Anora is the latest film by indie auteur Sean Baker. It’s had an amazing premiere and release, was awarded the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes, and has the highest per-screen average of any film this year. This is an anomaly in the current doldrums of indie film, which is the lifeblood of the industry.
Anora stars Mikey Madison, who is stunning as the title character, a stripper who is wooed by the son of a Russian oligarch. The two get married and the fairytale is threatened when news reaches Russia.
Anora is best experienced in a movie theater, projected on film – a feeling to savor. This is the film of the year. It was beautifully shot on film by the very talented Drew Daniels, who has built up an excellent resume of indie films.
[The conversation was edited for clarity and length.]
Talk about your working relationship with Sean Baker, this is your second film with him…
I said yes to Red Rocket without even reading the script. It was a low-budget film with a documentary-size crew, shooting in Texas where I am from… I went back to Texas to shoot a film 16 millimeter with one of my favorite directors. Our vision was just so aligned, creatively we were always on the same page and we had a very mutual sort of obsession with the edit. I like to know how things are intended to be edited. What the design of the scene is and what is the intention? We always would collaborate and talk about editing on set and we would try not to repeat shots in the edit.
I love the fact that you brought up editing and cinematography because I feel like this is a collaboration that does not get talked about very much.
I try to shoot movies to be edited in a certain way. It’s there in the footage, it’s there. The intention is always there. Sean is the editor of his films and there are very few shots that don’t end up in the movie. We shoot largely what we need and if we do cover ourselves, it’s a little insurance policy now and then. Sean will do everything he can to hold on to a shot, to not repeat a shot, to let something live in a wide shot if he can and I just appreciate that.
It’s a bright movie. It’s not bright in tone per se, although it does have humor in it. There are lots of lens flares. I see it as three different segments. You have the strip club atmosphere, then you have the luxury lifestyle, and then there’s the search and the finale. Each one, even though they’re part of a whole, I feel like each one has its own look.
We love seeing the spaces and understanding the geography and location. We don’t want to just shoot a movie in close-ups. We spent time scouting the strip club when it was open. I think that was informative. I wanted to sort of pay homage to the actual club. I didn’t want to change the light too much. I didn’t want it to feel like a different space than what it was.
Of course, we needed enough light for shooting on film and Sean wanted to shoot a lot of it, especially at the beginning of the film. He wanted to observe her drifting around the club, so she’s in and out of light and out of darkness sometimes. It’s not always the best light for me, but I had to just give her space and let her work.
In the luxury sequence, there’s loads of light, there’s all windows behind them, so it’s just literally when they’re in the house, literally all light. It’s just kind of just seeing them chill on the couch usually or the bedroom and there’s just loads of light in there. It just looks like a very bright place.
It’s full of depth, full of life. It’s shiny. The floors are reflective. The ceilings are reflective. There’s a lot of beige and white and then red, the red sheets and stuff. So it is supposed to just have a heightened, opulent feeling so that it is part of the seduction of her being seduced by his world.
I think that was just very important that you as an audience also feel like you’re falling for it, too. That’s the life she wants.. then Vegas. Vegas is colorful. Vegas is dynamic and moves. It’s partying. It’s also part of that similar bright and colorful and exotic almost to her.
Was this always going to be shot on film? Was that a conversation or was it just we’re shooting this on film?
It was always going to be shot on film. Sean from the beginning wanted to shoot on anamorphic lenses, which are like old Russian lenses. It’s just to just part of the Russian-ness of the film, the DNA of the film itself shooting on that glass, which has such a look. I don’t tend to just overly make things beautiful. That’s not really what I like to do necessarily. And the film is not always beautiful too, and I think that’s important. It can’t always be beautiful. It has to be ugly. It has to be real.
That is the difference with this film, that’s why we shot anamorphic. That’s why it’s on 4-perf 35. There’s an opulence to that format. There’s a luxury to that format. It’s the biggest negative on 35. You could shoot, I guess besides Vista Vision, but it’s big. It has anamorphic lenses that lend a certain sort of height. They heightened the reality. It’s very heightened.
