Interview with Anora director Sean Baker: Write the ending first

Sean Baker’s film Anora won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – the latest in the director’s acclaimed tales of sex workers, including: mandarin, The Florida ProjectAnd Red rocket. But Anora may be his most inviting and accessible work yet.

Anora – or Ani, as she prefers – is a lap dancer at a gentlemen’s club who finds a way out of sex work after meeting the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch named Vanya. Ani (Mikey Madison) and Vanya (Mark Eidelstein) escape, and suddenly a life that used to be about pleasing drunken customers has become one full of luxury: a mansion to live in, money to spend, and diamonds to wear . But the excesses prove fleeting when Ani realizes that Vanya wasn’t entirely open-hearted.

I spoke to Sean afterwards Anoramakes his New York Film Festival debut to discuss how he finds his stories, the power of women in his filmography, and how to make a mid-budget film look like a big-budget film.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity:

When did you know? Anora What would be the next film you wanted to make?

There was this aha moment when we figured out the main plot. My team worked with a consultant who had more exposure to the Russian-American community than the sex work community. We explored the idea of ​​this young woman who had something happen to her, something where she was held as collateral by the Russian mafia because her dead husband owed money. Over the course of about 24 hours, she realized that her husband was not the man she thought she was marrying because he didn’t come to the rescue. Suddenly she began to feel attracted to the men, her captors, in a kind of Stockholm syndrome.

This idea fascinated me, but I didn’t want to tell a mafia film. I didn’t want to make a gangster movie, so I tried to figure out what else would bring her into this situation. I was on Zoom with this advisor when I said, “How about she just marry the son of a Russian oligarch?” And she laughed out loud when I said that, and that’s when I knew I was onto something. At that moment we said, “We get it. That’s it. Now let’s just go ahead and write this thing.”

Many of the stories you have told are based on the power of women. What is important to you about these stories?

My films are often just reactions to what I don’t see enough of in film and television or what I want to see more of. I’m not the first to have an empathetic approach to sex work – definitely not the first – but I don’t see much of it and it’s fairly rare. When I see sex workers, they are often minor characters or caricatures, and I have become more and more aware of that. With each film, it’s become a conscious decision of mine to tell a universal story with a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional character who is a sex worker, to just… I wouldn’t say normalize it, but there it is, I guess I. My subversive tactic here is to really get the audience to see sex work differently, to help those who see sex work through this stigmatized eye so they can break away from it.

Anora To me it feels like both a big budget film and a “fuck you, watch me” kind of film. How did you manage that?

I had a slightly larger budget than The Florida Project. When you make these films, you have to put all that money on the screen to compete with whatever the studios or even the mini-studios are doing. You have to make a $6 million movie look like a $50 million movie that Hollywood would make. So we put everything on the screen and we always shoot on location and we have multiple locations. I think that’s the big difference. I think with a lot of indie films there’s something like, “Oh, you’re making a film on a certain budget? Do it as two people, put them in an apartment, and they never leave the apartment.” You know what I mean? And that’s why I’m fighting against it.

I also have ensemble casts. This is very important to me, especially in the creative field, because I just love seeing an ensemble come together in a very chaotic and confrontational way and have all these different personalities at play, but also because it increases the production value. A big cast feels bigger.

The film begins in a club called Headquarters in Manhattan. What brought you to this place?

I wanted to explore this new wave of gentlemen’s clubs, which are basically lap dance clubs, because they are so unique. It’s something new that I haven’t seen in film or television before. This different type of gentleman’s club brings with it a high level of intimacy. It also reminds me of something that has always fascinated me. During World War I there was this thing called “Dime a Dance,” where soldiers would come to a town on vacation and pay a young woman to dance with them for a dime.

This is the 2020s version of “Dime a Dance,” and I just find it fascinating how much psychology there is in it. It’s completely different than just dancing on a pole on a stage. I mean, the interaction, the transaction that goes on is so interesting. These young dancers either approach a customer or allow themselves to be approached by a customer. Within seconds they have to read this man and try to figure out, “Okay. How do I adjust my performance to get this person to spend money on me and maybe take him to a private clinic? [place]?” It’s a real hustle, but it involves psychology. The dancer must be attuned to exactly what the person is going through or thinking.

Let’s talk about the ending. Can you tell us how important it is for you to stick the landing on film?

For me, endings come first. They are the most important thing. It’s what you leave with the audience. They’ll be talking about this minutes later as they leave the theater, and I always have to think of the ending before I even put a word to paper. I have the beginning, the middle and the end, and I’m primarily figuring out that end. In this case it was very stressful because I was asking a lot.