“Anora,” which premiered at the film festival on Tuesday, follows a strip club worker who falls in love with the son of a Russian oligarch. When asked about how sex workers came to be the subject of the last five of his movies, Baker said after making 2012’s “Starlet,” he was “introduced to the adult film world.”

“I became friends with sex workers and realized there were a million stories from that world.

If there is one intention with all of these films, I would say it’s by telling human stories, by telling stories that are hopefully universal,” he said. “It’s helping remove the stigma that’s been applied to this livelihood, that’s always been applied to this livelihood.”

The film involves numerous sex scenes, but Baker said at the presser that he prefers to refer to them as “sex shots.”

Mikey Madison, who plays the title character said she, Baker and producer Samantha Quan “would talk about different positions” and then Baker and Quan would “demonstrate what they wanted it to look like.”

“Those scenes were fun to shoot and all of the lap dance scenes were very fun to shoot as well because the environment on set was very comfortable,” Madison continued. “After a little bit, I was almost too comfortable in those situations, especially walking around the club. All the women are naked, and I was too, and it was normal.”

Baker said that the movie did not have an intimacy coordinator on set, with he and Quan instead acting in that role.

Madison confirmed that she was given the option of an intimacy coordinator, but “as I’d already created a really comfortable relationship with both of them for about a year, I felt that that would be where I was most comfortable with and it ended up working so perfectly.”

In the film, Madison (“Better Things,” “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”) plays Anora, a 23-year-old working at a strip club outside of New York City. Her luck changes when she meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, who takes her on a week-long bender in Vegas during which the two get married. But when Vanya’s parents find out, the two find themselves being tracked down by Russian gangsters, who attempt to get them to annul the marriage.

“Anora” has been critically lauded as a subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce.

Baker has become a Cannes regular in recent years. He debuted “The Florida Project,” his look at a mother and her young daughter living on the economic margins, in the 2017 edition of the festival, and then returned in 2021 with “Red Rocket,” the story of a porn star who returns to his hometown in Texas.