The winners of the Directors Guild of America Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in 2024 were announced tonight during the 77th Annual DGA Awards at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. SEAN BAKER won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film for Anora.
What is interesting about this story is that it works on an emotional and intellectual level. The crimes are horrible and unimaginable but when you examine the context of the time in history and the societal influences there is a strange logic there. It makes them not just isolated acts of evil, but part of an oppressive community. Then it starts becoming a story about all of us.
I happen to think that the films that I do, I feel like in the end, are not going to be disposable, that they’re going to be movies that people want to revisit. So it’s up to me to make sure every detail goes into them so when they do revisit it, they enjoy it even more or see something they never saw.
We built an image-based treatment as an edit of the film to explore how Elwood and Turner see the world differently. Then we populated it with the necessary language to convey certain moments. We worked with this idea called adjacent imagery – imagery that’s not solely plot-driven. It has a sort of experiential, metaphoric, and symbolic resonance so that it’s not so utilitarian.
I think what is important for me is the relationships of the characters and the journey that they go on. I wasn’t interested in spending my time or the audience’s time explaining everything that happened and what would happen afterward. I think it’s more interesting to let the audience figure it out themselves. I think you have to pay attention and then you become more engaged in the story. That’s a lot more interesting than explaining directly what happened.
I think it’s about a story that not many people know yet. It speaks pretty directly to our current world, which is what makes it so confronting I guess. It’s a film that is a real ride and it has a kind of truth in it. It’s one that I’m proud of and been lovely hearing how people have sort of responded to it.
“John Williams is a Hollywood icon, and it seems the word was invented for him and has been overused for other people, but I also knew the importance of it to my relationship with Steven, who I’ve known for 30 years, and he’s given me so many incredible opportunities that, not that I ever going to think that I’m going to screw them up, but I just knew that this was going to be one of those situations where I had to hit it right away.”
“I think the main reason why I made this movie was to explore Ralph Fiennes’ interior journey where I have a person who’s in that position who says, I have difficulty with prayer. That’s the core of his job. That is the essence of it. It’s like you saying, I have difficulty believing in the words I write or me, I have difficulty in the capability of the camera capturing any truth. It’s kind of like that.”
“It’s a movie about aging, not just about old age, in that each character in the film is going through kind of a transitional moment. I think this movie for me was a way to explore that and work through some of my anxieties about my grandma’s aging and my own aging and just being faced with these transitional moments in life.”
“It came together because I wanted to keep doing movies the way I love to make them in the genre area, which is for me, the best way I can express myself in a creative and and free way. You don’t have the limits of reality. You can create your codes, and your own rules to tell your story, and you can go as far as the Brundlefly, and everything to express to meet the violence of what I wanted to say about the theme.”