I didn’t want to shoot it dingy, underexposed. I mean, it is a bit underexposed, but I didn’t want to beat it up and make it too grimy. It was supposed to feel like a change from her. If you look at how we shot her apartment and the club and the subway and the streets as opposed to shooting her life.
When they’re signing the papers… The whole movie was just so open and big, and that room just felt very small. So deliberate or not, that just worked. That was just very claustrophobic.
Those rooms are like that. It’s a fluorescent-lit office building. It could be anywhere. It’s like the fact that they have to go to Vegas to go to that space is almost, it’s just ridiculous. I mean, that’s part of the movie though.
The movie is about how ridiculous life can be and that’s what makes it funny and that’s what makes it relatable. Yeah, I don’t think that was necessarily by choice. Oh, let’s make this space super claustrophobic. It just landed that way.
What were some of the visual references or inspirations for the work on this?
One of my favorites was The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974). I just love New York, the colors, the feel, the anamorphic. Owen Roizman flashed it and pushed it. He did The French Connection, too. We do an homage when Toros is driving underneath the train tracks, those are the exact tracks that they shot under. We did a hood mount shot through the front where you could see the tracks flickering as they passed by.
Any favorite shots?
My favorite scene in the movie is the scene at the end when she’s smoking a blunt and they’re just passing this blunt back and forth and just kind of ragging on each other a little bit. I just love that scene. It was a very big scene, we spent all night and it was very elegantly shot and simple, and the lighting is very downplayed. There’s just something elegant and confident in the filmmaking. It just feels so right.
It works on such an emotional level. Any particular challenging scenes? Was there anything particularly hard to do in this film?
The big home invasion scene was difficult for many reasons. It is probably the only scene in the movie where we attempted to do a shot list where we had some sort of sketch of what the blocking was going to be. I don’t think we ended up shot listing it or even making a realistic shot. We didn’t do that for this film, but we did spend time a lot of time at the house talking about it, and we had a plan for what it could be.
We show up to shoot it and Sean has rewritten the scene and now it is generally going to be in the same areas, but now, there’s going to be a lot more back and forth and back and forth across the entire house. It made the scene make sense and it was more dynamic and we knew what it was.
Did you use a lot of natural light?
It was a lot of natural light, but also, we would lose the light. I had one 18K Lighting Rig that I would push in through the side and diffuse heavily, and then I had big diffusion rags. If the sun came out, we’d drape ’em over the whole window, this giant south-facing window. And also, oh my gosh. So the hardest part was I had to then figure out which shots could be done night for day because often we would just have to keep shooting. We had to have something to shoot, and there weren’t enough night scenes to shoot at the house. Often we would pivot or we would even invent new scenes to shoot at night. We would just have an abundance of night because we were shooting in the winter.
What camera did you use?
It was shot on the ARRICAM LT Super 35.
What has it been like being involved with this and being on the other side of it now?
I hope that we’re inspiring people. I feel like it’s so needed right now with the state of cinema and all of that, winning Cannes, winning the Palme d’Or, felt like a win for independent cinema. It truly did. I think the fact that we won, the fact that we were able to stand out, just kind of, to me it’s a sign of the times. It’s a sign that indie cinema needs a comeback. This is what people actually want. They want bold, original films, that are risky, that are subversive.
I completely agree with that. This is a film that feels like the present day. Most films now are about people who are well-off and well-adjusted. We didn’t need much background about Anora – we are Anora. Modern life is precarious and this movie reflects that like no other film this year, or in recent memory. The end scene, the last couple of minutes really blew me away.
That was also probably the hardest thing to shoot. We shot that on three different days, in two different locations. You would never know it, but I mean, yeah, the interiors were shot at two different locations just because of how difficult and the importance that we all put on that scene. It was the whole movie was that scene. It had to work.
Anora is now playing in theaters.
