Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden met on a student film shoot at NYU. Their first feature film, Half Nelson, for which rising star Ryan Gosling received his first Oscar nomination, was made for just $800,000 and put the pair on the Hollywood map as the next great writing/directing duo. Their follow-up film, Sugar, is about the personal and professional trials of Miguel ‘Sucre’ Santos, a Dominican baseball pitcher with his hopes pinned on the major leagues. And after a year spent wowing audiences on the festival circuit — which garnered the film nominations for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an Independent Spirit award for Best Screenplay — Sugar is now in wide release. After the jump, our friend Kristine Kennedy chats with Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden about Sugar.

KRISTINE KENNEDY: What made you guys want to make a film about a minor league ball player from Latin America?

RYAN FLECK: Well, I’ve always been a pretty big baseball fan. I grew up in Oakland- a big A’s fan- and I’ve been aware of all the Dominican players who have come through the league over the years. But, I didn’t exactly know why until recently, which is that every major league team has an academy, a camp, in the Dominican Republic. It’s this huge industry where players are trained and the good ones come up and play in the minor league systems. We became very curious about the guys you don’t hear about, the guys that don’t make it all the way.

KK: What kind of research did you guys do to put the script together?

ANNA BODEN: Well, when we started, when we heard of this, we started doing book and article research. We heard of these former minor league players who play up in the Bronx, and since we live in New York, it seemed like a natural place to start our hands-on research. So, we took the train up there and visited this park, which is where the last scene of the film takes place- Roberto Clemente Ballpark. We started talking to the guys and every single one of them had been through some journey that paralleled Miguel’s in some way. They had come from the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, gone through the minor league system, and somehow ended up in New York. They were playing in this league on weekends and their stories were so interesting. We thought, this is where the movie ends.

Then, we went to the Dominican Republic to learn first hand where [Miguel’s] story begins. We started off with some connections at the baseball academies, talking with the people who worked there and the kids who were playing there. Then, they would connect us with other kids from their hometown who had already gone to the United States and were back. Slowly, the story started coming together and the characters started coming together, not based on any specific story, but a composite of all these stories that had something in common with each other.

KK: Did these guys have a lot to say about the culture clash when they came to the US?

AB: That was the biggest thing. The biggest thing was food- ordering food, dealing with the language, missing home and feeling like this was a really strange place.

KK: So, it sounds like the academies prepared them to be baseball players, but nothing else and didn’t care about how these guys adjusted once they got to the United States?

RF: Every team is different. They have different resources that they pump into their academies. But, I think the teams are learning that their players perform better on the field if they have better off the field skills. Some places have computers now and are teaching guys computer skills. They’re teaching them English and Spanish, because a lot these guys have such limited education that they can’t even read Spanish. They’re trying to educate them better.

AB: Some of the academies are. But, even in the academies that are, it’s not always simply a failure on the part of the academy. It’s also that these are young kids and their ticket out is their baseball skills, not how well they do in the culture clash after baseball practice. They’re not going to get to the United States by knowing English the best. They’re going to get to the United States by knowing how to play the best, and after a really long day of playing on the field and then wanting to go and weight train after your mandatory English class, they’re not necessarily paying that close attention. We tried to capture that a little bit in the scene where Miguel is practicing his knuckle curve hold during the English class.

It’s not a simple thing, the reason why young kids are unprepared when they come over here. It’s also that the education system in the Dominican Republic- it’s not mandatory to finish high school. A lot of kids are dropping out of school very, very young to practice baseball.

KK: So, the academies, they’re affiliated with Major League Baseball? I know MLB is notoriously difficult with access.

AB: We didn’t have to go through the corporate entity.

RF: MLB leases the physical academies from the local owner, which is often former players. Like, Junior Noboa used to play major league baseball and he runs the Arizona Diamondback facilities where we shot. And Jose Rijo, who appears in the movie, also runs an academy.

AB: These academies are run mostly without a lot of daily or weekly influence from the teams. When we went to shoot, we needed to get permission from the Arizona Diamond backs, but not from Major League Baseball, just as long as we didn’t shoot any logos.

KK: At what age do kids start to get into these academies?

