Sean Baker’s improvised road to ‘Anora’

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NEW YORK (AP) — Sean Baker’s interest in the lives of sex workers began with the 2012 drama “Starlet.” For that film, set around the world of adult films in the San Fernando Valley, Baker spent time listening to the stories of sex workers. Some co-starred in the film. Many became friends.

“I remember being on set and Radium Cheung, my production manager, saying, ‘There’s a whole other movie.'” “I was like, ‘There’s a million stories to be told in this world,'” Baker recalls.

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Since then, Baker has traversed a wide swath of America in films set everywhere from West Hollywood donut shops to the industrial countryside of Texas. But it focused on the lives of sex workers. Shot on an iPhone, “Tangerine” (2015) follows a pair of transgender sex workers in Los Angeles seeking revenge on their cheating boyfriend. In The Florida Project (2017), a single mother turns to sex work to support herself and her daughter at an Orlando hotel. “Red Rocket” (2021) comically depicts a washed-up porn star.

When his latest film, “Anora,” starring Mickey Madison as an exotic dancer from Brooklyn who spontaneously marries the son of a Russian tycoon, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Baker dedicated the award to “all sex workers.” “. Past, present and future.”

It was a crowning moment for the 53-year-old who has long considered the French festival to be the pinnacle.

It was the dream. You’re kind of in an existential crisis after that. “I’m still figuring it out, quite frankly,” Baker said in a recent interview. “It’s not about opening doors. It’s definitely not about trying to get into the studio. To tell you the truth, it does the exact opposite. It’s like, ‘Okay, okay.’ And now we can keep doing it.”

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A strictly independent filmmaker, Baker feels less comfortable center stage than he is behind the camera. Likewise, his films entertain American subcultural communities that are rarely chronicled. He’s always been interested in “people and situations that are always there but people choose not to see,” says Samantha Cowan, the producer of “Anora” and Baker’s wife.

But “Anora,” one of the most popular films of the year, brought Baker dangerously close to the mainstream. “Anora” is widely considered a contender for best picture at the Academy Awards, along with other categories including best actress for its popular young star.

Baker has arrived at this moment despite charting an unconventional path for a filmmaker today. He has no interest in television or franchise films, and remains dedicated to the big screen. He makes irreverent independent films based on real-life experiences and research that balance screwball comedy with social realism. “Anora” is an unusual film that juxtaposes British social realists like Mike Leigh, a favorite of Becker, with masters of farce like Ernst Lubitsch.

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In a Hollywood producing big-budget fantasies, Baker rose by crafting what we might call anti-fairy tales. His films suggest that there is something bankrupt in what we collectively value and who we value. In “Anora,” Madison’s Annie isn’t the only one selling herself. Russian oligarchs are doing work they would rather not do. The transactional nature of everything is at once absurd and tragic.

It’s a feeling Becker arrived at through experience as well as research.

“I don’t want to say in any way that I have ever faced the hardships that an illegal immigrant or a marginalized sex worker faces,” he says. But having been an independent filmmaker for 30 years, there was a buzz. Until fairly recently, I struggled to pay rent.

Baker grew up in New Jersey outside of New York City. He attended film school at New York University. When he started out, he envisioned himself making “Die Hard.” But as his exposure to arthouse and international films expanded, so did his interests as a director. However, his first Richard Linklater-influenced film, 2000’s Four Letter Words, drew heavily from his suburban upbringing.

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But in the four years between this film and the next, he “finally” got some life experience, he says. Baker became less concerned with himself than with other parts of the world. He also developed a debilitating drug addiction that took years to get rid of. While living above a Chinese restaurant, Baker would talk to delivery workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, on the stairs. Those conversations led to the film “Take Out,” co-directed by Shih Ching Tzu.

“It really gave me a chance to reboot myself because I was down and out,” Baker says. “I lost all my friends. I lost everything. I had no more connections. Everyone I went to school with was working in Hollywood. Todd Phillips, I went to school with. He was already making his first movie, and I had gotten off heroin.” .

With “Take Out,” Baker takes the approach he took until “Anora.” He turned to immersive research, and subsequently constructed scripts that served as a blueprint for heavy improvisational films, selectively populated by professional and non-professional actors. In Anora, he cast Madison (as well as Yura Borisov and Mark Edelstein) before writing the script. He and Cowan also lived briefly in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach to enjoy the place.

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“Even though my films are almost set now, they are contemporary stories, I want them to feel like they were filmed in 1974,” Baker says.

As much as Baker may associate his films with a ’70s sensibility, he’s largely focused on where films can go from here — and how he can push their direction a bit. “Anora” Baker hopes to bring interest in independent arthouse cinema to a broader arena, and perhaps convince Hollywood that smaller, less expensive films can be much more successful.

“Anora” and Brady Corbett’s “The Brutalist” — a three-and-a-half-hour epic shot on VistaVision that grossed less than $10 million — appear to be in the awards mix, which signals a shift, Baker says.

“It would be a nod to the industry,” Baker says. “Right now, there’s a panic in L.A. I’m like, ‘We don’t have to make movies like this.’

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