Sean Baker
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Swept Off Her Feet: Sean Baker on Anora
“Tonight, this could be the greatest night of our lives/let’s make a new start/The future is ours to find.” The lyrics of Take That’s 2008 hit “Greatest Day” burst from the soundtrack at the start of Sean Baker’s exhilarating, Palme d’Or–winning eighth feature, Anora. Drew Daniels’ camera tracks across a row of strippers and customers at a Manhattan club before cutting to handheld shots in which one dancer, Anora, or Ani (Mikey Madison), moves from guy to guy, hustling time in the VIP room. (“You don’t have cash? Let’s go to the ATM!”) For the guys, their stacks of twenties […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 18, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: Awards, Anora, Emilia Pérez, The Substance, The Seed of the Sacred Fig
In my awards-wrap piece for last year’s Cannes, I complimented jury president Ruben Östlund and his deliberators on a deliberation well done. They chose to award mostly the films Vadim Rizov and I had already covered in prior dispatches, granting me the freedom to go longer on my thoughts about The State of the Festival, as well as highlights from the Quinzaine des cinéastes sidebar (a.k.a. The Directors’ Fortnight), which had just finished unveiling new artistic director Julien Rejl’s inaugural edition. No such luck this year—not because Greta Gerwig gave ungreat prizes (au contraire, her jury’s picks were about as […]
by Blake Williams on May 30, 2024 -
Watch: Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or Acceptance Speech for Anora
American independent filmmaker Sean Baker was, for us at Filmmaker, the thrilling winner of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or for his forthcoming NEON release, Anora, a comedy about a sex worker, played by Mickey Madison, and her relationship with a Russian oligarch’s son. “This literally has been my singular goal as a filmmaker for the past 30 years,” Baker said on accepting the award from the Greta Gerwig-led jury, “so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. But I do know that I will continue to fight for cinema because right […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s Take Out
Sean Baker’s debut feature was 2000’s Four Letter Words, but it was his second (following his work on TV’s Greg the Bunny), Take Out, directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, that is the most clear antecedent to the neorealist-inflected work he practices today. When I interviewed Baker in 2012 about his Starlet, we began with his origin story, which included this section on Take Out: I was a bit discouraged. I was seeing these filmmakers I’d gone to school with — Todd Phillips, Marc Forster — start to make waves. Their careers were taking off. I wanted to get back to my […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 31, 2022 -
23 Days, Ten Crew Members, Two Lenses and One Joker: DP Drew Daniels on Red Rocket
“I really love to embrace limitations,” says cinematographer Drew Daniels. “I try to limit some of my choices on any film I do.” With Red Rocket, the opportunities to welcome constraints were plentiful. The latest from Tangerine and The Florida Project filmmaker Sean Baker, Red Rocket was shot in 23 days entirely on practical Texas locations with a supporting cast largely populated by local first-time actors. The crew boasted 10 members, including producers doing double duty as assistant directors or costume designers. The grip/electric department was a literal one man band, armed with Digital Sputniks, a few Astera tubes and […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Mar 15, 2022 -
Red Rocket, The Bad News Bears in Basic Training and Claude Chabrol: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
My first recommendations this week are two Blu-rays that are worth picking up not just because they’re terrific movies, but because they come with superb audio commentaries packed with useful information. They’re both comedies, though the first, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, leaves a bit of a rough aftertaste thanks to the sly way in which Simon Rex’s revelatory performance sneaks up on the viewer. His recent Independent Spirit Award win was well-deserved, as I can’t think of many actors who could have so skillfully walked the line between playfulness and predation; as fading porn star Mikey, Rex beautifully projects an […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 11, 2022 -
“Embracing the Male Gaze”: Sean Baker on Red Rocket
Red Rocket throws a curveball to viewers who think they know what to expect from a Sean Baker movie. There are surface commonalities connecting it to his previous works—docu-realistic stylings, detailed worldbuilding and the centering of marginalized communities. Yet, unlike his last three pictures Starlet, The Florida Project and Tangerine—which marinated in the humanity of, respectively, a young female porn star, transgender sex workers and a family living with invisible homelessness—the man under the magnifying-glass this time is an increasingly disturbing presence. Washed-up adult movie star Mikey Saber (played with real verve by Simon Rex) is selfish to the point of […]
by Sophie Monks Kaufman on Dec 9, 2021 -
Watch: Sean Baker’s Short Film for Khaite’s Fall ’21 Collection
Inspired, he says, by Walter Hill and, as obvious from the title treatment, The Warriors title designer Dan Perri, Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) has directed a blast of a fashion short for Khaite, a girl-gang fantasia evoking the cinema as well as streets of ’70s and ’80s New York. Shot by Sean Price Williams, the short compresses the attitude, abandon and confrontations of some imagined and long-lost work of downtown cinema (you’ll pull your own set of references — mine included Ms. 45, Liquid Sky, Paris is Burning and Wild Style) into a brisk four-minutes scored to Ace Frehley’s New […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2021 -
The Future of iPhone Filmmaking with FiLMiC Creator Neill Barham
Since Sean Baker’s Tangerine hit the scene as the first feature film shot on iPhone, more filmmakers have embraced mobile production as a viable filmmaking tool. Steven Soderbergh shot Unsane and High Flying Bird on an iPhone 8. Claude Lelouch shot over 30% of his latest film, The Best Years of a Life, on an iPhone and loved the experience so much that his next film (not yet released) was shot entirely on an iPhone. Behind all these iPhone-lensed features there has always been one go-to app: FiLMiC Pro. FiLMiC Pro unlocks professional-level control over the phone’s camera, including exposure, […]
by Joey Daoud on Oct 9, 2019 -
On Decks: The Art (and Necessity) of the Independent Film Lookbook
Lookbooks are an increasingly vital part of the filmmaking process. A good lookbook can make a pitch, just as a bad one can dissuade an investor, producer or financier from a project. Yet the creation of lookbooks is rarely discussed. The topic is missing from the many labs and tutorial programs set up to help first-time filmmakers—even though a good lookbook is perhaps the quickest way for a project to stand out. Simply put, refined visual knowledge and the skillful conveying of that knowledge is power for a director. When we interviewed Reed Morano last year about her work on […]
by Meredith Alloway on Mar 14, 2019
