Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Anora’s Sean Baker, Mikey Madison & Cast On Making An Indie Oscar Breakthrough And Doing “Things We’re Told We Can’t Do Anymore”
When Sean Baker and Mikey Madison arrive at the Deadline shoot for this article, it’s a beautiful, clear blue-sky day in Los Angeles. Just for a moment, it’s almost as though the fires and smoke of the past few weeks are an imagined horror. Such is the indomitable spirit of L.A. The city, and the very nature of its artistic industry, has always been about resurgence and resilience. So, with the sun resolutely shining, it seems fitting to be celebrating Anora—a film that’s all about grit and the refusal to be beaten.
At no point in Anora does Madison’s central character surrender her personal power. As she works her job in a strip club and then spontaneously marries a rich, young Russian client, she remains self-possessed. Even when his oligarch family come for her, seeking to brutally eject her from their spoiled son’s life, she holds her head up with dignity.
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Now, as the Academy Award-nominated Baker and Madison stand together for our shoot, they’re at the end of a long Oscar road that first began years before, with the germ of an idea on a winter’s day in Coney Island. From winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, to gathering a bristling collection of nominations, Anora required hard graft, deep dedication to the craft and finally, a prayer for the future of independent film and the cinema our city was built upon.
Back in 2008, Sean Baker hit his stride with Prince of Broadway, the story of an illegal Ghanaian street vendor in downtown New York whose hustling ways are compromised when he is presented with a toddler, the son he never knew he had. It refined a template the film maker had first begun with 2004’s Take Out, set in upper Manhattan, which charted the goings-on in a Chinese restaurant staffed by undocumented workers. Baker’s style was a kind of docu-fiction; realistic enough to look like fly-on-the-wall verité, but scripted and shaped into a compassionate dispatch from the margins of mainstream life.
Starlet, about an aspiring porn actress followed in 2012, then, in 2015, came Tangerine, a milestone film shot on iPhones that followed two transgender sex workers who set out to get revenge on a cheating boyfriend. Baker’s reputation was steadily growing, and with 2017’s The Florida Project, the heartbreaking story of a single mom living in poverty in the shadow of Walt Disney World, it looked like he was about to break out. The film was nominated for award after award, all over the world, but when it came to the Oscars, only the film’s supporting actor—Willem Dafoe—got a look-in.
Baker had been hoping to move up a league, like so many of his indie peers, but that extra cash injection was just not forthcoming. So, instead, in 2021, he made Red Rocket, a companion piece to Starlet, about a washed-up porn actor returning home to Texas.
“Red Rocket was a reaction to my other films not taking off,” Baker says. “I actually thought Starlet would finally open doors. I thought Tangerine would open doors. I thought The Florida Project especially. That’s why when I heard that Willem was the only one nominated for the Oscars [that year], I was like, ‘O.K. they don’t want me, they don’t want my films. I’m going to freaking make something insane next.’”
Red Rocket debuted in Cannes that year, in Competition, which then paved the way for his latest film, Anora. Baker had been pleased enough that his film had been chosen to compete, so he was blown away when George Lucas presented him with the highest honor: the Palme d’Or. In his mind, in telling the story of Anora ‘Ani’ Mikheeva—a part-Russian lap-dancer who falls for Ivan ‘Vanya’ Zakharov, the son of a rich oligarch—he’d made another crazy movie, not something that would bring in six Academy Award nominations. “That’s what I thought I was doing with Anora,” he says. “So that’s why I’m so pleasantly surprised that it’s being accepted now. It’s nice.”
Anora came to him installments. “It was after Red Rocket,” he recalls. “I think we were between projects. You always are. There are a number of ideas you have sitting on the back burner, and you have to decide just which one to bring to the front burner.” He was making a high-end fashion film for Khaite’s new collection at the time, an homage to Walter Hill’s The Warriors. “We shot out in Coney Island in the winter,” he says. “I was out there shooting and looking around saying, ‘This place is stuck in time, and it’s so gorgeous and cinematic, and I love the way it feels in the winter especially. I was with my producer, Alex Coco, who happened to produce that fashion film. So, both of us were there, and we said, ‘We should make our next film here.’”
The germ of the actual story came around that same time. “It was this idea of a young wife or perhaps fiancée being held captive against her will,” he says, “because of something that her husband or significant other did, and then her falling out of love with that person because she’s realized that she wasn’t the priority. So that was this idea that I really found fascinating. I didn’t want to tell a Russian gangster story—been there and done that. So, I think the eureka moment was when I was thinking, well, what is the equivalent of marrying into the mob? Oh, marrying into money. And then what if this girl marries the son of a Russian oligarch? And at that point, it became our little elevator pitch. That was it. That’s all we needed to really get us moving.”
