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Internal Lives: Annie Baker on Janet Planet
Sophie Okonedo and Julianne Nicholson in Janet Planet For a playwright, making their feature directorial debut comes with a certain degree of anticipatory hype, and the results are evaluated with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they aren’t too “wordy” or “stagey.” As with David Mamet’s House of Games, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano or Celine Song’s Past Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s Janet Planet should put any fears to rest as to how the director would take to creating specifically for the screen. Not that there should have been any doubt: Her interests have long been steeped in the moving image. At 13, she attended the Academy of Music in her native Massachusetts to see Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, then spent her days as an NYU undergraduate patronizing Film Forum and discovering Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer at her job at St. Mark’s Bookshop. Baker’s most lauded play, The Flick, was set inside a dying western Massachusetts movie theater in possession of one of the last 35mm projectors in that state.
Set over the summer of 1991, Janet Planet opens with 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) at an overnight summer camp, desperate to come home. Baldly threatening suicide in a phone call to her single mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) while fibbing to her fellow campers about why she has to leave, Lacy might appear antisocial at the outset, but in the way she asks questions about the “larger things in life,” she proves to be curious and quietly wise beyond her years. That her deep bond with her mother might prove concerning as the pre-teen gets older is an observation gently made by both Janet and the viewer, but thankfully Baker’s screenplay never uses their co-dependency for cheap dramatic artifice. Nicholson, who grew up in nearby suburban Medford, Massachusetts, crafts a portrait of a caring mother who’s committed to being her daughter’s guardian while making sure that Lacy will grow to accept and adapt to the world she’s been brought into. Even as several men and old friends—played by, in order of appearance, Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo and Elias Koteas—enter into the family’s life, the film’s honest, detailed gaze remains fixated on its two central soulmates, who just happen to be related to each other.
A few weeks before the theatrical release of Janet Planet, which screened at the Telluride and New York Film Festivals last fall, I spoke with Baker about the transition from playwriting to filmmaking, how she cast the role of Lacy, revisiting locations from her childhood and much more. Janet Planet is in theaters now via A24.
Filmmaker: You had some experience in screenwriting before Janet Planet, right? I believe it was through writing gigs for-hire that you qualified for health insurance.
Baker: Yeah, I’ve written a lot of screenplays for-hire and even tried to write one for myself to direct, years earlier, but it ultimately ended up not being something I wanted to direct. But Janet Planet was definitely my experiment in writing a screenplay for myself. No one hired me to write it, and that was very important. It was a very private writing experience and an experiment in writing something in my own aesthetic as opposed to someone else’s.
Filmmaker: When the production was greenlit, what was your experience like of assembling a team?
Baker: I was doing it all for the first time. In the theater, I work almost entirely with people I know and have already worked with many times over. With this film, it was an interesting experience to have to interview people and hire everyone, from the producers to the department heads. Every position had a whole process behind it, and that [experience] will never happen again. A lot of people who worked on Janet Planet I’d want to work with again and again, but to start from scratch was a hard but fascinating experience. I know everybody in theater so intimately, and I feel really lucky with this film, as it took a really long time. I found really great people, particularly my department heads, including my editor, Lucian Johnston; my director of photography, Maria von Hausswolff; my production designer, Teresa Mastropierro; my costume designer, Lizzie Donelan. Those were really stimulating collaborations for me, and I feel lucky to have found them.
Filmmaker: While in pre-production (or perhaps even earlier, while writing the screenplay), were you doing extensive location scouting? Given your personal familiarity with the area, maybe some of the locations you settled on were obvious to you at the outset.
Baker: Totally. I wrote a lot of the movie while staying in Ashfield, Massachusetts, during the summer of 2020, Then, the following year, I would drive up to Massachusetts at least once a month by myself to take pictures and go back to these old locations. I snuck onto the grounds of my old summer camp in the off season and timed how long it would take for me to walk down a hill, etc. It was actually all quite naïve because I didn’t understand how complicated location management is, but I really lucked out with my incredible location manager, Meredith Crowley. A lot of these locations were in Amherst and the surrounding area and were really hard and complicated to get. I don’t mean that they were expensive to get, but that it was hard to track down a person in a rural area to ask [for permission to use the site]. It felt like the movie was dependent on these specific locations, so I spent a lot of time up there retreading old ground and taking a ton of pictures.
