By FilmInk Staff
With Oscar winning director Sean Baker headed to Australia for a one-night-only in-conversation Vivid Sydney event at The Sydney Town Hall, we pay tribute to the daring talent behind Anora, The Florida Project, Tangerine and Red Rocket.
“I went into NYU thinking I was going to make the next Robocop or Die Hard and I left NYU thinking I was going to make the next Naked or Secrets And Lies,” writer/director Sean Baker said last year at The Red Sea Film Festival.
That comment pretty much sums up what makes Sean Baker tick creatively: he’s got the cinematic concerns and interests of an outsider, but the filmmaking savvy of a Hollywood insider. Though certainly a shock and a bold indicator of the possible changes afoot in the American film industry, the multiple Oscar wins for Baker’s 2024 instant classic Anora were strangely fitting. Despite making films about sex workers and those who live in the margins of American society, Sean Baker had been wholeheartedly embraced by the film community for which he’d long worked outside. A wild, uncompromising and unconventional talent, Sean Baker is now inarguably in.
Sean Baker was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1971 to a teacher mother and patent attorney father. He became obsessed with homemade movies at a young age after his mother took him to see Universal Monster films being shown at the local library. Through high school, Baker worked as a projectionist, and then drove a taxi while studying at The New York University through The Tisch School Of The Arts. Baker dropped out of college to get experience making industrial films and TV commercials before returning to graduate in 1998.
Industrious and inventive, Baker directed four low budget films – Four Letter Words (2000), Take Out (2004), Prince Of Broadway (2008) and Starlet (2012) – which enjoyed minor festival acclaim and limited releases. “My interests still lie in all genres and I think if you look at my Letterboxd account, you’ll see that I watch everything,” Baker laughed to FilmInk in 2017. “Not following the Hollywood route – I didn’t move to Los Angeles early on, I stayed in New York – changes everything. If you’re not trying to actually break into the Hollywood system, meaning working for the studios, your focus is forced to change. I discovered a lot of character driven cinema from overseas at NYU, and eventually political cinema. Independent film was kind of forced upon me, because I couldn’t have blown up a building with a $3000 budget. I’m quite happy with the direction I took. It’s taught me more about the world. I’ve been educated with every subject that I focus on, and through the people I meet.”
Sean Baker’s real breakthrough came in 2015 with experimental, freewheeling drama Tangerine. The film tracks a day in the life of two transgender prostitutes: the deliriously-named Sin Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor). Baker got the idea for the film by watching real life versions of these characters hanging out in his colourful LA neighbourhood, and much of the film takes place either on the street or in late-night fast-food joints. This is part of the point too. Sin Dee and Alexandra are literally street walkers, and the street is their theatre. The duo conducts their flamboyant lives as a kind of reality TV screech fest, tottering their way through one storm in a teacup after another.
Remarkably shot on a mobile phone, Baker is not really interested in the mechanic of plot. Sin Dee is upset because her pimp has broken her heart. It’s around Christmas time, and the girls are down on their luck and looking for love as well as money. They hang out and have rows and receive small moments of redemption and pleasure. That’s about it, but there is abundant pathos on display. Even if we feel that their lives are limited and controlled by others, Sin Dee and Alexandra are real enough for us to enter into their world and dilemmas with an open heart as well as an open mind.
Baker enjoyed comparisons with the early work of Jim Jarmusch on Tangerine, and the feel is similar. With his first higher profile feature, Baker announced himself to the larger world as a writer/director adept at making ordinary, quirky, and disorganised lives seem colourful, compelling, and most of all, humanistic. “I became friends with sex workers and realised there were a million stories from that world,” Baker has said of his milieu in Tangerine. “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. It’s helping remove the stigma that’s been applied to this livelihood, and that’s always been applied to this livelihood.”
After the acclaim afforded the daring and technically on-the-edge Tangerine, Baker kicked it up a notch with his next film, which even featured a major movie figure in the great Willem Dafoe. Another against-the-grain work, The Florida Project tells the story of six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), who lives with her unemployed mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) in a run-down tourist trap motel within spitting distance of Disney World. To Moonee and her friends, the rundown neighbourhood is a kind of wonderland; abandoned houses are private playgrounds, their motel homes are shaped like fairytale castles and rocket ships, and the lack of parental supervision is simply the freedom to do whatever they want.