Like Baker’s previous films, it was to be a character study, this time of a very particular kind of American girl. “I’m from the tri-state area,” says Baker. “I’m from Jersey and from sort of the Sopranos version of Jersey, so I kind of know that world. I have friends who live in Brighton Beach and Coney Island, I knew people with that Brooklyn attitude and that Brooklyn accent, and I’ve met many Anis throughout my life. I always saw her as an independent girl who’s streetwise, who knows how to handle herself. We call them scrappers. If they find themselves in a fight, they can hold their own. And also, somebody who has a sense of humor, is funny.”
So, when Baker saw the 2022 film Scream—the fifth in the franchise—he knew he’d found his Ani: Mikey Madison, who plays Amber Freeman in the horror-thriller. But when Baker offered her the lead in his new movie, she thought he must be joking. Sure, she’d had her explosive turn as a Manson girl in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character torched her with a flamethrower; she’d been the kid in Pamela Adlon’s show Better Things, but Madison had been trawling through auditions and meetings for some ten years, and his was too much to take in. So, as though she were being Punk’d, she called her agent. Would they check with him, is it true?
Baker responded by personally sending Madison a voice memo. “He’s famous for sending voice memos,” says Madison. “And he was like, ‘Hey, so nice to meet you. And also, just letting you know you 100% have the role. The role is yours.’”
What followed was an odyssey of in-depth Russian lessons and Brooklyn accent practice for Madison, a native Angeleno. She had to be believable as a deeply East coast woman with Russian heritage, living in Brighton Beach and working at a strip club. And above all, she was absolutely determined to create a respectful and authentic portrayal of sex work. Andrea Werhun, author of Modern Whore, served as a consultant on the film, and helped supply Madison with background detail on the day-to-day of working in a strip club. “Andrea was talking about locker-room chatter, things that you say to someone, what food she brings as her lunch to eat in the break room, little things like that,” Madison says.
Madison got her own pole at home for dance practice—installed by her somewhat nonplussed, but very supportive father. She learned to twerk, too, with the help of dance instructor Kennady Schneider. And Schneider provided lots of background tips and tricks, like teaching Madison to heat up her clear platform Pleaser shoes with a blow dryer so they would mold to her feet.
Cast members Luna Sofía Miranda and Lindsay Normington were also able to present an authentic portrayal of sex work from experience, as Madison’s fellow dancers Lulu and Diamond. Madison says of Miranda, “We became friends, and she’s wonderful and was so generous sharing stories and had such a great sense of humor about her job.”
Early in the film, there’s a scene where Ani works at the club and we see her standing back, deciding which patrons to approach for lap dances. She talks casually with coworkers and customers as she works the room. That scene was shot in a completely improvised fashion, Madison says, albeit with the “safety net” of the crew. “They filmed that with a completely live club, so dancers were everywhere, music was blasting, customers were all over the place.” Madison wore a wireless mic as the camera followed her, guerilla-style. It absolutely had to feel both real and intrinsic and not at all voyeuristic or impressionistic.
The development of that level of authenticity in portraying Ani’s work at the club felt deeply essential to Madison. “It’s hard to think of just one thing [I did], because that was everything for bringing the character to life. If I hadn’t have done [the research], it would be a completely different character and story, I think. It was the most important thing I did.”
Part of the reason Baker chose Madison for the role was, she explains, because of her willingness to drop any sort of vanity. “He told me that I wasn’t an actor who was afraid to be ugly or freaky or weird, or that I was open to exploring those strange parts of myself that aren’t attractive. I wasn’t afraid of what I was going to look like on screen and so I think that was something that interested him.”
And Baker didn’t feed Madison a whole lot about who Ani was at her core—leaving a trusting space for Madison to find Ani on her own. “I don’t know if there was much of describing who the character was,” she says. “I think he trusted me to do that. I mean, I remember [being told], ‘She is going to be tough, hard, there’s going to be a hard part of her.’ But all of everything else was left for me to create and build. I wanted her to be a full-fledged, complicated person with vulnerability and layers. And so, I think, we intuitively just knew that we would capture those things. He would be able to guide me, and I’d be able to just build this character and let her be.”
