The first hour of “Anora” is designed to feel like a Cinderella story. Ani (Mikey Madison), a Brooklyn sex worker, gets swept up into the whirlwind lifestyle and absurd wealth of Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 19-year-old son of a Russian oligarch who goes from her client to husband in the course of a week.
“I was trying to present the audience with a classic Hollywood romantic comedy, maybe a dirty romantic comedy, but a romantic comedy for the first 45 minutes to an hour,” said writer and director Sean Baker when he was guest on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast. “I knew that could be its own movie. I always say, ‘You can get up and leave the theater when the helicopter shot that pulls out from the mansion and she’s living happily ever after, and that’s it.’ I even bookend it with this pop song.”
But for that Cinderella story to work, the “Anora” prince/oligarch would need his castle, and not just any castle. Below, Baker and production designer Stephen Phelps discuss how they found the mansion, how it became an essential part of the film’s cinematic language, and how they tamed and transformed it into this year’s most important location setting.
Grounded in Neighborhood and Culture
One of the defining features of Baker’s films is they are grounded in a specific corner of the world. From the motel on the outskirts of Disney World in “The Florida Project,” to the Hollywood streets through the eyes of two trans sex workers in “Tangerine,” the realist details and specificity of people’s lives are the lifeblood of his films. “Anora” was no different.
In fact, the culturally rich communities in the Brighton Beach and Coney Island were Baker’s literal starting point. While on the podcast, the filmmaker discussed how his initial interest in making the film wasn’t rooted only in character or story. Baker had long dreamed of finding a project he could shoot in Russian and Armenian Brooklyn neighborhoods, which he had gotten to know through his long-time collaborator Karren Karagulian, who plays Toros in the film and has starred in each of the director’s films.
“Then, late in COVID, I made this fashion film that was sort of an homage to Walter Hill’s ‘The Warriors,’ which shot in that area, and I think it’s what re-sparked that desire,” said Baker.
Keeping his ears open and actively searching for story ideas, Baker had one neighborhood consultant who told him a story she had personally experienced about being held captive. Her significant other, a Russian gangster, abandoned her, and she started to experience Stockholm syndrome and gravitated toward her captors. Baker had no desire to make a Russian gangster film, but that story would be the inspiration for the 25-minute set piece at the midpoint of “Anora.”
“How this young woman would deal with this very scary predicament while processing the fact that her significant other has just abandoned her, that was one of the early ideas — the images in my head that could take place in real time, play out in real time, while the audience is really experiencing this with her,” he said.
Before he even had his characters, Baker would build out from the 25-minute scene set in a living room, adding Ani’s Cinderella story that proceeded it and the world of the Russian oligarch wealth that inspired it. But as he fleshed out the world, in particular the 25-minute set piece set that unfolded in real time in the oligarch’s mansion, he started to realize he was envisioning spaces and a world he had not seen.
“So I was writing it obviously for a luxurious mansion somewhere in the Brighton Beach or Sheepshead Bay area, so I’m sitting in my apartment in West Hollywood, I typed in ‘best and biggest mansion in Brighton Beach’ and this one popped up,” said Baker.
When location manager Ross Brodar started to research the house Baker found online, he discovered it had actually been designed for a Russian oligarch, who at one point lived there, but sold it to a local Russian American who grew up in the neighborhood.
“[The owner] was so gracious and very enthusiastic about us shooting at his wonderful home,” said Baker of the owner. “Obviously I wrote it for a mansion, but getting into that space and seeing it, ‘Oh my gosh, I have so much to work with in here and play with here.’”
Production designer Stephen Phelps was nervous when he first saw pictures of the space. “It was a little intimidating at first, because we had limited means and we had this big house,” he said. Phelps simply didn’t have the budget to set dress such wide open and vast spaces, but as he examined the home more closely, he discovered, “it was a Russian family who [live there] and it had their sense of decor that kind of fit along with what made sense for the movie.”
