Sean Baker on Anora and the everyday labour of sex work

Sean Baker’s films have consistently explored the lives of those on the margins, particularly sex workers, as in Tangerine (2015), Red Rocket (2021) and Starlet (2012). In that sense, they are films about labour; the labour of performance, calling to the various power dynamics at the heart of these interactions.

Baker’s films are characterised by strong, wily, complex characters who jump in and out of simulacrum with ease, whose relationships with others are both transactional and familial, breaking down expected binaries to complicate the nature of sex work, and his latest film is no exception. In Anora, his Cannes Palme d’Or-winner, Baker follows the eponymous protagonist – she prefers to go by Ani – a stripper and sex worker who works long nights, gyrating against a lineup of men to Take That’s Greatest Day in the very first shot. Afterwards, she stalks the club, flirting her way along looking for a new client, a master at hustling the men she meets to ATMs with a flirty grin. Ani is electric – her draaawling Brooklyn accent, vape in hand, glitter strands in her hair – and she knows how to create the illusion of intimacy for the men who crave it.

Unexpectedly, she falls for a client, the son of a Russian oligarch, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) who endearingly sock slides around his mansion, who fucks quickly like an overeager teenager. Soon, he is proclaiming his love for Ani and they end up getting married in Vegas. But rather than a rags-to-riches fantasy, Baker is quick to subvert our expectations of a blissful rom-com happy ending, as the second half of the film shifts into a chaotic, NYC car-chase around the city for a not-so-happy Cinderella story. As Ivan has escaped from his fixers-cum-babysitters Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tavmasyan) and the charming, quiet Igor (Yura Borisov), Ani joins them on their hunt around the Eastern European and Russian locales of New York’s Brighton Beach.

Gritty, funny, spectacular, heart-wrenching and messy – one thing is for sure, Baker has created the next big New York film, and Mikey Madison is the infallible shining star. Read our interview with him below.

In your films, you frequently work with people who are a part of a community whose story you’re telling. Why did you want to set the story in Brighton Beach around the Eastern European and Russian diaspora?

Sean Baker: It goes back to Karren Karagulian, who played Toros in the film. He’s Armenian-American, and he came to the US when he was 20 years old, and met his wife Lana, who is Russian-American – she plays his wife in Anora, too – and we’ve always talked about exploring a way to film in Brighton Beach.

It’s a culturally rich locale and it hasn’t changed much in years, especially Coney Island, which has remained the same with all the same rides. When the opportunity came up to do this film, I knew he had to be Toros. He has been in all my films, he’s my good luck charm in a way. He was even in Red Rocket as the man on the phone.

Karren is a good friend, and he has taken risks for my film – in Tangerine, he played a queer role, which is still stigmatised in Armenia, so it was brave of him to take on the role. I wanted to keep working together, especially in Hollywood which doesn’t create characters for actors like Karren.

Mikey Madison is incredible in this film. Can you tell me about working together to create this central heroine who we all gravitate towards and root for?

Sean Baker: After seeing Mikey in Scream, I immediately told my wife and producer Sammy: ‘We’re going to call her agent after this screening.’ I wrote the script with Mikey in mind, Mikey was so dedicated to learning everything she could about sex work. Both of us worked with writer and performer Andrea Werhun who wrote her sex-work memoir Modern Whore. Mikey spoke to her extensively to prepare for the role.

She also spent time at the club, she shadowed the dancers, and she really worked her butt off. She took months of pole-dancing lessons. And, as you know, she’s only on the pole for like 20 seconds of the film, but I think it obviously did so much in terms of her confidence in performing. She even co-choreographed the dance in the film, where she is dancing in front of Ivan on the rug.

Beyond that, she learnt pages and pages of Russian dialect, while working with a dialect coach for her Brooklyn accent. Mikey’s attention to detail really made her character a true hero, she didn’t leave a single stone unturned.

Speaking of performances, I’m really interested in this semi-documentary method you used in the film, of giving the actors hidden microphones in public locations to improvise and perform. Please could you tell me a bit more about that method?

Sean Baker: I love shooting on location because it takes the audience into a place that they can tell is real. Even the layman audiences will know that isn’t an actor.

