“I just thought I’d made a crazy exploitation film”: Sean Baker on his Palme d’Or-winning lap dance film | film

SEan Baker is very demanding in his research and immerses himself in the environment of what he is making a film about. And yes, he knows what that looks like. “People on the internet are like, ‘Oh, Sean is such a jerk!’ That’s the only reason he makes these movies.’” He grins happily with his face wrinkled, his eyes crinkling and his whole face seems to be smiling. At 53, he looks like he’s fallen into the fountain of youth. His boyish exuberance and tousled hair give him a Richie Cunningham wholesomeness that provides an amusing contrast to his films’ themes, if not their bubbly, irrepressible tone.

His charming fourth feature, Starlet, was a buddy film about a young porn actress and a moody older widow. His fifth film – the riotous breakout hit Tangerine, shot on three iPhones and a $100,000 budget – was set among transgender sex workers on LA’s Santa Monica Boulevard. Red Rocket was about another porn star, this time older and more disreputable, trying to convince his teenage girlfriend to pursue the same career.

Baker’s latest film, Anora, is a glorious, high-energy tragicomedy about a Russian-American lap dancer, played by the Oscar-winning Mikey Madison, who regrets her impetuous marriage to the giggly 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch. The director still seems stunned that Anora won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. “I just thought I made a crazy exploitation film,” he says, his face scrunching up again.

If the impression he conveys is that of an R-rated boy in a R-rated world, then that fits with his childhood memories of following his father, who worked as a lawyer in Manhattan, on trips to the city from their home in New Jersey accompanied the city. “It was always a ‘welcome to the jungle’ moment,” he gasps. “We were coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel and that would put you right on 42nd Street. This was the heyday when it was full of grindhouses and porn theaters. It would say ‘Marilyn Chambers XXX’ anywhere.” He mimics his younger self, eyes fixed on the stems as he looks out the passenger window: “‘WWhoa! What’s up?“That stuff really stuck with me.”

Maybe the people shouting “Hondog” are right. “There Was “Anora requires a certain amount of practical research,” says Baker, who is aware that this is not just a figure of speech. In preparation for writing the film, he frequently visited the clubs where Anora (or Ani, as she preferred to be called) might work. This wasn’t a solo mission: He was accompanied by Madison, whom he had cast before he’d even written the script, after seeing her as a member in the bloody climax of Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” the Manson family played. Also present at the clubs were Samantha Quan, Baker’s wife and producer, and one or two other crew members. But still.

“We took part in lap dances,” he says sheepishly. “We had To. It was the most embarrassing, real “Curb Your Enthusiasm” stuff. I’m trying to do an interview and do a lap dance at the same time, which is so ridiculous. In the middle of the dance I would say, “Okay, what does a man normally do at this moment?” I would completely kill the mood. The dancers went wild.”

Some of them had experiences that weren’t all that different from what they imagined Ani would experience in the film. “There was a sad, sobering moment when a woman said, ‘This happened to me.’ I don’t know if she was an oligarch, but she married into a rich family and was rejected by them. She had tears in her eyes.”

The film alludes to the generally sanitized Hollywood view of sex work by showing Ani’s young husband sliding around his mansion floor in socks, just like Tom Cruise did in Risky Business, the 1983 comedy about a teenager who runs his house turns to a brothel for the night. But Baker noted that the Pretty Woman paradigm still holds: “We’ve heard from a lot of dancers, ‘As soon as I marry this rich businessman, I won’t have to do this anymore.'” It’s not that different from playing the lottery It? “Sure. You get it in all areas of work, all areas of life. “One day I will…”” Win the Palme d’Or? “Exactly!”

How can a woman like Ani find fulfillment? “It would be a big step to get the respect she deserves from someone who actually sees and hears her,” Baker reflects. “One of the reasons I made the film is because I realized that our Cinderella stories have changed in the last decade. It’s about wealth and fame now. When I was growing up, the American dream was a house in the suburbs where you would hopefully earn enough for your kids to go to college. That was pretty much it. That has changed and that is perhaps what the film comments on.”