I knew very early on that I had to find the right house [where Janet and Lacy live]. In 2021 or maybe even 2020, I joined nextdoor.com and started posting constantly, looking for houses. I’d also drive up to visit people and take pictures and see if I could find the right house. It was actually through nextdoor.com that I found the house we ended up using in the movie. I fell in love with it. It was sort of like meeting the right actor for a part—once I’d been inside, I couldn’t picture the movie in any other house. And there were so many problems with it on a logistical and technical level! Most of the windows don’t open all the way; you couldn’t fit in air conditioners. A lot of the rooms were round or slanted; most of the bedroom [doors] were locked; there were a lot of bugs everywhere. It was just a very tricky location, but it was so clear to me, once I’d been in there, that the film had to take place within that house, and I was very grateful to my producers and location manager for making it work. It wasn’t an easy shoot at that house, with no air conditioning during a heatwave in Massachusetts [laughs], but they were troopers about it.
Filmmaker: I’m now reminded of the recurring presence of the oscillating fans in the film.
Baker: [laughs] Yes, those very slow, semi-useless oscillating fans.
Filmmaker: I believe you found Zoe very late in the casting process. What were you looking for in casting for the role, and how did Zoe fit that description?
Baker: I was looking for someone who had a very palpable internal life, who wasn’t trying to please me or anyone around her, who resisted sentimentality. Those were the essentials I was looking for, and those are very hard to find in an 11-year-old girl. If I had auditioned for a movie at that age, I would have tried desperately to make everybody like me and wouldn’t have had that kind of access to my interior, especially with a camera pointed at me. It’s a really special skill that Zoe had immediately. She has a kind of privacy that’s really interesting when you can tell she’s thinking many, many thoughts and has a real searching intelligence, but you don’t know exactly what she’s thinking about. There’s this real mystery to her. It also never felt like she was trying to be cute, which I think, understandably, is what 99 percent of child actors are trying to and are probably encouraged to be. By “cute,” I don’t mean the way someone looks, obviously, I mean it [as] an affect—“cute” like someone adults would like.
Filmmaker: Did you hold any chemistry reads between her and Julianne?
Baker: Yes, it was important. Julianne doesn’t live in New York, so it was important to me to only have her read with someone if I was serious about casting them. She read with one or two kids total, and Zoe was one of them. I met with Zoe a bunch after her first couple of auditions were on tape—she lives with her family in Delaware—and eventually brought her to New York to work with her some more. I actually filmed her in Prospect Park [in Brooklyn], followed her around with my iPhone and had her say some of the lines from the movie while we were sitting next to a pond. I was amazed how she could sound like a real person talking very casually, in any context, and maintain control over her privacy and interiority in all of these different contexts. When Julianne was in town, they read together. They were a really funny pair, and there was a kind of pain and humor in the way they listened to and talked to each other that I really liked.
Filmmaker: Regarding the casting of the film’s other prominent roles, I know you’ve worked with Will Patton before [in the Signature Theatre’s production of Baker’s play The Antipodes in 2017], but what went into casting Elias [Koteas] and Sophie [Okonedo]? Did you have experience with each of these actors beforehand?
Baker: No, but each of the actors were my first choice for their prospective parts. I’d done a play with Will before and developed a real shorthand between us in the process. Elias and Sophie I didn’t know until I cast them. They’re super different but wonderful, and Sophie, in particular, was such a joy, partly because we’re both such theater people. She’s an endlessly fascinating performer and was up for trying anything. It was really fun throwing ideas around together. Each of the performers understood, on an intuitive level, the humor in my writing, which was nice, as I don’t ever want to try to get someone to be funny. That never works, at least with what I’m going [for]. The humor always needs to seep out by accident, and I felt like all of them had a really good handle on that. We never had to talk about what’s funny and what’s not.
Filmmaker: The film is structured by title cards, chapters even, that mark different characters’ entrance into and exit from the film. What was the reason for wanting to include those?
Baker: For the [structure]. I always knew that the movie would be structured through these three, for lack of a better word, usurpers [the characters Wayne, Regina and Avi] who would enter the household and triangulate this “marriage” between mother and daughter. That was always pretty clear to me from the beginning: The structure would be three people who are somewhat disrupting the status quo.
Filmmaker: Janet is introduced via Lacy’s POV in a dryly humorous, somewhat deadpan shot of mom standing in the distance, ready to pick her daughter up from summer camp. What kinds of conversations did you have with your DP about the look and feel of your shot compositions? Were there certain visual comps you had for what you were hoping to achieve?
Baker: I was really attracted to Maria’s work before I hired her because I felt that there’s simultaneously a formality and a lot of tenderness to it. She can be very formal, but she’s never cold. A lot of our process [consisted of] spending an insane amount of time together and going to the places where we were planning to shoot. She came to Massachusetts the winter before prep started, and we went to every location in midwinter. Then, she came back in the summer, and we continued to spend so much time together and grew very close. We would be lying on a hilltop and taking pictures of each other. In a way, I feel like our comp for this movie was… our friendship [laughs].