AB: I think it’s sixteen, but they can’t maybe play until they’re seventeen…

RF: No. They can play at sixteen now.

AB: There used to be barely any regulations at all. Jose Rijo was signed at fourteen and sent directly to the United States for two thousand dollars in the 80’s. But now, there are regulations. You have to have graduated high school to play in the major leagues in the U.S.

KK: When you guys were putting the script together, did the story come together pretty quickly? By the time you were done with your research, did you have a pretty good idea of the arc you wanted to put your character through, what kind of person you wanted Miguel to be?

RF: We knew the end of the movie first, because we started our research in the Bronx and we knew that’s where a lot of these guys end up who don’t make it all the way. We just worked out way backwards from there. We knew that a large part of the film was going to be dealing with Miguel’s isolation and, obviously, living in a small town where he doesn’t know the language, doesn’t know the culture. So, finding a character who wouldn’t deal with that very well.

KK: There’s a lot of pressure throughout the film for him to be a success, the one place that he can go to be himself is the cabinet shop, where he gets to do something that he really enjoys. How did you pick that hobby?

AB: I don’t know. That came out of different brainstorming. We liked the idea that it was some sort of profession or hobby that was very “use your hands.” It seems like this is a guy who is really good with his hands and he likes the physicality of the work, but there’s also something artistic about it. We’d met a couple of guys along the way who said that their father had a carpentry shop or a cabinet shop. That sparked the idea that maybe that’s something Miguel’s father had done.

KK: So, your experience, going through the whole process of making Half Nelson, did you feel a whole lot more prepared to do something like Sugar?

RF: Not really.

KK: A totally different kind of film to make?

RF: It was the same in the sense that we used the same crew that we were very familiar with and it was fun to travel with everybody. But, it was in Spanish. Anna speaks pretty good Spanish. I don’t. And there’s lots of baseball in the movie, which are essentially action sequences. There’s balls that need to go in a certain place. Lots of extras. We joke around, but it feels like going from Half Nelson to this- this is like making Titanic. It feels like a huge, epic movie.

AB: That’s not to say that we didn’t approach working with character and working with the dialog sequences and the quiet, alone sequences in the same way that we approached them in Half Nelson. There were just other, huge challenges that made it a much more daunting film to make.

KK: Shooting in the Dominican Republic, did you find people to be cooperative?

AB: People were surprisingly cooperative and we relied on people to cooperate all through the process, starting in the research phase. We wouldn’t have even been able to write the story had we not had people be very open, like let us into the academies. We got our first choice of every single location. And casting- we cast all non-professionals down there.

KK: How did you know that Algenis Perez Soto was the right person for the role [of Miguel]?

AB: He was person number 452 that we interviewed. So, we had 451 people who we talked to who weren’t right for the role. So, when we talked to him, we knew immediately that there was something different about him. Had he been number ten or twelve, then maybe we wouldn’t have known right away. Since we met him so late in the casting process, both of us knew immediately that it was gonna work.

KK: Did you talk to anybody in your research who felt, in the long run, that it wasn’t really worth it, all that time and effort that they put into baseball?

RF: I wouldn’t say that they would phrase it like, that it wasn’t worth it. There were a handful of people who had left the way the Miguel does in the movie, because they were frustrated. They saw the end was coming. They knew they weren’t going to the next level and they just decided that it was time to do something else. But, there were a lot pf people who were sort of heartbroken, back in the Dominican, who had gone through the process and then come back and are still finding it difficult to find work.

AB: There were a handful of people – and it was really educational for us, from the perspective of writers to see it – you could just see how fresh their wounds were. They couldn’t even go there to talk about what they perceived to be a really big failure in their lives. There were a couple of guys who were really angry and had left because of a conflict with a manager. They thought there was racism involved or something like that. It was important for us to see those people for whom it was just a visceral reaction.

– Kristine Kennedy

Kristine Kennedy is an avid baseball fan, a carpenter and a screenwriter. She also plays bass and sings in the band Audible. Sugar is currently playing at Ritz East in Philly and Showcase at the Ritz Center in Voorhees, NJ.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 2:55 pm.