NEW YORK – Sean Baker’s interest in the lives of sex workers began with his 2012 drama “Starlet.” For that film, set around the adult film world of San Fernando Valley, Baker spent time listening to the stories of sex workers. Some co-starred in the movie. Many became friends.
“I remember being on set and Radium Cheung, my DP, was like, ‘There’s a whole other movie. And there’s a whole other movie,’” Baker recalls. “I was like, ‘There’s a million stories to be told in this world.’”
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Since then, Baker has traversed a wide swath of America in films set everywhere from West Hollywood donut shops to industrial rural Texas. But he has kept the lives of sex workers in focus. The iPhone-shot “Tangerine” (2015) is about a pair of Los Angeles trans sex workers out to avenge a cheating boyfriend. In “The Florida Project” (2017), a single mother turns to sex work to support herself and her daughter in an Orlando motel. “Red Rocket” (2021) comically captures a washed-up porn star.
When his latest film “Anora,” starring Mikey Madison as a Brooklyn exotic dancer who spontaneously marries the son of a Russian oligarch, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Baker took the moment to speak about chipping away at the stigma of sex work. He 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 the pinnacle.
“It was the dream. You’re sort of in an existential crisis after that. I’m still figuring it out, quite honestly,” Baker said in a recent interview. “It’s not about opening doors. It’s certainly not about trying to get into the studio. To tell you the truth, it does the exact opposite. It says: OK, good. Now we can continue to do this.”
Baker, a resolutely independent filmmaker, is less comfortable at center stage than he is behind the camera. His movies, likewise, relish the communities of seldom-chronicled American subcultures. Samantha Quan, a producer of “Anora” and Baker’s wife, says he has always been interested in “people and situations that are always there but people choose not to see them.”
But “Anora,” one of the year's most acclaimed movies, has brought Baker perilously close to the mainstream. “Anora” is widely considered a contender for best picture at the Academy Awards, alongside other categories including best actress for its lauded young star.
Baker has arrived at this moment despite charting what, nowadays, is an unconventional path for a filmmaker. He has no interest in television or franchise movies, remaining devoted to the big screen. He makes scrappy indie movies built from real-life experience and research that balance both screwball comedy and social realism. “Anora” is the unusual film to draw comparisons to both British social realists like Mike Leigh, a favorite of Baker’s, and masters of farce like Ernst Lubitsch.
In a Hollywood that churns out big-budget fantasies, Baker has ascended by crafting what you might call anti-fairy tales. His movies suggest there’s something bankrupt in what and who we collectively value. The poverty of “The Florida Project” took place in the shadow of Disney World. In “Anora,” Madison's Ani isn’t the only one selling herself. The Russian oligarch’s henchmen are doing a job they’d rather not. The transactional nature of everything is both absurd and tragic.
“If I’m too calculated, like ‘This is my grand statement on late-stage capitalism,’ I’ll get a little contrived, I’ll get a little preachy,” Baker says, smiling. “But it’s hard to ignore it in a country more divided by the day.”
It’s a sentiment Baker has come by through experience as well as research.
“I don’t want to say in any way that I ever faced the hardships of an undocumented immigrant or a marginalized sex worker,” he says. “But being an independent filmmaker for 30 years, there was a hustle. Up until fairly recently, I was struggling to pay rent.”
Baker, the son of a patent attorney, grew up in New Jersey outside New York City. He attended film school at NYU. When he began, he envisioned himself making “Die Hard.” But as his exposure to arthouse and international film expanded, so did his interests as a filmmaker. Still, his Richard Linklater-influenced first feature, 2000’s “Four Letter Words,” drew heavily from his suburban upbringing.
But in the four years between that film and his next, he “finally” had some life experience, he says. Baker became less interested in himself than in other parts of the world. He also developed a debilitating drug addiction that took years to shake.
While living above a Chinese restaurant, Baker would talk to the delivery people, many of them undocumented immigrants, in the stairwell. Those conversations led to “Take Out,” co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou.
