Sean Baker
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IFP Week: Sean Baker and the Safdie Brothers on How To Film Inside Working Businesses
If you’re a filmmaker, it may seem like the city is your playground. It’s not. Everything costs money. Every public space you want to shoot in requires permits and insurance. It all requires planning, hard work, negotiations, or simply lots of pleading. One issue that’s cropped up in multiple talks during IFP Week has been this: What do you do when you want to shoot in a place of business? How do you get a bodega owner or a restauranteur or the owners of a giant mall in Flushing to let you run around with cast and crew, even though […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 20, 2017 -
“I Don’t Want To Kill a Medium”: Director Sean Baker Talks The Florida Project and iPhones at IFP Week
Sean Baker is amazed some people still think he’s a new filmmaker. That implies that he’s young. On the contrary. “I’m old,” Baker remarked during his talk at IFP Week 2017. (Or at least he’s 46.) Back in 2015, Tangerine put him on the map. And it was shot on an iPhone 5S, which made him seem like some millennial who’d never even heard of a Bolex. As it happens, Tangerine was his fifth film. The others weren’t obscure; Four Letter Words, Take Out, Prince of Broadway and Starlet were all acclaimed. (He also spent years as the co-creator of […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 19, 2017 -
It’s a Small World: Sean Baker on The Florida Project, