Half Nelson (2006 Ryan Fleck)

It's been a while - reviewed here. Fleck and Anna Boden wrote the film (and she edited the picture as well - a quite unusual combination unless you're a Coen, Allen or Soderbergh). Something really different, a socially conscious, honest, unpredictable story of ... friendship ... which manages also to offer up an intriguing history lesson throughout.

Q. How did you first get together creatively? Was it romantically or through work?
Anna Boden: We were dating first, and I was doing a documentary short for a film class and I just kind of asked him to help me out and hold the microphone, basically. But then he had all these suggestions, about how to edit the film. He started directing everything…..
Ryan Fleck: And I didn’t need you at some point, it was my movie.
Anna Boden: We ended up co-directing that and we liked working together.
Ryan Fleck: I had done some theatre, and I had more of a fiction film background and Anna had been more involved in documentaries, so I worked a little bit more with the actors in Half Nelson and stole the director credit while she was sleeping.

They also made  It's Kind of a Funny Story and Mississippi Grind and Sugar (Dominican baseball player recruited to US) and some TV stuff including episodes of The Affair.

Doesn't go where you think it will go - e.g. in great scene between Gosling and Anthony Mackie - in fact arguably it doesn't go anywhere... Gosling and 17 year old Shareeka Epps are fabulous:

Anna Boden: I think that his relationship with Shareeka, his friendship with her, was a very important basis for his character’s friendship with her in the film. They’re still close, and by the time we started shooting they had really formed a friendship and she maybe had a little bit of a crush on him too.

Unlike our previous film it's often in close up.