To play opposite Madison, Baker found Mark Eydelshteyn, a young Russian actor not long out of his teens and best known for the hit romantic Y.A. drama The Land of Sasha (2022). “The first time I met Sean Baker was via Zoom before my self-tapes,” says Eydelshteyn. “I had a very short Zoom call with him. I asked him what he wanted to see, and what he wanted to find, and he said just, ‘I want to see guy who is living his life, and he’s full of freedom. He’s just living his life and that’s it.’ I said, ‘O.K. thank you. I will try to do something.’ Then I did the self-tape, and then we talked about the script in general. About the ideas of the script, about this character and his arc. I think it was our second meeting when he said that I was approved to do the character, to play Ivan.”
When he was asked to self-tape, Eydelshteyn was unaware of Baker’s past. “At that moment,” he says, “I didn’t know honestly who he was, because I hadn’t watched his movies. Shame on me… But every person with whom I shared that I had a call with Sean Baker, said, ‘You know that he’s one of the most amazing independent directors ever?’ And I said, ‘Oh really? O.K.’ So, it was really scary to do the self-tapes because everybody already had said that Sean is a genius. He’s a genius, I’m not. What will I do? But I just tried to have fun during doing self-tape, and during the whole process, honestly. I think it’s a secret of any profession.”
As Ivan, the weed-smoking heir to a Russian fortune, Eydelshteyn certainly has a lot of fun. Since money is no object, Ivan can party his way out of any situation, which is how Ani and he come to get married in a Vegas wedding chapel on a drug-fueled city break. How did he channel that kind of reckless hedonism? “I’m not this type of person,” he says. “I never had lots of money, and I never bought as much stuff as Ivan does. And with Sean, I found the key. I realized that Ivan is the opposite of me, totally the opposite. So, if I’m doing something on set and it’s comfortable for me, I have to cancel it and do something that’s uncomfortable for me. Do it funny, do it very fast. Do it very loud. He’s just like me, but he’s the opposite of me, so it had to be uncomfortable for me to play this guy.”
To keep Ivan in check, the Zakharov family hire Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian handler who wearily cleans up after them. Karagulian has been there for Baker since Take Out. “We met about 30 years ago, through a mutual friend who was studying in NYU Film School, and Sean was in NYU Film School as well that time. And our mutual friend made a short with me in it, and Sean was producing it. Since then, whenever he writes something, he writes a part for me. And of course, aside from that, we’re also friends. We know each other for many, many years. Been in all his films. I think this is our eighth or ninth project together.”
What’s all the more impressive about this is that Karagulian never trained. “I’m not a professional actor,” he says. “I don’t have an acting background. Acting for me was always doing favors to my director friends. And the first time when I thought, ‘I’m going to become an actor when I grow up,’ I was already 40 years old with three kids. So yeah, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad thing, but it’s been like a hobby for me.”
Having seen Baker’s process up close, Karagulian has a very clear idea of what the director does. “First, he finds a location that he falls in love with, then he finds stories from that location, and he falls in love with those too. Then, I think he finds people that he loves for being people. He made an actor out of me. He made an actor out of a lot of other people. He made producers out of people who are not educationally producers. He’s a walking encyclopedia of film. He eats film. He breathes film. Head to toe, he’s a moviemaker. He’s a very special guy; he’s a true artist. I’m so grateful that I have watched him throughout these years to mature from film to film. And I see how he finds his mistakes, or if there are things that he can do better. And from film to film, how he matures, he goes to another level, another level.”
“On Anora, I wanted to make sure I could deliver 110% this time around,” he continues. “And also, I knew that he was going to demand very high-quality work from all of us, plus from himself. We got very lucky and blessed. I think the movie gods and movie angels were watching over us so that—for some reason, somehow—everything worked out in our favor. Like starting from our cast, our incredibly talented people from different parts of the world, from different backgrounds, different cultures. We got together. Most importantly, we developed this camaraderie and love towards each other, this energy. And we’re still friends. We still all love each other. It’s our Anora family. And I think that’s readable, when people watch the film, you can see that.”
A key part of the Anora family are the two goons that Toros hires to kidnap Ani and Ivan and force them to go down to City Hall to annul their marriage: Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), the not-so-smart muscle, and Igor (Yura Borisov), who secretly falls for Ani. Unlike his screen persona, Tovmasyan is a bright, funny individual who began as standup comedian in 2006, citing Bill Burr, David Chappelle and Tom Segura as just a few of his influences. Although the part of Garnik requires comic timing and even a little slapstick, Tovmasyan says he played it straight for his audition.
