Sometimes, a director comes up with a movie title so good that they can spend years trying to think of a story worthy of it.
“All the way back when I was growing up in Oakland, I knew I was one day going to make a movie called Freaky Tales”, the film’s co-director Ryan Fleck told Zavvi. “I had no idea what it was going to be about, but I had the title.
“Over the years, I’ve pitched various ideas to Anna (Boden, Co-director), and she always said they were too conventional to have that title – which was a nice way of saying they weren’t very good! But we’d always have ideas for what this movie could be that neither of us were fully invested in, and when we realised we could tell a series of overlapping stories, it started to click; we could focus on wild, freaky short stories, without worrying about backstory and character nuance.”
The movie has arrived at the perfect time for Boden and Fleck, with their high-energy, genre-defying anthology movie feeling like the complete antithesis of their previous project, MCU blockbuster Captain Marvel. Here, they appear liberated from endless studio notes and meetings with producers to make the craziest overlapping stories possible, jumping from punks-vs-Nazis adventure, to hip-hop musical, and from crime thriller to old-school Hong Kong action throwback.
“We’ve told so many different kinds of stories before”, Boden told Zavvi, “and this time, our only conscious goal was to make something fun, something that would be constantly propulsive and pushing the audience forward. We weren’t trying to make people think or feel – the movie is called Freaky Tales, and the challenge was creating the fun movie that’d live up to that title.”
Each tale is set in its own corner of Oakland in 1987, jumping from underground clubs to sleazy video stores and everywhere in-between. That the first two tales take place in music subcultures, using lesser-known actors before the likes of Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn take centre stage later on, was key in establishing the vibe of the movie.
Boden explained: “We always thought about this movie as a cinematic mixtape; it shouldn’t have felt like an album by one artist, but a well curated mixtape you’ve been personally gifted. And that didn’t just mean picking from the movie genres we love, but the music ones they’re linked to – I love 8 Mile, so I wanted a piece of that battle rap scene in here, and I love this era of American punk music, so we incorporated the influence of Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline Of Western Civilisation.
“By approaching the movie as a mixtape, it allowed us to see it as more than just one thing but curated well enough so that when taken as a whole, it still feels like it has a satisfying wholeness to it.”
The movie frequently departs from reality, with supernatural conspiracy theories and historical revisionism within each story demanding you expect the unexpected – it wouldn’t be particularly freaky otherwise. However, British viewers may be surprised to discover that the final story, in which Top Gun: Maverick star Jay Ellis appears as basketballer Sleepy Floyd, is the one drawn the most from Fleck’s own memories from growing up in Oakland.
“It was one of the most evocative moments of my childhood”, he explained. “Hearing that game on the radio, and the announcer calling Sleepy Floyd “Superman” - that stuck in my head as a ten-year-old and it has stayed with me all these years.
“But you’d have to be a hardcore basketball fan of a certain age to remember who he is, he was never a Michael Jordan figure. Hearing that call and knowing that he still holds the NBA playoff record he set during that game, was an inspiration to tell a Superman-style story for him – we were thinking of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and how we could reimagine his legacy in this super violent revisionist history.”
The finer details of this world, not just the over-the-top ones, are drawn from Fleck’s formative memories too.
“There’s a scene in the punk story where Lucid (Jack Champion) is at dinner with Tina (Ji-young Yoo) and her family. Her parents are immigrants so speak a different language at home, but Lucid sits there smiling and laughing along with the conversations, following them even though he has no idea what was going on – it reminded me of being in Oakland and hearing these conversations at friend’s houses.
“A lot of my life was in Spanish, and I didn’t understand it!”
The Pedro Pascal-starring tale takes his character into a video store whose cranky owner wants to test every customer on their movie knowledge. Fleck acknowledges that this man was an older version of himself, having worked at several video stores in the area during this period.
However, rather than cast a younger actor, they bagged an older A-lister for a cameo, who we’re about to reveal (so please stop reading here, if you want this moment unspoiled!).
Boden said: “We worked on the Apple show Masters Of The Air, which Tom Hanks was a producer on, and through that experience we met him. He’s maybe the most famous person from Oakland, and there were all these references to his early movies in the script, so we thought we should send it to him and see if he’d consider making a cameo.
“He said yes, so we wrote this part specifically for him, something fun and juicy that we felt was completely up his alley. We honestly still can’t believe he showed up!”
Freaky Tales is released in UK cinemas on Friday, 18th April.
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