“Then when we got there, it was very lived-in,” said Phelps. “I had to bring in like probably 20 percent of [the set dressing], but then it was mostly swapping rooms,” as the production designer would create his own living room, bedrooms, by moving around and repurposing the family’s furniture for what made sense for the movie. He would also remove several chairs and tables, “it was clearing it so [the camera] could actually see the architecture of the space.” And, of course, Phelps’ team would need props and set dressing they could destroy during the big stand-off between Ani and her captors.
The Windows
The wrap-around floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Mill Basin brought a great deal to the film. The view overlooked the surrounding area, supplying a backdrop that is distinct to the far end of Brooklyn neighborhoods.
“You can see the cars on the BQE and you feel — even though it doesn’t feel like the New York we see a lot — it still feels like New York,” said Baker. “I could have shot so much more, I actually undershot that house. I wish I could have done that house even more justice.”
For the low-budget film, the mansion itself would have do heavy lifting of capturing the extreme wealth of Ivan’s family. But even the biggest homes, unlike sets, are designed to be experienced, not photographed, and so many movies and TV shows often struggle to capture the awe-inspiring grandeur of eight-and-nine figure residences on the screen.
“The views could be great, the beach house itself could be great, but as soon as the film crew gets there and you put a camera lens on it everything starts to feel really small. It is difficult to make those kind of places impressive in the way you want,” said Phelps, who went on to explain why the “Anora” house, with its wraparound windows, was such a notable exception. “It really helps to have that big open space, letting the floor reflections shine and having the big windows to feel that space on screen.”
For the audience, through the widescreen (2:40: 1 aspect ratio), that combination of the windows, view, and wide open space bowls the viewer over — like Ani, we have never seen anything like this before. Phelps told IndieWire that with the awe the mansion supplies as a base, he could imply the oligarch’s wealth in smaller ways that were more in line with the film’s budget.
The enormous windows also helped Baker, Phelps, and cinematographer Drew Daniels maintain the film’s distinct texture and mood. Although “Anora” is a colorful film, its pops of color, especially red, like Ani’s scarf, are set against a gray, wintery world of New York — it was a contrast that Baker said was instrinic to how he emotionally envisioned Ani’s world. And in that sense, the enormous windows were a gift in how it allowed that gray winter backdrop to exist in the film’s main interior. The shot of Ani against the snowy night her last night in the mansion is one of the film’s most poetic and indelible.
The windows though were also a constant variable — it wasn’t always gray winter skies outside — that created headaches for such an ambitious film that only had 37 days to shoot. There was no way to always predict the changing weather outside, nor block out the light from windows which are in the background of a majority of the shots.
“Drew Daniels is amazing, and our wonderful gaffer Chris Hill, they really had a lot to deal with,” said Baker. “The way that the mansion is designed is essentially one side of [it] is all glass looking out onto the water. There would be weather changes. Sometimes the clouds would part and sun would come out suddenly, ‘We’re like, no, we want this all to be gray, so what are we going to do?’ But then we played with that. We allowed those moments, because those guys are just incredible craftsmen. They would be able to time certain sections to allow for flares and to allow for moments that would pop where suddenly [it] would become sunny. It’s very subtle, there’s subtle changes that I think work in the tone of the scene.”
For the 25-minute setpiece between Ani and her captors, Daniels and Hill helped create a schedule in which the scene would be shot in pieces over the course of eight days and supplied the production the best chance at consistent sunlight from the windows.
“Those big windows get dirty extremely fast,” said Phelps. “We had a small crew, so I was one of the guys cleaning those windows every day. I ended up not having a long enough squeegee, so I ended up duct-taping it to a broom handle. Those windows were a whole thing to tackle.”
The image of a production designer of a leading Oscar candidate cleaning windows with a squeegee duct-taped to a broom in some ways captures the essence of Baker’s “Anora,” a small film that found a way to capture the big world of extreme wealth through the emotional lens of a young neighborhood woman with big dreams.