“They sent me a couple of scenes, and I did a self-tape,” he recalls. “But before that, my agent explained that Sean Baker likes to see people more raw, more real. ‘Don’t try to create the character,’ he said, which is like, don’t overact or don’t try to be funny in the audition. Just be more of yourself and more real. I took that advice and after I sent the self-tape, I got called back in five minutes: ‘Welcome on board, man!’”
Once he’d got the part, Tovmasyan got to work. “When I started thinking about the character,” he says, “I felt, like, ‘I kind of know that character.’ I was thinking that he would be Toros’s cousin, because before that, there was no mention [in the script] that they are cousins, but I thought this would be more natural—so many Armenians, when they move into United States, they work with their cousins, because the Armenian community is very supportive. I felt like my character moved to New York later, after Toros, and he’s kind of under Toros’s control. When I thought more about my character, I decided that, before he moved there, he had a drug problem, and then he quit.”
Both of Toros’s henchmen have interactions with Ani, and Garnik’s are indelible, as his attempts to restrain her leave him bruised and bloodied. “I was super impressed by Mikey,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, we don’t have a single actress in our country who could have done this much work,’ because she’s acting so different from her reality. She’s a totally different, humble person, quiet, the attitude of a princess in real life, and then she’s talking in this bold Brooklyn accent, speaking some Russian, and she’s able to bring all the drama too. For the fight scenes, it was so easy. So easy to act. Because there was no acting, it was a real fight. That was really a crazy ride.”
Baker prepared his cast thoroughly for the fight scenes. Madison says, “There were films, or performances, that he would send me and say, ‘Oh, watch this film and maybe you’ll understand why I want you to watch it.’ And he’d be watching these very obscure foreign films. And I’m like, ‘I wonder why he wants me to see this?’ And then a character would come on screen and there would be an essence or an energy, or even just a costume. And I was like, ‘Oh, I understand now.’”
One such film Baker suggested to Madison was Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion, starring cult film icon Meiko Kaji. “It’s a Japanese film, and there’s sort of a toughness and also a soft femininity to this character and also an extreme fight and a will to live,” Madison says. She also watched Maurice Pialat’s Loulou for Isabelle Huppert’s performance. “There’s sort of a stillness. I think he wanted me to watch Loulou because of the fight scenes, because they were all real and they’re slapping each other around. But to me, I was like, ‘Yes, I see that. Yes, I’m ready to do that. I’m willing to do that.’”
And this focus on fighting makes sense, given that at the center of the film is a fight scene spanning some 28 minutes. The oligarch’s henchmen, Igor and Garnik, have burst into Ani and Ivan’s love nest at his family home and attempt to separate the couple. What ensues is an incredibly artful dance between frightening violence and slapstick humor that reveals both Ani’s inner steel and Igor’s integrity—two strong hooks into the film as a whole.
Madison didn’t really know Borisov before going into this scene, she says. “It was the first time working with him, I didn’t know him at all, and his interpretation of the character is different than what I had in my head, and you have to evolve and change things. And so, I was doing some emotional preparation. Before we’d start, I had to run upstairs and just get into a head space and run down. And Sean would always be like, ‘What are you doing up there, because you always come down and give this look on your face?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I can’t just snap into it and jump into the character.’ He was trusting and we were really on the same page. It was stressful to shoot, really exhausting, painful.”
Madison did her own stunts throughout. “I had bruises covering my body. The blood vessels were bursting in my eyes,” she says. “My wrists were bruised from being tied. It was a lot. And I never felt like I was in danger just to clarify, but it wasn’t painless, you know what I mean? Emotionally. But I was welcoming that because it added something to the scene. In the moment everything feels real. I’m running from Yura and fighting each other as hard as we possibly can. So, there’s going to be honesty on screen, and it’s temporary, all that. Any discomfort is temporary, but the movie will be forever and the character’s forever. And so, I’m willing to put myself in those positions to do her justice. She’s a true fighter in every sense and so I had to fully go for all of it.”
Borisov first met Baker in Cannes in 2021, at the premiere of his film Compartment No. 6 by Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen. It was just a brief encounter, but Baker clearly saw something in Borisov. A year later, he called him for the role of Igor. Of that phone call, Borisov says simply, “He just said, ‘Let’s do my next film together,’ and that’s enough. Because it’s not so important why. It’s feelings, it’s not about words.”
