There are two kinds of people: those who have seen Half Nelson and those who haven't. Although I myself fall into the latter camp, I find that people of the former variety inevitably insist that people like me are deeply missing out. Well, for those of us ostensibly missing out, the directing team behind Half Nelson, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, have a new film in theatres. It's called Sugar, it's about the journey of a Dominican baseball player who (like so many faces unknown to us) does not achieve the dream, and it is a flawless gem. At this roundtable interview, the two directors talked about their sublimely succesful sophomore turn at directing.Could you talk about what the inspiration was for this film?
RYAN FLECK: The inspiration for this movie? Let’s see. It was actually right before we took Half Nelson to Sundance in 06. I’d read an article—I’m a baseball fan, and I’d read an article that just had a sentence about the Dominican camps for the Mets or some team, and I didn’t know what that meant. I knew a fair amount about the game but I didn’t know exactly what that was, and I started to do a little research and realized just about every major baseball team has one of these camps in the Dominican Republic where they sign players and they house them and teach them a little bit of English in order for them to come to the United States and make money for their teams. And we thought—we’d heard of the big time guys, Ortiz, Ramirez, all these famous Dominicans playing in the majors, but what happens to the guys who never quite make it there? Hundreds of guys a year go through this process. So we just started interviewing them; that led to some research, and that’s where the story came about.
And you weren’t inclined to make it a documentary as opposed to a fiction film?
ANNA BODEN: It never occurred to us until we started telling people what our next movie was about. They were all like, “Oh, it’s a documentary?” But it didn’t occur to us to approach it like that.
Anna, are you a baseball fan?
AB: Am I a baseball fan... um, I appreciate the game, but I don’t understand the whole concept of feeling good about yourself when your team wins or bad about yourself when your team doesn’t win, so I guess I’m not officially a fan. But I like watching, and what drew me to the story was more the “American dream” aspect of it. There’s this one guy who’s going after one thing his whole life, but he’s still so young and trying to figure out who he is, and his idea of the American dream changes along the way.
How did you approach it as an editor? Because that’s obviously a pretty complex…
AB: You mean the baseball stuff? It was something so different, between what we had been doing with Half Nelson, and, from scripting to shooting to editing, it was just such a different thing because everything is so planned out and we’re so used to shooting in a loose “let the actors do what they want” kind of style. So I think that the editing for the baseball stuff really started before we were shooting, and we kind of went through our shot list on video and shot out some of the stuff during the rehearsals, and I had my laptop in the Dominican Republic with me and we edited together the sequences to see what was working before we even shot it on film. I think that was how we started to find the rhythms and how we wanted to shoot it eventually.
Was it a conscious decision to go with somebody who hadn’t acted before for the lead role?
AB: We weren’t against—if there had been some nineteen-year-old, amazing Dominican baseball player/movie star, we would have been like, “Bring it!” [laughter] We weren’t against using an actor at all. It was just kind of what the role required—there was a much huger pool of young Dominican baseball players than there was of young Dominican actors.
RF: Who could also play baseball.
AB: Who could also play baseball. And we wanted to keep it authentic, and eventually if we interviewed enough people we would find somebody who could act. And we got lucky.
How many baseball players that come onto the league actually default and stay in the US? Did you find that out?
RF: We don’t have a specific stat because a lot of the guys stay illegally, so it’s tough to know for sure. But the first place we started our research was up at Roberto Clemente Park, which is where the last scene of the movie takes place, so a lot of those guys were the people we talked to who told us their stories, and we kind of worked our way backward from there and they introduced us to somebody who was still over there, and we met their families, and we kind of did research like that. Exact numbers it’s hard to tell, but the majority who don’t make it would prefer to stay here than go back.
When you did that research, was there like a lightning moment when you realized, “Oh, there are all these guys around us who are good enough to make it to the majors in our day-to-day lives in New York”?
AB: That’s something that was interesting to us. I mean, we realized that one of our good friends used to be a baseball player—but, definitely, when going up to the Bronx and going up to Washington Heights and meeting so many people who had been professional baseball players, and who had made their living playing baseball, it was eye opening. And now they drive for Frito-Lay, or they work as a dishwasher, and that was something that attracted us to the story. You know, we live in this place that has so many people from so many different places with such rich histories; how did they come here? This is one of those stories.
Anna, how did you get yourself situated in this very machismo sports culture and get situated in a culture and gender not your own?
AB: That’s… an interesting question. I didn’t approach it as trying to find what was different… I guess the better answer would be that… both of us knew very little about this going into it and so much of our understanding of it was based on research. Our understanding of the character was based on talking to people and hearing their stories, so I think that probably the machismo culture and all of that was just part of what we were learning and trying to understand about this character, and it came from taking little bits and details from all these lives of people we met. Then, also, spending a little time in a minor league clubhouse [laughs] and seeing what the vibe was there—noticing how the vibe changed when I was there versus when [Ryan] was based alone, based on what he would tell me.
How did it change?
AB: Um, the porn magazines went away. [laughter]
RF: There’s a scene that was cut from the movie where everyone’s hanging out in the clubhouse and passing around a Playboy and stuff, which was something that I experienced when I was in there without Anna. And then when she came in that kind of disappeared.
Could you talk a little bit about your shooting style and your approach, particularly about the harsh sunlight in the Dominican?
RF: Sure, there were a lot of challenges about working in the DR because we were pressed for time and, like you said, there’s a lot of harsh sunlight that created problems for our DP. But, you know, we ended up laying down a lot of—because there’s a lot of dark skin and harsh sunlight in the DR—
AB: And baseball caps.
RF: And baseball caps, so it’s hard to get details. It’s really a nightmare for photography. But we laid down like a huge white sheet right between the mound and home plate, so any time we’re in closer shots there’s a lot of reflection coming up from the ground. But in terms of the shots, we watched a lot of baseball movies and how they got it wrong; as a baseball fan, I felt like we wanted to capture a part of the game that hadn’t been seen in movies before. We watched Raging Bull; those fighting scenes were some stuff. That’s a much bigger movie, I’m not trying to compare this to Raging Bull, but I think there’s a feel to some of those subjective sports moments that we were studying.
Sugar is in select theatres now. Please go see it; it really is magnificent.
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