It’s easy to imagine a worse version of the film, in which Ani’s Russian in-laws don’t bother to have the marriage annulled, but instead kill her and dump the body in the Hudson. But the striking thing about Baker’s films is that – despite the poverty, crime, desperation and drug use of his characters – they are largely free of threat. Anora may have a lot in common with Jonathan Demme’s 1986 screwball thriller Something Wild, but she has no equivalent to the terrifying sociopath played by Ray Liotta in that film. Maybe there’s an inherent sweetness in Baker’s attitude that keeps him from engaging in this kind of threat? “It’s funny because I watch very extreme films and I’m friends with people like Gaspar Noé,” ​​he says, mentioning the name of the director of the grueling Irreversible. “But you’re right. I’ve never been there. I don’t know why.”

Even guns are conspicuous by their absence: Baker’s 2004 film Take Out, about a Chinese immigrant working as a delivery driver, is the only one of his films to feature a gun. Fifteen years ago, Baker and actress Karren Karagulian, who has starred in all of his films, began discussing what would become “Anora.” From the start, they set themselves the challenge of writing a gangster story set in the Russian-American community of Brighton Beach (aka Little Odessa) without ever showing a gun. “We asked ourselves, ‘Is this even possible?'” Anora proves it is.

Guns and menace aren’t the only elements missing from Baker’s films. Aside from Willem Dafoe, who was nominated for an Oscar for playing a good-natured motel manager in 2017’s “The Florida Project,” Baker has steered clear of stars, perhaps fearful that they would spoil the laid-back methods that are so important to his work are: the extensive improvisations, the last-minute rewrites, the scenes in which actors mingle with the unsuspecting audience.

“I have many friends in the industry who have had nightmarish experiences working with big Hollywood actors,” he says. “I don’t know how they get through the day. I would throw in the towel. I would love to work with Jennifer Lawrence or Leonardo DiCaprio one day. I heard they are great! But you never know. It could really derail a film.”

His immersive process and tendency to blur the line between life and work are also at odds with the A-list. But is it taking a personal toll on him? “Well,” he says, his smile fading for the first time. “There is a responsibility you can take on when you use real people who may be struggling. I sometimes assumed a kind of guardian position over my actors. I couldn’t do it any other way. Besides, I feel too…” He narrows his eyes. “The word is not ‘dark’. But let’s say “alternative” lifestyles. I think I’m digging in a little too deeply on a personal level. I’ve had addiction issues my whole life.”

Baker openly admits that he was addicted to heroin in his 20s. “I will never go back to opiates because that would be suicide,” he says. “But I found myself in my 40s and 50s in places I never thought I would be. Sometimes I think, “Why am I partying like this?” It’s because I’ve entered a world that I probably wouldn’t be in if I wasn’t interested in making it into a movie. Or I find it romantic for some reason.”

Can he keep his distance in these moments? “There is distance, yes, because I’m there on more of an observational level. But I Am participate.” He thinks about it differently: “So I guess there isn’t that much distance. This can be scary and I have to take care of myself.”

Although the film industry is a notoriously dangerous place for anyone with that appetite, Baker claims to have never experienced this side of Hollywood. “It seems extremely clean these days. But I’m so indie, I’m out there. Many of my colleagues – and I don’t want to judge them here – are pretty straightforward. There are a lot of comic book nerds making movies!”

I ask if he’s clean now and he looks away. The smile is back, but it’s now more rueful than carefree. “Um, I’m not,” he finally says. “No, that’s not me. I was clean for seven years, and then I realized that opiates were my drug of choice, so I started doing other things. It comes and goes. Apparently there is a weed staple that has been more or less normalized in the US. But there’s always the enjoyment of other, er, party substances. And, uh, I’ll leave it there.”

He says this without a hint of defensiveness, but rather in a sweet and conscientious tone, as if he were moving a fragile object out of harm’s way or turning his U-rated face away from the X-rated world.