Borisov is straightforward and philosophical, too, about all the attention surrounding him now with this film. He’s already a very well-known actor in Russia, but this was his first U.S. production. This Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination makes him the first Russian to be nominated in almost 50 years (Mikhail Baryshnikov was the last, in 1977 for The Turning Point), but Borisov shrugs off the fanfare, including the popular notion that he’s a kind of perfect-man heartthrob, borne out of his character’s touching and intuitive understanding of Ani. “Sometimes I feel that people want to see what they need,” he says.
The first time anyone knew the film was working was when the film premiered at the 2,400-seater Grand Théâtre Lumière in Cannes. “Honestly, Cannes is like a dream,” remembers Eydelshteyn. “Everything is mixed up in my head already. But I remember the moment when we were in the theater. We were waiting for the movie to start, and it was my first time seeing it. I sat beside Mikey and I was really scared. She had already seen it. I said, ‘Mikey, I don’t know what we are about watch right now and how the audience will react.’ It was very scary. Maybe one of the most scariest moments in my life. And she just cut me off and said, ‘Mark, I promise you, everything will be O.K.’”
That was the feeling across the board that night. “I’m not going to lie,” says Karren Karagulian. “When we were making the film, I thought to myself, ‘This feels like we’re doing something very special.’ So, then after that, when we showed it in Cannes Film Festival, of course I was already very excited. We were in that theater with those people, all those movie lovers, and they got up and they started clapping. And that didn’t stop for a very long time. That felt very special to me also. And then, at the end of that one-week journey to Cannes, we won the Palme d’Or, I came out of there, I said, ‘That’s it. I can quit now. I can actually die now. I have done it all.’”
But for Karagulian there was an even bigger honor waiting down the line. “One of the biggest bonuses of this film, for me, is that I received dozens and dozens of messages via my social media. I didn’t have Instagram before, I got Instagram after Cannes—and I love it, by the way. People are writing me from different parts of the world. Armenians especially; they’re writing me saying, ‘We are proud to be Armenian.’ And these are young people. That is so, so, so special for me.”
Baker, however, was definitely more surprised than Karagulian. “It’s not like I was setting out to be a provocateur, but I definitely thought, ‘Oh, we’re making a divisive movie,’” he says. “And we were fine with that, because, as long as we were making a movie that we knew people would go and pay and be happy to see and all that stuff, that’s all we cared about. Quite honestly, I do care about how the film plays to a global audience, to the world cinema. That means a lot to me. But honestly, I never thought about the Palme d’Or. We were hoping we’d play in Competition—that was important. But the Palme d’Or was not even a goal because we thought we weren’t making a film that would ever be considered for a Palme d’Or. I mean, that would make it to that level. And the same thing goes for the Academy Awards and the Baftas.”
What did he think would be divisive? He laughs. “What did I think would be divisive? Sex work, off-color language? Things we were told you can’t do anymore, you can’t say anymore, because we’re living in different times. I always pushed against that, because it’s the characters saying this stuff, it’s based in real life. It’s based in reality. It doesn’t mean that the filmmakers are hateful. It doesn’t mean the film is hateful. I think we forget that. We forget that you still tell stories that have anti-heroes and portray some things we might not want to see or hear. And that doesn’t have to be directly insulting.”
Perhaps another reason Anora has lasted so long in people’s minds is the film’s obvious compassion for the people it depicts, shining a new light on minorities. What is his secret for getting into these communities, whether the Russian-Armenian community in Brighton Beach or the private dancers of New York? “Time,” he says. “It’s just taking time, showing you’re devoted, gaining the trust and making friends. I always think, if somebody came into my life and said, ‘Hey, I want to tell a story that’s a fictionalized version of your story,’ I would hope that that storyteller would do it in a respectful way. I just apply that to the way I approach subjects that I’m covering. But time is a big part of it. And also, I want these films to be most appreciated by people from those communities and locals and saying, ‘O.K., he got it right.’ I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if they didn’t feel the representation was respectful and responsible. That would really be hard for me to live with. But our distributor, Neon, has been incredible. We’ve had sex-worker screenings on both coasts here in the States. We’ve also had screenings just for Armenians in Glendale, and the film has been playing quite well to Slavic audiences.”
There has been some chatter about Madison’s purported decision to eschew an intimacy coordinator for herself. “Just to be clear, I wasn’t making the decision for the entire cast,” she says. “I was asked if I personally would like one and I think that it’s a case-by-case basis. It should be about comfortability if you feel safe. Look, ultimately, I had a very positive experience making this film. I am really grateful that I had this experience working with Sean and Sammy [Quan]. It was a very positive one for me.” She adds that the conversation around intimacy is not one she takes lightly at all. “I think it’s a very important, layered conversation… I don’t want anyone to feel bad or upset or angry, and I just want to keep clarifying, I think it’s really important to have people like that in place to protect people. I look forward to working with an intimacy coordinator in the future if that feels like the right decision for everyone involved, not just for me.”
