my movie: Sugar by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

The movie Sugar tells the story of 19-year-old Miguel "Azucar" Santos, a pitcher from San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic who moves to a small town in Iowa to pursue his dream of making it to the majors.

Sugar was written and directed by the team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, best known for previous movie Half Nelson. We chatted with the duo about their latest film.

What inspired you to make a movie about a Dominican baseball player? Are you baseball fans? Merengue fans?

Ryan is a baseball fan. Anna is a merengue fan.

What’s better, The Natural or The Bad News Bears?

Bad News Bears.

Were you surprised by anything when you shot in the Dominican Republic?

We were surprised by how quickly the sun rose and fell! The sun seems to stay very high in the sky for a large portion of the day – the most difficult lighting situation to shoot in. And once the sun starts to go down, it heads down fast. It posed a real challenge for our director of photography and lighting crew, but they learned to adjust quickly. They had to!

Are you Spanish speakers? Was it hard to write dialogue in Spanish?

We wrote the script in English first. Anna is fluent in Spanish and worked with a Dominican-born translator in New York to translate the script into Spanish. Then we worked with the lead actor, Algenis Perez Soto, to revise the language so that it felt natural to him – and specific to a 19-year-old character from that specific part of Dominican Republic (San Pedro).

You guys are a couple. Does that mean you take your work home with you? Do you ever want to get away from each other?

Declined to comment.

Sugar opens in Los Angeles and New York this Friday, April 3.