Not so very long ago, Sean Baker, an amiable New Jerseyan in fresh middle age, was one of independent cinema’s best-kept secrets. Now, with Anora, he has written and directed the funny, sexy, action-packed front-runner in the race for next year’s best-picture Oscar.
His journey towards that film, a joyous screwball comedy about a lapdancer who marries a young Russian heir, is as wild as the movie itself. But that rise has been stealthy rather than meteoric.
In 2008 two of his films, Prince of Broadway and Take Out, both concerning immigrant life in the United States, were nominated for the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award. Baker co-wrote, codirected, co-edited and co-produced Prince of Broadway for the relative back-pocket-change sum of $3,000.
Seven years later his film Tangerine also made waves. Its raucous depiction of a transgender sex worker (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), who discovers her boyfriend and pimp has been unfaithful, was shot using three 5S iPhones. That was groundbreaking.
The Florida Project, Baker’s drama set in the Orlando resort hotels used to house welfare cases off season, was the hottest ticket at Cannes film festival in 2017. Red Rocket, his 2021 porn-star comedy, played in competition there to huge acclaim in 2021.
Anora is on another level. This year’s Palme d’Or winner is already enjoying the kind of buzz once reserved for superhero pictures. Greta Gerwig, the president of the jury at Cannes, gushed that “it felt both new and in conversation with older forms of cinema. There was something about it that reminded us of [the] classic structures of Lubitsch or Howard Hawks, and then it did something completely truthful and unexpected.”
An Anora-themed popup shop in New York recently saw thousands of patrons queue up in the hope of landing one of 50 limited-edition diamante thongs, fashioned after the lapdancing heroine’s workwear. This feels like a phenomenon.
“I can feel that this is different from the other movies,” Baker says. “Even the companies that are distributing our film are Neon in the States and Universal throughout the world.”
That matters. Neon is the independent distributor that helped Parasite become the first winner of the best-picture Oscar in a language other than English. Universal is a giant.
“I can see the impact that the film has made in France,” he says. “I can see the amount of marketing that Anora is getting. The amount of attention is wonderful.”
Baker, who spent eight months interviewing transgender prostitutes in his research for Tangerine, embedded himself in the sleazy underworld around lapdancing as he wrote his script. Andrea Werhun, the Canadian author of the 2018 memoir Modern Whore, which chronicles her time as a sex worker, was a creative consultant. Anora’s title star, Mikey Madison, another certain Oscar contender, learned dance and fight choreography, and worked the floor of a lapdancing club ahead of production.
“What Mikey did was so impressive,” Baker says of an actor previously best known as a bit player in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “She had done so much research. She had shadowed dancers; she spent time in the club. She understood how it was to have one of those interactions where she would go up to men and have to read them in a matter of seconds and then figure out, ‘How am I going to hustle this guy and get him to the ATM?’”
This is Baker’s fifth film about sex work since Starlet introduced him to the world, in 2012. He has spent time among many practitioners over the past decade to lend authenticity to his writing. One of the first US screenings of Anora was for sex workers – who, perhaps unsurprisingly, gave rave notices. Baker told The Irish Times in 2022 about the “suitcase pimp” archetype that inspired the sleazy protagonist of Red Rocket. The research on Anora was similarly illuminating.
“The first draft – or the original idea – was that it was going to be a traditional strip club, very much like what you’ve seen in Hustlers or Zola or one of those films,” he says. “I didn’t want to cover that same territory. And suddenly I came across this new wave of gentleman’s clubs. These lapdance clubs are very different. There’s not really much dancing involved. There’s not even a stage. You just go in, and it’s like a lounge.
The whole idea was to show that people aren’t always what we expect them to be. That seems important at a time when we are busy dehumanising people
— Sean Baker
“It’s weird. It’s almost as if you’re meeting and picking somebody up at a bar, but it’s all set up. You’re paying admission, and then you approach one of the girls – or the girls approach you – and you go to a private room. So I thought it was very unique and something I hadn’t seen in movies before.”
Baker is accustomed to prudish types questioning his fascination with the darker side of commerce. For the writer-director it’s almost part of the family business. Eschewing the use of an intimacy co-ordinator – in consultation with his actors, of course – he and his producer wife, Samantha Quan, did the blocking for Anora’s sex shots. Even the indie icons John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands never went to these lengths.
“It was just the easiest way,” Baker says. “It was the easiest way because I don’t have a storyboardist. So it was, like, ‘Oh, here’s the shot. Here’s the angle. I may as well just show you the position.’ It was very collaborative. Of course, we offered our actors the option of having a co-ordinator, but the fact is that I have shot many scenes without an intimacy co-ordinator for all these years. The priority has always been the safety and comfort of the actors. With Anora we were all on the same page, and it actually became pretty fun. My actors would present me with ideas of how we should shoot some of these shots, and then I cooked up some shots myself.”
Set within Coney Island’s Russian community, the film is a carefully calibrated farce in which Anora’s whirlwind romance and quickie marriage to the charming, twitty Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) prompts the young man’s oligarch parents to send in the goons. Chaos ensues when Vanya runs off and Anora proves tougher to crack than expected. The increasingly exasperated henchmen, played by Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov, join their Russian Orthodox boss, played by Karren Karagulian, in an uneasy alliance with Anora as they search for the missing groom.
The charismatic Borisov, a busy Russian actor who came to intentional attention as the unexpectedly soulful gopnik in the Cannes hit Compartment No 6, was a secret weapon both on and off camera.
“Yura was actually cast before Mikey,” Baker says. “So was Karren Karagulian, who is married to a Russian American. His wife is actually in the film. I knew he was going to be a part of it forever. But I didn’t always know how it was going to happen, because I was throwing my actors into real situations and having them interact with real locals. So that had to be improv.
“Yura was a real help. The first time we scouted Tatiana’s, the restaurant that you see in the film, Yura was with us. And people recognised Yura and wanted to take photos with him. So he was our passport. He was the one who helped us secure that location.”
One of the film’s big selling points is its vivid depiction of that Russian-American locale. “The whole idea was to show that people aren’t always what we expect them to be,” Baker says. “That seems important at a time when we are busy dehumanising people.”
Never mind the Oscars. Success will not change the boyish-looking Baker. At 53, with eight features to his credit, he has sidestepped the need for such commercial considerations as box-office draw. Save for a lovely turn by Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project, Baker casts from the streets and from Instagram.
His films recall Tim Robbins’s overturned proposal in Robert Altman’s The Player: “No stars, just talent.”
“I’m not going to change what I do so easily,” he says. “Hopefully, now I’ll never be seduced. I almost was a few times by Hollywood. But, after the Palme d’Or, for the most part it’s just made me a little more secure in what I’ve already been doing. I don’t have to hear the noise as much any more. I know I’m doing something right.”
Anora is in cinemas from Friday, November 1st