The film’s success has brought with it a level of personal attention that puzzles Madison. “I don’t fully understand the curiosity towards me,” she says. “I think I understand the curiosity towards the character, and I don’t know. I’m just the vessel for that… I’m just one person.” A self-professed introvert, she finds her peace at home with her animals, “just watching a movie. Putting attention on something other than me. How do I say this? I’m a little sick of talking about myself. Do you know what I mean? I feel embarrassed sometimes talking about myself.”
It’s clear that great relationships were built and good memories made on set, with a family-level closeness. Borislov smiles broadly as he recalls their friendships. “It was like a summer camp or something,” he says. “Mikey lives in L.A. and was in New York and Mark and I were really very far from our home too, and Sean and Sammy and a lot of people was very far from home, it’s this expedition. It was very fun because when you spend all your time together, you’re changing every day because of people around you. And all the people around you are changing because of you. And it’s a very, very real process.”
He cites as a high point as Eydelshteyn’s 21st birthday when they all went on a boat tour of the Hudson River to the Statue of Liberty. Borisov says, somewhat secretively, that there are “lots and lots of stories”. However, last month, Madison hilariously revealed to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that she drove the boat herself. Then, about a week after their trip, that same boat sank (luckily, with no one on board).
Looking to the future now, Madison has her sights set on international film. “My dream is to work without borders in a way,” she says. “If I have to learn another language to work with foreign director, I’ll try to do it… I mean, Tilda Swinton does that a lot, working with foreign directors, and that’s something I really admire. I love her work.”
There’s a project on the horizon already, but nothing she can name just yet. It’s “something really special that I have my fingers crossed for, and I’m really hopeful about. I feel like with Anora, I pushed myself so far beyond anything I’ve ever done before.”
For the director’s part, Baker has a lot on his plate right now, primarily as he races to finish the editing duties on Left-Handed Girl, the solo debut of Shih-Ching Tsou, who co-directed Take Out. But will his job get harder now that more people know who he is and know his style? Will he find it harder to get naturalistic performances from people?
“It’s funny,” he says. “I’ve actually been thinking a lot about this because somehow people say that with Woody Allen films, his male leads are often just versions of him. John Cusack did it wonderfully in Bullets over Broadway. Everybody does a good Woody Allen when they’re on a Woody Allen film. Well, I think actors coming into my films now are familiar with my work, and they know what I like. They know to be abrasive, they know to be brash. They know what I like. Look at Lindsay Normington, who plays Diamond in the movie. She’s familiar with all my other work, and you can see that in the scene where she’s like, ‘Get out of my private room, bitch.’ I think she was actually playing to me knowing she was in a Sean Baker movie, she knew what to give.”
“It’s fun to see that starting to happen,” he says, “But I think people also understand that I’m based in reality and that I make these sorts of social-realist films, and they have to play it real. And I always tell my actors, we don’t need to be too polished. If we’re too polished, it’ll play against us. We need the ums and the ahs and the stutters and everything like that. So, I think my actors know that it’s O.K.”
And translating that to shooting on location, does he ever worry about losing his anonymity? Will it become impossible to shoot guerilla-style? “According to my line producer Olivia Kavanaugh, and Alex Coco and Samantha, yes. It’s become a slightly harder to shoot guerilla style—or at least we have more eyes on us. It’s harder to get away with it. I think I may have to use pseudonyms now. Yeah, it hasn’t come to that yet. Still, to stay completely under the radar has become a little more difficult. And that’s why I may, who knows, I may try outside of one of the big cities next time.”
Whatever comes next, how will it compare to what came before? “I think you can expect more of the comedy that you see in Anora,” he says. “I’m trying to go there. I’m trying to go into fun, situational comedy that obviously has a little grit to it, more along the lines of a Jonathan Demme sort of thing. And so, the stuff I am interested in will continue to explore that balance between drama and comedy, by having more of both. But also, I think I do this to myself every time I try to do a movie. Yes, I’m staying in my wheelhouse, so there’s a certain amount of comfort, but I also have to mix it up and I still have to make it a challenge.
“Every film, I lose myself. Every single film becomes an emotional, personal journey.”
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