Sean Baker’s interest in 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, and many became friends.
His films are set everywhere from West Hollywood donut shops and the Sunset Strip 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 “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, Baker dedicated the award to “all sex workers, past, present and future.”
Baker’s movies 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” has brought Baker closer to the mainstream.
Baker has no interest in TV or franchise movies–he’s devoted to the big screen. He makes scrappy indie movies built from real-life experience and research that balances screwball comedy and social realism. “Anora” was inspired by both British social realists like Mike Leigh, a favorite of Baker’s, and masters of farce like Ernst Lubitsch.
Baker has been crafting anti-fairy tales that critique the bankruptcy in what and who we collectively value. 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.
Up until recently, I was struggling to pay rent
“I don’t want to say in any way that I ever faced the hardships of undocumented immigrant or 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 grew up in New Jersey outside New York City. He attended film school at NYU. At first, he envisioned himself making “Die Hard.” But as his exposure to arthouse and international film expanded, so did his interests.
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 had acquired some real life experience. 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 in the stairwell.to the delivery people, many undocumented immigrants. 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, was already making his first film, and I was getting off of heroin.”
Baker has leaned into immersive research, after which he built screenplays as blueprint for improvisation-heavy films, eclectically populated by professional and non-professional actors. In “Anora,” he cast Madison (as well as Yura Borisov and Mark Eydelshteyn) before writing the script. He and Quan also lived briefly in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach get the setting.
“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. He hopes that the attention to Anora will carry independent, arthouse cinema into wider arena, and, maybe, convince Hollywood that smaller, less expensive movies can punch well above their weight.
Made on a budget of $6 million, Anora has earned close to $40 million at the box-office.
