Southside With You is a simple walk-and-talk romantic date movie—except for the fact that its subjects are Barack and Michelle Obama. The film tells the story of the First Couple’s very first date, drawing on the details that are in the public record, and making up whatever isn’t, while staying true to the very real-life figures the characters are.

Director Richard Tanne and actors Parker Sawyers, who plays Barack Obama, and Tika Sumpter, who plays Michelle then-Robinson, chatted with The Hollywood Reporter about the pressures of portraying the most famous couple in the nation.

Thing is, there weren’t any pressures. “They were sort of baked into the American narrative at that point and time,” Tanne said. “I never really thought about the after; I only thought about the before. The characters that I was crafting for the script were always the same because they were the 1989 versions of them, so whatever was going on in public life was not affecting the screenplay.”

Sawyers also didn’t find playing the future president as difficult as you might think. His concerns on set were more technical. “I just focused on the job as an actor, like learning the lines and making sure I could show up every day and got enough rest and so forth,” he said. “There wasn't so much presidential pressure, it was more like ‘We're using natural light so let's make sure I hit my marks and do my job and get everything we need.’”

Sumpter was equally calm about playing Michelle. “When you strip down the Michelle Obama of it all, it's Michelle Robinson, who is a girl from the south side of Chicago who came from humble beginnings — and I think that's why [the Obamas are] very accessible to a lot of people now — who was inspirational,” she said. “She climbed from humble beginnings where she was to the presidency with her husband. The pressure wasn't that much because it was at a certain time in her life when she wasn't Michelle Obama.”

She admires the First Lady’s “laser-focus” on life. “She never dimmed her light for anybody.”

As to how Southside fits in with the current presidential race, Tanne doesn’t know for sure what the reaction to the film will be. In another interview with THR, he said, “I think it's probably going to be a refresher in this election season. It's a very humanizing portrait of these two people. It's not that I intended to humanize them so that people would take another look at them politically — I was just trying to tell another story about their lives, and that requires showing humanity. I'll be really interested to see if it does become a part of the great conversation.”