When indie film director Sean Baker was a high school student at Gill St. Bernard’s in Gladstone and working as a projectionist at the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, he never could have dreamed that years later, his new movie, Anora, would be an Oscar frontrunner—and premiere at the very same theater.
Buzz is that Anora, which stars Mikey Madison, is a contender for the Oscars’ best-picture and best-actress awards. It won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and many critics are calling it the movie of the year. The film is a thrilling, modern-day Cinderella story about a sex worker from Brooklyn who meets and marries the son of a Russian oligarch; it’s in theaters now.
“It seems like it’s getting nice universal love, which is really incredible,” says Baker, 53, who is unpretentious and modest about his achievement. He’s also known for his critically acclaimed films The Florida Project (2017) and Tangerine (2015). Baker’s wife, actor and producer Samantha Quan, is a producer on Anora.
Photo: Priscilla Mars
Baker, who grew up in Short Hills before moving to Somerset County with his family, often explores stories about people on the margins of society, specifically sex workers. He became interested in this world while making his first feature film, Starlet, about adult film stars, in 2012.
“That was where I got to meet sex workers and actually become friends with them and hear a lot of their stories,” he says. “While we were shooting, my director of photography, Radium Cheung, said to me, ‘Well, there’s a whole other movie right there.’ And so I started to realize that there are a million stories to be told in this world because there are so many different aspects of sex work, and every sex worker is an individual. But it wasn’t as if I set out to make the next sex-worker movie. It happened quite organically.”
The idea for Anora came about when Baker revisited his desire to make a film about the Russian-American community in Brighton Beach and Coney Island.
“I had figured out this main plot of a young sex worker marrying a son of a Russian oligarch, which brought me to a totally different aspect of sex work and into the world of escorting and erotic dancing. So it was something I hadn’t explored yet,” he says.
Baker’s first brush with strip clubs was actually at the notorious, now-shuttered Frank’s Chicken House in Manville: “If you know the history of that place, it was a pretty extreme introduction to strip clubs.” (Frank’s was shut down at one point for lewdness complaints.)
Accepting his award at Cannes, he dedicated it to “all sex workers, past, present and future,” saying he wants to chip away at the stigma of sex work.
Baker has been steadily working in film and TV since graduating from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He decided early on while working on his film The Florida Project that he was more interested in tackling themes than issues, because themes are something that everybody can talk about and relate to, he says. One of the themes that he wanted to explore with Anora was the general disrespect that society has for sex work.
Baker’s Jersey upbringing helped shape the director he is today. When he was around five years old, his mother took him to the Millburn Library to watch Universal’s monster films, a highlight reel of horror movies from the early days of the movie industry. It was a transformative experience.
“I remember the mummy being stabbed with a spear, and then Dracula rising from the grave. And then the one that got me was, they showed the burning windmill sequence from the end of Frankenstein. I just remember that image of the monster and the internal mechanism of the windmill and him looking through it….And the next morning, I told my mother I wanted to make movies. That was definitely the turning point for me,” he says. (His story echoes Steven Spielberg’s trajectory of making Super 8 films as a kid before heading to film school.)
After his first year at NYU, Baker went home during the summer to work, driving cabs for Sky View Taxi in Somerville. He later used some of those experiences in his films—namely in Tangerine, which follows a transgender sex worker. Some of the cab sequences that appear in the movie were based on real-life interactions. “You learn a lot from these experiences,” he says. “I know that the people I met and the crazy taxi experiences I had really made a lasting impression on me. I still have material that I haven’t even used yet.”
At Tisch, Baker learned about the history and craft of filmmaking. He met fellow student Chris Bergoch, a screenwriter who grew up in Wayne and would become one of his regular collaborators. The pair co-wrote Tangerine and The Florida Project.
While Baker hasn’t yet filmed an entire movie in New Jersey, he did shoot scenes for his first feature, Four Letter Words, in Basking Ridge. It explores the views and attitudes of young men in suburbia—high school friends who reunite after entering college. “I’m very interested on a sociological level in the way people treat other people,” Baker says.
In Anora, he specifically wanted to explore power dynamics and the transactional nature of relationships. “I was interested in how [characters in the film] treat the person who is either above or below them in the hierarchy,” he says. “Everybody is punching down in the film, meaning they’re disrespecting the person who’s just under them in terms of power. And then I wanted to show what happens when it gets to [the lead,] Ani. Who is she punching down to?”
“I also wanted to explore the theme of consent and the complexity behind [it],” he says.
Baker says he also wanted to explore the theme of adulthood: Many of the characters in Anora think they’re adults, but they act like children.
“I wanted the audience to be laughing until they’re crying, you know? I think as long as we get us back to a grounded reality and kind of sit with Ani in those last few moments of the film, you understand that everything leading up to this scene actually isn’t very funny at all,” Baker says. “But maybe you’ll leave the film feeling some hope for the character.”
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