But what’s heaven to children is really a disturbing dystopia huddled in the shadow of The Magic Kingdom: drugs, booze and the threat of violence are ever-present, and the pressures of poverty are constant. The darkness that lies just outside the gates of The Magic Kingdom is real; the film is the result of Baker’s investigations into the lives of Florida’s long term unemployed and the day-to-day, precarious lives they live in the area’s countless roadside motels. The result is a deeply affecting film, made all the more so by our knowledge of its fidelity to the truth.
“When you actually go and immerse yourself and you go and talk to people in the community, everything changes,” Baker told FilmInk in 2017. “We wrote an original treatment for the film, and that changed when we went to Florida and met people. For example, the Bobby character played by Willem Dafoe would never have existed if we hadn’t met these different hotel managers that opened up their worlds to us. So, all the details of the film, everything besides it being a mother-daughter story, came from us actually being there. The only reason we made that initial treatment on our own is because we didn’t have the money to take the trip there. Representation is extremely important. For my last few films, I’ve been an outsider to these worlds I’m focusing on. Because I’m an outsider, I really have to make sure I never assume anything…ever.”
Baker kept it on the edges – and enjoyed more acclaim – with 2021’s comedy drama Red Rocket. The film asks a typically wild question: what’s a washed-up porn star meant to do when he’s burned all his bridges? In the case of Red Rocket’s Mikey Saber (played to perfection by Simon Rex), he finds the answer staring him in the face from behind the counter of his local donut cafe, in the small industrial hometown where he’s returned to lick his wounds. Barely legal, “Strawberry” (newcomer Suzanna Son) is charmed by Mikey’s promises of escaping to a new life, and the audience is slowly hipped to the meaning of the term “suitcase pimp”.
Rarely explored on film beyond perhaps Bob Fosse’s grim cult classic Star 80 (1983), the “suitcase pimp” is a male hanger-on, often a loosely employed boyfriend or husband, who manages a more popular female porn star, grooming and using her. After examining sex work through different prisms in his earlier films, Starlet, Tangerine and The Florida Project, Baker felt there might be a way to make a film about one of these players, provided the right person came along. Certain of one thing, he had no desire to tell the story as dour drama or moralistic tragedy, but instead chose to have the film flip flop between comedy to quiet poignancy and back again.
Aware of the dazzling Simon Rex (who had also appeared in porn films himself) since his MTV VJing days, Baker knew that he had his man…and by dent of that, the means by which to structure and create the wildly entertaining Red Rocket. “I noticed that Simon had a presence,” Baker told FilmInk in 2021. “And you know what? He made me laugh on a daily basis. He could act. I saw that. Even in those six-second videos for MTV, he was shining.”
If Red Rocket was his most entertaining and accessible work up to that point, Baker doubled down on it with his follow-up. 2024’s Anora was, of course, the film that really put Baker over the top, taking out top prizes at Cannes, as well as those aforementioned Oscars, namely for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Editing. This raucous comedy-drama stars Mikey Madison as Anora, whose life as a sex worker changes overnight when a client pays for her company for a week. The son of a Russian oligarch, the seemingly smitten Ivan (Mark Eidelstein) soon proposes marriage, whisking Anora off to Vegas to complete the ceremony. What follows is anything but happy-ever-after, as Ivan’s incredulous, infuriated parents send in their fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian) and two goons, Igor (Yuri Borisov) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), to forcibly annul the marriage.
But despite the torrents of acclaim and acceptance into the cinematic mainstream, don’t expect Sean Baker to start making the kind of blockbusters he dreamed about before college. “I like the movies I’m making,” Baker told FilmInk in 2024. “I like the wheelhouse I’m working in. Anora cost a little bit more than The Florida Project, yet it still allowed me to cast unconventionally. It still allowed me to exercise some guerrilla filmmaking tactics. So, I was comfortable here, and I would like to continue that.”
With additional reporting by James Mottram, Gill Pringle, Travis Johnson and Julian Wood.
Sean Baker: In Conversation happens on June 7 at The Sydney Town Hall as part of Vivid Sydney’s Creative Trailblazers series. For all ticketing and venue details, click here.
