Yesean Baker is an avid researcher who immerses himself in the context of whatever he is making a film about. Yes, he knows what it's like. “People online say, 'Oh, Sean is a horn!' That's why he makes those movies.'” He gives one of his brief, happy facial smiles, his eyes disappear briefly and his entire face appears to be smiling. At 53 years old, he seems to have fallen into the fountain of youth. His boyish hairstyle and unkempt hair give him Richie Cunningham health, which is a fun contrast to the themes of his films.
Her beautiful fourth feature, Starlet, is a buddy movie about a young porn star and a feisty old widow. His fifth film, the wild hit Tanker, shot on a $100,000 budget using three iPhones, is set among transgender sex workers on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Red Rocket is worried about another porn star, this time old and disreputable, who is trying to get his teenage girlfriend into the same business.
Baker's latest film, Anora, is an acclaimed, high-energy tragic comedy about an Uzbek-American laptop, starring Oscar winner Mikey Madison, who laments his quick marriage to his 21-year-old son. Russian oligarchy. The director is still stunned. Añora won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival. “I thought about making a crazy exploitation movie,” he says, his face scrunched up again.
If the idea of a U-rated kid in an “It was always a 'welcome to the jungle' moment,” he gasps. “We'll come out of the Lincoln Tunnel and it'll take you to 42nd Street. It was the heyday of grindhouses and porn theaters. There will be 'Marilyn Chambers XXX' everywhere. He reflects on his youth as passengers watch from the window: “'W.Hello! What is happening?'That thing was with me.
Those who shout “horndog” may have a meaning. “There was “A certain amount of research on anora,” Baker says, knowing it's not just a figure of speech. While preparing to write the film, she often went to clubs where Anora (or Ani, as she likes to be called) could work. It wasn't a solo endeavor: Madison had been cast even before the script was written, in which she played a member of the Manson Family in the grotesque climax of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Baker's wife and producer, Samantha Kwan, and one or two other crew members also attended the clubs. But still.
“We attended lapdance,” he says jokingly. “Are was do This is a really embarrassing thing, it really curbs your enthusiasm. I'm trying to do an interview with a lap dancer and it's so ridiculous. Halfway through the dance, I thought, 'Well, what would a guy normally do right now?' It would absolutely kill the vibe. The dancers were having a great time.
Some of them had experiences that were no different than what they thought Ani would be like in the movie. “There was a sad and sobering moment when a woman said, 'This happened to me.' I don't know if it was an oligarch, but she married into a rich family and was rejected. This moved her to tears.”
Like Tom Cruise's 1983 comedy about a young mover in Risky Business, the film addresses a typically antiseptic Hollywood view of sex work by showing Ani's young husband sliding across the floor of their mansion in his socks. Night inside a brothel. But Baker believes the beautiful woman paradigm still persists: “Many dancers say, 'If I marry a rich businessman, I won't have to do this anymore.'” It's no different from playing the lottery. he? “Of course. You get it in every job and in every walk of life. 'One day…'” Will he win the Palme d'Or? “Exactly!”
How can a woman like Ani find satisfaction? “It would be a step toward getting the respect she deserves from someone who actually sees her and listens to her,” Baker reflects. “One of the reasons I made this film was because I realized that our Cinderella stories have changed in the last 10 years. Now it's about wealth and fame. When I was a kid, the American dream was a house in the suburbs, hoping to earn enough to put your kids through college. It was too much. That has changed and the film comments on it.
It's easy to imagine a worse version of the film in which Ani's Russian in-laws don't try to annul the marriage, but instead kill her and dump her body in the Hudson. But what's striking about Baker's films is that, despite his characters' poverty, crime, desperation, and drug use, they are mostly non-threatening. Anora may owe a lot to Jonathan Demme's eccentric 1986 thriller Something Wild, but it's nothing like the terrifying sociopath played by Ray Liotta in that film. Maybe there's an inherent sweetness to Baker's perspective that prevents him from facing that kind of threat? “It's funny because I watch very serious films and I'm friends with people like Kaspar Nosz,” he says, mentioning the name of the forceful director. “But you're right. I've never been there. “I don't know why,” he said.
Even guns are notable by their absence: Baker's 2004 film Take Out, about a Chinese immigrant who works as a delivery driver, is the only gun in his footage. Fifteen years ago, Baker and actress Karen Karakulian, who has appeared in all of his films, began talking about becoming Anora. From the beginning they set themselves the challenge of creating a gangster story set in the Russian-American community of Brighton Beach (also known as Little Odessa), without showing a gun. “'Is this even possible?' We were wondering,” Anora demonstrates.
Guns and menace aren't the only thing missing from Baker's films. Aside from Willem Dafoe, who won an Oscar in 2017 for playing a kindly motel manager, the Florida project's backer has avoided stars, perhaps fearing they would destroy the relaxed methods essential to his work: elaborate improvisations, minute rewrites , scenes where the cast mingle with unsuspecting members.
“I have many friends in the industry who have had dream experiences working with great Hollywood actors,” he says. “I don't know how they spend their day. I'll throw in the towel. I would love to work with Jennifer Lawrence or Leonardo DiCaprio for a while. I hear they are great! But you don't know. It can really derail a movie.
Your overactive process and tendency to blur the line between life and work is also not in tune with the A-list. But will it affect you personally? “Well, yeah,” he says, smiling slightly for the first time. “There is a responsibility you can take when you use real people who may be struggling. At times I have adopted a kind of guardianship position with my actors. I couldn't do it any other way. And I'm impressed… He narrowed his eyes. “The word is not 'dark.' But let's say “alternative” lifestyles. I find it a little deeper on a personal level. I have had addiction problems my entire life.
Baker talks about his heroin addiction when he was 20 years old. “I would never use opiates again because it would be suicidal,” he says. “But I found myself in places I never thought I would be when I was in my 40s and 50s. Sometimes I think: 'Why am I partying like this?' If I'm not interested in covering it in a movie because I've been in a world, I can't be. Or for some reason I find it romantic.
Will he be able to keep his distance in those moments? “The distance is there, yes, because I am at an observation level. but me the morning participatory.” He replies: “Then I guess not until now. It can be scary, I have to take care of myself.
While the film industry can be a dangerous place for anyone with that appetite, Baker says he doesn't enjoy that side of Hollywood. “It seems a lot cleaner these days. But I'm so indie that I'm outside of all that. Many of my colleagues (and I don't blame them) are very honest. Comic book nerds make a lot of movies!
I ask him if he's clean now and he looks away. The smile is back, but now it's more pathetic than carefree. “Um, I don't,” he finally says. “No, I'm not. I was clean for seven years, then I realized my drug of choice was opiates, so I started agreeing to do other things. It will come and go. There appears to be a basic weed-based diet that is more or less standardized in the United States. But there are always other party items to consume. And I'll leave it at that.
He says it without getting defensive, but rather in a sweet, conscientious tone, like putting a fragile object out of harm's way or turning his U-rated face away from an X-rated world.