We also watched a ton of movies and have very similar tastes. Before we started working together, we obviously talked about Ingmar Bergman and Maurice Pialat and his L’enfance nue, which was a really important reference for Lucian, Maria and myself. Maria and I also talked about Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive a lot and watched several [Apichatpong] Weerasethakul movies. Weerasethakul is my favorite living filmmaker, and it was fun to watch his movies with Maria. I know this is an overused word, but Maria is a really intuitive artist who responds very spontaneously to what’s in front of her. A lot of our [conversations] were just articulating our instincts to each other and finding a way through it. A lot of her movies have been shot in Denmark and Iceland [recent films shot by the cinematographer include Hlynur Pálmason’s A White, White Day and Godland], and I think the lush, green strangeness of western Massachusetts during a heatwave became pretty interesting to her. It was fun negotiating all of that, even though it was very, very hot.
Filmmaker: When you mentioned Weerasethakul, I was reminded of your film’s intricate sound design. If I’m not mistaken, you had someone recording those sounds prior to everyone else arriving in Massachusetts that you would then implement as you saw fit in post?
Baker: Yes, during prep our sound designer, Paul Hsu, first came up to Massachusetts and placed this little microphone in the bushes near the house to record sound 24 hours a day. I didn’t even know you could do this. The microphone ran for two weeks and recorded sound 24 hours a day. There’s stuff we still haven’t listened to! We started shooting in late July, and Paul had recorded two weeks of sound from late June to early July, at this house, in this one year [2022], 24 hours a day. It’s kind of an amazing sound document on its own. At any time, I could just say to Paul, “4:45 p.m., beginning of July” and he would be able to find what it sounded like on one day at the beginning of July at 4:45 p.m. and what it sounded like on another day at 4:45 p.m. There were so many bugs and birds surrounding that house, and that was one of the reasons I wanted the house so badly, as the sounds were intense and almost overwhelming. I knew the movie wasn’t going to have a traditional score, so having all those tapes to work with was really helpful. We tried to be seasonally specific, too; [i.e.,] peepers only come out at certain times of year. We were careful, probably bordering on overzealous, but it was fun working with Paul that way and, I think, important because the animals really are the score of the movie.
Filmmaker: I have to ask about a sequence early in the film, in which Janet and Lacy accompany Wayne to a mall so that he can spend time with Sequoia [Edie Moon Kearns], his daughter, who is roughly Lacy’s age, from a previous marriage, and how you found that early ’90s, period-specific mall. Following your shoot, I believe the mall has since permanently closed?
Baker: Not only that, it has been demolished to the ground! There’s nothing there. That mall was there while I was growing up. Since [the film’s] production budget was for the house, we didn’t really have a budget to secure any other location, so finding a mall was going to be really tricky. We could only shoot for a very, very brief period of time in this mall, like six hours, and there was no budget or time to production design it. We just got lucky that the inside of this mall looked like it’s 1991. I mean, we obviously had to remove some flashing LED screens and an iPhone stand and things like that, but it was pretty minimal. We got in there, grabbed a bunch of stuff, pushed it to the side and started shooting. There’s no VFX in regard to the signage you see; it really is what was there when we arrived.
It was also really important to me to film in a mall that had a fountain, as I wanted the sequence to be as romantic as two people falling in love in Rome, so I was like, “We need a fountain, and it has to be a beautiful fountain.” There used to be so many of those types of malls, but now there are very few malls with working fountains. I was so happy to film that beautiful, crazy fountain in the mall, and now it doesn’t exist anymore! I guess it’s a tribute to this thing that everybody complained about in the ’90s that now seems kind of sweet.
Filmmaker: You mentioned Ingmar Bergman earlier. You’ve previously said that the best film ever made about being a kid is Fanny and Alexander. Reminded of how that movie involves puppetry and theatrical performance, albeit somewhat differently than in Janet Planet, I wanted to ask about the more theatrical aspects of your film. For instance, in one sequence, Janet and Lacy watch an outdoor performance that feels inspired by Bread and Puppet Theater, a radical puppet theater based in Glover, Vermont, which I know was an influence on you.
Baker: I wanted to pay tribute to a certain kind of theater aesthetic I hadn’t seen on screen before. I felt really happy and lucky to be working with those puppets [in the film], and Maria and I both liked shooting them so much that we fantasized about making an entire film with only puppets at some point down the line [laughs]. We worked with this amazing puppeteer who lives in Ashfield, Jeremy Louise Eaton, and they’re all her puppets. [Eaton most recently served as design director of the artist-owned Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield.] She and I were in conversation for over a year before we started shooting, so a lot of care and thought went into that theater performance, only a fraction of which ultimately ended up in the movie. We actually devised and rehearsed quite a long theater performance, but only a small part of it made it [into the film]. It was definitely my favorite day of shooting, though.