“That really gave me a chance to restart myself because I was down and out,” Baker says. “I lost all my friends. I lost everything. I had no more contacts. Everybody who I went to school with had been in Hollywood working. Todd Phillips, I went to school with. He was already making his first film, and I was getting off of heroin.”
With “Take Out,” Baker hit on an approach that he’s carried through to “Anora.” He leaned into immersive research, after which he built screenplays that served as a blueprint for improvisation-heavy films, eclectically populated by professional and non-professional actors pulsating with real life. His next movie, “Prince of Broadway,” followed a Ghanaian immigrant selling knockoff designer products in Manhattan.
For years, Baker contemplated a movie set in Brighton Beach. He and the actor Karren Karagulian, a regular in Baker’s movies, had talked about “a bro movie with Russian gangsters.”
“I’m glad that didn’t happen,” Baker says, chuckling. It went on the back burner. But after Baker heard a story about a young woman abandoned by her significant other and then held as collateral, he began rethinking a Brighton Beach movie set around a sex worker. To contemplate it, Baker and Quan moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood for a few months.
“We really hunker down in those places,” says Quan. “We don’t like to go to a place and say we’re just going to get a surface view. We really embed ourselves in that place. We talk to people. We get to know everyone. The research is us being there and soaking things up.”
Before Baker has a script, he typically casts his lead roles. For “Anora,” that meant enlisting Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn and Madison. After seeing Madison in 2022’s “Scream,” Baker was convinced she was perfect — even if his approach took some convincing of financiers.
“I remember when I was pitching it, they were like, ‘Mikey Madison and who else?’” Baker says. “I’m like: ‘No, no. She’s the star.’”
When Baker met with Madison, they spoke only vaguely about the project.
“He pitched me a very loose idea for what the story might be, the character,” Madison says. “I was essentially just agreeing to working with him.”
While writing the script, the two stayed in regular connection, talking through and gradually forming the central character with the help of consultant Andrea Werhun, author of the memoir “Modern Whore.” Baker, whose work apartment includes a kitchen stocked with Blu-rays in the cabinets, also gave Madison a handful of movies, including Federico Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria.”
Meanwhile, Baker looked at things like “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” for shooting New York at night. Later, he shot on the same stretch of Brooklyn road beneath the elevated subway immortalized by the chase scene in “The French Connection.” He and his production designer, Stephen Phelps, decided to put a hint of red in every shot, a nod to films like Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt.” In the credits, Baker thanks the director Jesús Franco for the red scarf and colors of “Vampyros Lesbos.”
“Even though my films are taking place pretty much now, they’re contemporary stories, I want it to feel like it’s shot in 1974,” Baker says.
During production, Baker would sometimes lean into guerrilla filmmaking techniques, sending Madison into a pool hall or restaurant to interact with those inside. (“The scene could go in any direction because it’s not really a scene,” says Madison.) For the sex scenes, Baker and Quan would themselves model the movements for Madison and Eydelshteyn.
“He was really dedicated to creating a safe space for us to be able to do those scenes and feel comfortable,” Madison says. “He wanted us to see what the positions would look like, so they would show us — obviously fully clothed and everything. It was funny and kind of broke the tension a little bit. Sean’s a one-of-a-kind director.”
As much as Baker might connect his films to a ’70s sensibility, he’s largely focused on where movies might go from here — and how he might nudge its direction a little bit. He’s proud that “Anora” is in the Oscar conversation, but is mostly rooting for his collaborators. “Because I already won my thing,” he says, laughing. But Baker hopes the attention might help carry independent, arthouse cinema into a wider arena, reawakening audiences to the big-screen experience and, maybe, convincing Hollywood that smaller, less expensive movies can punch well above their weight.
That “Anora” and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” — a 3 ½-hour epic shot in VistaVision and made for less than $10 million — seem to be in the awards mix, Baker says, is telling of a shift.
“That’s going to be a signal to the industry. Right now, it’s panic in LA. I’m like: We don’t have to make films for that much. They don’t have to cost as much,” says Baker, who advocates altering guild rules for lower-budget indie films. “The rules are going to have to change. And attitudes toward watching movies changed because of streaming and because of COVID. We have to remind audiences that some films are made for the big screen.”