Nothing you read will prepare you for “Anora,” Sean Baker‘s raucous, unpredictable comedy that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Last May, Baker and his star Mikey Madison sat in the audience at the Lumiere and watched all the other contenders accept their awards. As George Lucas presented a special prize to his chum Francis Coppola, Baker said to himself, “Did we just win the Palme d’Or?” Sure enough, jury chief Greta Gerwig soon called him up to the stage.
Over Labor Day weekend, the film was the hit of the Telluride Film Festival, where I sat down with the producer-writer-director and his breakout star. The independent production, distributed by Neon, is a major Oscar contender and screens this evening, September 8, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Baker always develops his stories, from “Florida Project” to “Red Rocket,” with community and location in mind. In this case, Baker started out with the Russian community in New York’s Brighton Beach and Armenian actor Karren Karagulian, who has appeared in all of his films.
“He was the impetus to make this film, along with Vache Tovmasyan, who plays Garnik,” said Baker. “He actually is one of the biggest comedians from Armenia. They’re Armenians working for a Russian family. And Igor [Yura Borisov] is their Russian henchman working for the Armenians who work for that Russian family. There’s a hierarchy.”
Loosely inspired by Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria,” Baker had the main plot and the ending but not the script before he hired the actress who would play the title role — a New York sex worker who becomes entangled with the randy son of a Russian oligarch. Baker saw Mikey Madison in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” and rewatched the film several times.
“She comes at the end of the film and suddenly she takes over,” said Baker. “In my opinion, she stole that scene.”
When “Scream” came out, Baker and his producer wife Samantha Quan went to see Madison in the film. “I had already seen her in crazy mode in ‘Once Upon a Time,’” he said, “and now I saw her more grounded, playing a sexy teenager. That’s exactly what I needed.”
“She’s our Anora,” Baker told Quan. “As soon as we leave the theater, we’re calling her reps.”
It turned out Madison shared a rep with Brooklyn Prince, star of Baker’s “The Florida Project.” Baker offered Madison the role over coffee at their first meeting. He pitched Madison the movie, which involved pole and lap dancing at a strip club plus strenuous sex and fight scenes. Madison instantly accepted.
“Everything to do with the character I was excited about exploring,” Madison said. “There’s different sides to her. At times she’s presenting herself in a sexual way, because that’s what her work is about. And there’s also times where she’s not. She’s layered.”
Baker told Madison he would write the script for her portrayal, but it took a year to finish. That included writing all the dialogue for Russian and Armenian characters in English and having it translated.
The centerpiece is a fight scene known on the set as “the home invasion.” An explosion of chaos precisely covered over eight days with one 35mm camera, henchmen Garnik and Igor attempt to restrain Anora as she wriggles, punches, claws, bites, and kicks. She inflicts damage. When the boss Toros arrives, the two muscle men warn him not to set her loose.
“The fight scene, it’s meant to be shockingly funny,” said Baker. “We knew it would take place in real time. We were covering every second. It couldn’t be montaged. Every angle was calculated, shot-listed. Then of course, we had stunt coordinators coming on.”
Madison rehearsed with them in slo-mo. “‘You end up here,’” she said. “‘Then here you knock this over. You’ll end up on sofa at this point.’ And then we just went for a take. It was wild!”
“It was crazy to see,” said Baker. “I’m behind the monitor watching this going, ‘oh my god,’ when you see it in full speed. ‘What are they doing?’”
Madison went home with some bruises and scraped knees. “Yura, I accidentally cut him with one of my acrylic nails under his eye a little bit,” said Madison. “It’s just part of it, any of that bruising is so temporary, but that scene is going be forever, so I wanted to go all in for it.”
How did Anora learn to fight like that? “We talked a lot about backstory,” said Madison. “One of my biggest jobs as an actor is to go through all of those questions of who she is, where she comes from. We talked about her being a big scrapper. She does know how to fight, but I don’t think that she had ever gotten into a fight with multiple grown men before, so that was new for her. She’s willing to totally jump into a situation and fight tooth and nail.”
Anora has just married Ivan in Las Vegas, a dream come true for her, but Ivan’s parents are not happy. They want the henchmen to get the marriage annulled, ASAP. But Anora isn’t letting go so easily.
“It’s this incredible opportunity that’s being presented to her,” said Madison. “She also likes him, and he’s funny and charming, and so why the fuck would I not take this opportunity? She jumps at it and it’s spontaneous fun.”
For Ivan, Borisov recommended the young actor Mark Eidelshtein, who at Baker’s request sent in his own video of a scene. “He gave us the most incredible taped audition in which he did it nude, just with the hat,” said Baker.
“He was naked in his audition,” said Madison, “standing in front of a glass window. And then, as he turns around slowly, someone zooms in.”
As usual in his films, Baker examines how marginalized people are treated in our society. “I was exploring themes with this film, instead of actual issues,” he said. “One of those themes was levels of power and how you treat the person under you. How power in our capitalist society is really money, and how that works into and dictates things. Also, what defines adulthood or maturity? That’s a constant throughout. And the lack of any respect given to sex workers. All cultures still apply a stigma to sex work, and they’re dismissed and they’re disrespected and discarded. And what I wanted to have come across to the audience is how a young woman’s hopes and dreams being shattered is affected by the nonchalant, casual attitude of others. They couldn’t care less about her heart, who she is as a person, her humanity.”
Madison knows that roles like this don’t come around every day. “I woke up every morning and jumped out of bed and was excited to go to work,” she said. “I’m very lucky. I had this opportunity, and I was very sad when it ended.”
Next up: Madison is looking for the right role, while Baker is wondering what his next setting might be. “I do want to lean even more into comedy than I have,” he said. “There’s comedy to all my films. [In “Anora”] it’s more blatant. With ‘Takeout’ and ‘Prince of Broadway’ the humor came from behavioral humor, interactions between people that I find fun. But now I’m actually doing the setup and doing the punchline. I’m going a little more broad, and maybe the next one will be fully leaning into the cinema of John Landis, or Robert Zemeckis’s ‘Used Cars,’ one of the best comedies ever. Getting back to that unapologetic humor that used to be the norm.”
In any case, Baker has never gone Hollywood, even when the phone kept ringing after “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project.” “Hollywood is like, ‘This guy doesn’t want to work with us,’” he said. “I’ve made it clear I’m pretty independent. No, really, I’m not joking.”
