Career Highlights

• Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden are the directors, writers and producers of the film Sugar
• Collaborative efforts include Have You Seen This Man?, Young Rebels and Gowanus, Brooklyn which won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2004 Sundance Festival
• Sugar tells the story of Domincan-born baseball player Miguel "Sugar" Santos, who gets the opportunity of a lifetime to play in the United State's minor league system
• Fleck and Boden discovered the star of Sugar, Algenis Perez Soto, playing a casual game of baseball with friends in the Dominican Republic
• Their latest project is a screen adaptation of Ned Vizzini's young adult novel It's Kind of a Funny Story

Career Overview

Director and writer Ryan Fleck and director, writer and producer Anna Boden are the creators of the film Sugar. Sugar was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards and nominated for a Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Fleck and Boden met on the set of a student production while studying film at NYU. They collaborated on two documentaries, Have You Seen This Man? and Young Rebels, before making Gowanus, Brooklyn, a sample film aimed to attract potential financiers to their undeveloped script, Half Nelson.

Gowanus, Brooklyn won The Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, and Fleck and Boden were subsequently invited to the Sundance Writer's Lab to receive professional feedback on the Half Nelson screenplay. Half Nelson was released in 2006 starring Ryan Gosling. It won multiple awards including three Gotham Awards for breakthrough director, breakthrough actor and best feature film; two Independent Spirit Awards for its lead actors; and it earned Gosling an Academy Award nomination for best actor.

Boden and Fleck have since co-written and co-directed the 2008 film Sugar, which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, about a 19 year-old Dominican who immigrates to the United States to play minor league baseball. They wrote the screenplay together after doing extensive research about Dominican immigrants who arrive in America to play in minor league towns. It was a Spotlight film in the 2008 Hamptons Film Festival and was picked up by Sony Classic Pictures and was released in 2009.

Our Interview

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden joined ThinkTalk host Zack Sherwood to discuss their careers and working together on the film Sugar. They answer student questions about how they came up with the idea for the script and how they used what they learned in film school to write and direct movies.