I think there’s something so singular about—and this is not just specific to an organization like Bread and Puppet—a kind of rural, back-to-the-land, political theater aesthetic. There are a number of these companies still in existence, and many more that used to be, throughout New England, and artisans at these companies making incredibly beautiful work. It was a joy to be part of it briefly.
Filmmaker: Did the puppetry also inspire the poem Avi reads to Janet on their picnic late in the film, the one that references angels and puppets?
Baker: Yes, from the beginning I knew that poem would be in the movie. It’s the fourth Duino Elegy by [Rainer Maria] Rilke and, to me, that poem captures some kind of ambivalent spirituality of childhood, and the feeling of being watched and being the watcher. That poem speaks to a kind of spiritual confusion I felt as a kid more than any other poem I’ve ever read, and it’s also a poem about the theater, which was really important to me. In many ways, the poem feels like it’s the center of the movie, and it was important that [its inclusion] be a kind of incantation, a kind of spell, in the movie.
Filmmaker: Did you always want to have the reading of the poem be cross-cut with shots of Lacy at home alone? The cross-cutting really emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter.
Baker: We always knew it was going to be symbiotic, yes. Regarding the amount of cross-cutting, we had like 17 million different versions [of that sequence]. There are even versions where certain things happened on screen and certain things happened offscreen, but how much we were going to let “the miraculous” be witnessed on screen and/or happen offscreen was a big question for us in the editing room.
Filmmaker: Without revealing too much, the film closes in a dance hall with an extended shot of Lacy sitting alone by herself on the sidelines. The final shot, framed tightly on Zoe’s face, is one I feel could’ve taken days to get.
Baker: We didn’t have time!
Filmmaker: Not having any time will certainly speed up the process! That intimate moment is a powerful way to end the movie and has such a lasting effect on the viewer, even though I’m sure it was done very quickly.
Baker: Thank you for saying that. There was barely any rehearsal, and it was done very quickly. I just said a lot of things to Zoe to prepare and had her watch [the other performers]. While we were working on it, I realized that she had to be watching people dance; we couldn’t summon that from having her look at a blank wall. We had just finished shooting the contra dance with the dancers themselves and the band but asked a small group of dancers to come back. They were five or six very sweet people who had wrapped for the day, but they came back to dance, silently, in front of Zoe to get her [reaction]. While we were getting the shot, I said a lot of weird stuff to her [laughs]. [Beforehand] I had been putting a lot of darker, sadder thoughts in her head, and those were [turning the scene into] a really bleak moment. But I think the thing I said in that moment that caused Zoe to think whatever thoughts she’s thinking at the end of the movie was to “imagine yourself dancing, just imagine yourself out there, dancing.” I think that melancholy but hopeful imaginative leap behind her eyes is what is happening in the last seconds of the movie.
Filmmaker: Taking the reins as a first-time feature director, did you have the experience of “finding the film” in the edit? Did it change at all from your assembly cut onward?
Baker: Oh yeah, the assembly was about 2:45 [two-hours-and-forty-five minutes]. So, we cut almost an hour off of it. It’s funny because, while the script was 67 pages, the assembly was 2:45. I’ve learned that my screenplays are exactly like my plays in that they’re three minutes a page, not a minute a page. My play The Aliens was only 70 pages, so everybody thought it was going to be a really quick one act, but it’s two-and-a-half hours if you do it right. Theoretically, I was OK with making a two-hour-and-45-minute movie, but that wasn’t actually what it wanted to be. That’s one of the amazing things about the editing process: The movie becomes this strange living organism that is rejecting certain scenes and asking for others. It’s like an animal you have to simultaneously tame and listen to.
One of the things I love about editing is how unpredictable it is. You get a great idea in the middle of the night, implement it the next morning and it’s just terrible. You then get [another] great idea in the middle of the night that you try the next morning, and it fixes a whole crisis. You don’t know until you try it. More than any other thing I’ve ever done, I can’t solve something like that in my head. I’ve staged entire plays in my head, but you can’t cut a movie in your head, or I couldn’t, at least, my first time around.
Filmmaker: Now that the film is out in the world, have you found there to be a difference between sharing a work with an audience in the theater, where it’s more of a live document every single night, as opposed to a film where you’re done with it?
Baker: It is different, but in both cases, by the time the thing is done, I have moved on completely in my life. I’m sort of ruthless with myself. I never reread my plays. I don’t think about them. I don’t want to think about Janet Planet anymore [laughs]. The second I’m done, I have to move on or else my life is unbearable, and I’m always thinking about the next thing. So, I just walk around now thinking about my [upcoming] Queens movie, and that’s what’s alive inside of me now. That’s what holds possibility.