Mikey’s research really informed her improv because she learned so much from just spending so much time at that club getting to know the dancers. Before she meets Ivan at the club, I wanted to set up the mechanics of Ani’s world, to show the labour of their work, and to shoot a night in her life in a docu-mode. We had the club up and running – one of the producers was actually DJing. We gave Mikey a wireless mic and earpiece, and followed her with a telephoto lens, [Robert] Altman-style. We’d watch her go from client to client, where I’d say, ‘Next’ and she would move on to the next man. I relied on her improv for those scenes. These women will approach a man and within a few seconds, they have to read that person and figure out ‘How am I going to hustle this?’. Mikey understood it so well. She brought that dialogue, and in a way, she was helping me write that beginning through her improvisation. 

For the Brighton Beach sequences, we brought the actors into restaurants, into billiard halls in which they interacted with the community. Vache, who plays Garnick is actually Armenia’s number-one comedian. It’s also fun to switch up the visual style – I was experimenting with a lot of different styles. We would go from something quite controlled and calculated, with a steady cam, or dolly-moves to suddenly candid camera, sending our actors in with wireless mics, or shooting from the sidewalk to see what happens. I love doing that kind of thing – no matter how stylised or how controlled my films are, I still want an element of docu-drama.

I was interested in following just one woman’s journey, not attempting to represent every woman – Sean Baker

I really like what you say about like it being a labour film, because I can’t help I notice the camera always panning away from Ani to the cleaners, the service workers, the fact that Ivan’s friends are working in the service industry.

Sean Baker: I love that you bring that up because not many people see that form of labour. That was a real intention to be intercutting Ani’s work with other people’s work and showing that there are more similarities than differences with sex work and other forms of labour, which all can all sometimes feel menial.

Working Girls by Lizzie Borden is a great example of that.

Sean Baker: Lizzie saw the film and really liked it. I was really inspired by her films. She is one of the first filmmakers to shine a different light on sex work as a form of labour. 

Speaking of tonal shifts, the film shifts across multiple genres too. One second, we are with Ani on such a high in Vegas, with this rapid, blissful montage. Next, we are in a home invasion sequence where everything crashes around the mansion for almost 30 minutes. Can you talk about this structural choice?

Sean Baker: I just wanted to pull the rug out from under the expected genre film. I was basically presenting the audience with Hollywood’s version of the story for the first hour and that came along with a pop song which bookended the first hour with all the tropes of a romcom. I was very aware that once I got that out of the way, I could go and start almost an entirely new movie. And that would be jarring for an audience, but in a good way.

The home invasion is the beginning of part two. Can you tell us a bit about filming that sequence, which lasts around 28 minutes?

Sean Baker: We filmed it for eight days. We couldn’t have one single continuity error as it takes place in real time. My coverage had to be more extensive, more calculated and the flow had to work. We were shooting in order, in real-time so everything had to be planned. Some day, I would walk into the mansion and be like, ‘Guys, I need 16 more minutes to rewrite this moment.’ You would see the fear on everyone’s faces, but I thought it was necessary, especially with such a tightly timed sequence, I was almost workshopping as we were shooting. On top of that, Mikey is doing her own stunts, so it was all very exciting.

You mentioned that Anora draws from Nights of Cabiria by Fellini. What inspired you from that film particularly? And what were your other influences?

Sean Baker: It’s one of the earliest examples of a truly empathetic approach to sex work, following one singular heroine, Giulietta Masina who is spectacular. She’s in almost every shot of that film, just like Mikey is in almost every shot of Anora. I was interested in following just one woman’s journey, not attempting to represent every woman.

A lot of my influences have to do with style. I’m gesturing towards films like French Connection and stylistically, even Godard’s Contempt. In hindsight, I realised everybody’s pointing out the Pretty Woman similarities and, of course, that’s true, but it wasn’t on my mind while I was writing. Somebody brought it up during our first week of production. Then, I started reflecting on the influence of 1980s films on Anora, as that’s the decade I grew up in, and I realized there’s a lot in there. There’s traces of Coming to America, Something Wild, Into the Night... the list goes on.

Anora is out in UK cinemas from November 1.