences like Hollywood Shuffle and about 3,000 other movies, but also, of course, the “Freaky Tales” song, which originated with Too $hort — hearing that as a kid, listening to the Sleepy Floyd game against the Lakers on the radio, and hearing the announcer literally say, “Sleepy Floyd is Superman.” These sorts of things echoed through my mind for a long time, and I thought, “Freaky Tales is going to be a movie that Anna and I are going to make one day.” It was just figuring out what the ingredients were going to be. I think we finally cracked it when it was like, you know what? Give each storyline its own time and we’ll just focus on these short films and figure out the best way to have the characters interact with each other.
Danger Zone provided the perfect underdog theme for Boden.
Boden: Ryan kept saying, “We’re going to have to make this movie.” And finally I was like, “OK, fine, we’ll make the movie.” He wore me down… I mean, I love the Bay Area, and he keeps telling me that I’m—
Fleck: …an honorary member of the Bay Area.
Boden: Because I did not grow up there. So for me, there had to be something else juicy in it. And for me that is this theme of these underdogs, that are kind of all colliding in this moment in time and having their moment to rise up against bullies of various kinds… I think finally there was a version of the movie that did legitimately get me really excited, and part of it was the Danger Zone storyline, and getting at Too $horts’ music from the point of view of these women. So many versions of the Freaky Tales movie that I had gotten from Ryan in the past were not that; they were more focused on Too $hort, from his perspective. Hearing the song [“Freaky Tales”] on that album and trying to imagine a fictionalized origin story of where that came from, then starting to weave that into the “underdog” theme, that got me really excited.
I am sure you didn’t plan on this when you were casting, but you’ve got a few Marvel alums in the cast. Did you all bond over your shared experience?
Fleck: Ben [Mendelsohn], we’ve worked with three times before, so we cast him in Captain Marvel and this as well. So he knew what that was all about. We didn’t have to share stories.
Boden: We were all there together. [Laughs]
“It’s very cathartic for me to see Nazis get lit on fire.”
Fleck: When we made the movie, which feels like a while ago, The Last of Us hadn’t even come out yet. We knew who Pedro [Pascal] was from Mandalorian — though he’s hardly on camera — and Narcos. I remember him from a low-budget vampire movie called Bloodsucking Bastards, in which he was fantastic, so we just liked him from that stuff. And then he became this sort of megastar after that. We never really got to talk much about the Marvel experience afterwards. We did after he was and after he shot it. And then Dominique [Thorne], of course, had just gone through Ironheart, but she wasn’t allowed to talk about it.
The themes that seemed timely when this premiered at Sundance have only become more timely. Have you reflected on that at all as things in the real world are only getting crazier?
Boden: Yeah. We did not think that having Nazis as the villains was a controversial thing when we wrote this, but it does feel like now, more than ever, a story about making the decision to stand up and actually fight against hate is a relevant question. It’s very cathartic for me to see Nazis get lit on fire and to have that experience. We hope that it can kind of be that for people in the context of a fun popcorn movie: that it can still be fun, but also be this kind of cathartic experience. I don’t know, what do you think?
Fleck: Yeah, yeah. It’s just like characters say throughout the movie: Every now and then, every decade, we need to remind audiences that Nazis are not cool, but they’re the bad guys and we will light them on fire. I hope that this movie brings some people some sense that it’s OK to have fun at the movies and beat up Nazis at the same time.
