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Sugar Is One Sweet Tale
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden are ready for the majors with their follow-up to Half Nelson
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Fleck and Boden’s interests were piqued when they met a whole community of near-pro talents playing at a field in the Bronx. Many of these players had been through training academies and the American minor leagues, and Fleck and Boden were riveted by their stories. From the players, and from the moviemakers’ own research in the Dominican, the script for Sugar was born.
Fleck and Boden spent about a year writing the screenplay, which was originally written in English, although much of the dialogue is spoken in seamless Spanish. Neither moviemaker felt comfortable translating, so they worked with a native Dominican speaker in New York during the writing process. To create further authenticity, the native Spanish-speaking actors were encouraged to refine the script by using modern, teenage, Dominican slang.
“We occasionally would find that something just wasn’t translating,” Boden recalls. “For instance, in the movie, Sugar makes fun of a friend while they’re all drinking, and for some reason, even though the words were translated perfectly, the humor just wasn’t coming across. So we brainstormed together, threw some ideas around and came up with a better joke that really made the actors laugh out loud. I’m not sure American audiences will get the nuance of the joke, but it was more important to us to have the scene feel real and natural for the actors.”
In further pursuit of realism, Fleck and Boden cast the role of Sugar themselves from the multitude of young ballplayers they met in the Dominican. They drove from baseball field to baseball field with a camera and interviewed somewhere north of 600 young men.
“We’d roll up on a baseball field in the middle of nowhere and ask kids if they wanted to talk to us and potentially be in a movie,” says Fleck. “Just to set the stage, it wasn’t unusual for a couple of cows, goats or chickens to be lingering nearby, watching us with the same fascination the players had by our presence,” he laughs. “We’d ask the guys simple questions about their lives, favorite players, movies, music, etc. If we liked them, we’d hand them a scene and ask them to come back and read it for us the next day. Before we learned to prep them better, the players would literally read everything on the page—including stage directions, character names and both parts. It reminded us just how far away from New York and L.A. we were.”
Algenis Perez Soto was lucky number 452 in the audition process; he landed the lead role despite no previous acting experience. Trained as a shortstop and second baseman, Perez Soto needed to learn to pitch in the two months before filming began. His natural skill and previous training made this transition possible, and the resulting baseball scenes are thrilling and completely believable.
“The most important thing was to cast real ball players in all those roles,” Fleck explains. “Every player in the Dominican Republic, Arizona, Iowa and New York scenes is a baseball players. We held tryouts in Iowa to make sure they all knew what they were doing out on the field. We also watched a lot of real games to get a feel for how games are shot for television, and we looked at Raging Bull for the more hallucinogenic sequences that really capture what’s going on in Miguel’s head.”
Sugar was shot in 43 days over four months on 35mm film. Many of the key crewmembers had worked with Fleck and Boden on Half Nelson. One of the most compelling technical aspects of the movie is the division of sound and silence.
“The Dominican Republic is an incredibly loud place,” explains Fleck. “Everywhere you go, there is always music, motorcycles, trucks, laughing, fighting. We wanted to contrast that bustling energy of Miguel’s home with the isolation and quiet of Iowa’s farmlands.
“We tried to do the same thing on the baseball field,” he continues. “When Miguel is playing well, the sound and images tend to feel relatively natural and realistic. But as that changes, we tried to get inside his head a bit more, strip away the crowd sounds and really isolate him on the mound.”
Fleck and Boden report that finding financing was easier the second time around, with HBO Films providing the $5 million budget. While cash was still tight for a movie shot in the Dominican Republic, Arizona, New York and Iowa, all with baseball stadiums full of extras, the young moviemakers know they were lucky to find capital for a largely Spanish language film with no name actors.
“Maud Nadler immediately got excited about what we were trying to do,” Boden says of their experience pitching the film to executives at HBO Films. “We didn’t have to convince her that Tom Cruise shouldn’t be playing a 19-year-old Dominican ballplayer,” laughs the native Bostonian. “Her division at HBO Films had made movies like this before—Maria Full of Grace, for example.”
Fleck and Boden found a lot of support in the Dominican, too. “The small communities we were filming in really got behind the movie,” says Fleck. “The whole block came out to dance at the party scene we were filming. People lent our art department pictures and lamps and tables from their homes for the set.”
“There were some challenges to making a film in a place that doesn’t have a well-established filmmaking community,” admits Boden, “but our crew jumped in and got resourceful, and I think the film was better for it.” MM
Sugar is in theaters now.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Kate on 6/22/09 at 12:08 am
I just want to let people know that the story for “Sugar” is based on or inspired by the documentary “The New Americans” in which one element focuses on two Dominican baseball players and their lives in MLB. Check it out. It’s on DVD and it’ll be rebroadcast on PBS in July on Global Voices. If you like the story for Sugar or are interested in the lives of immigrant athletes, definitely check out “The New Americans”.
- Comment by Shoe Italian on 7/08/09 at 2:47 pm
Half Nelson was a great movie
- Comment by San Diego Weddings on 7/08/09 at 2:52 pm
Wow, can’t wait to see Sugar. 35mm cameras are awesome!
- Comment by Cheap Notebook Laptop on 7/08/09 at 2:57 pm
Ryan Fleck is Awesome. MY cousin went to school with him
- Comment by Crazy Vision on 9/10/11 at 12:07 pm
thanx for shring this ..
please feel free to visit my blog asalah
This story was published in the Spring 2009 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
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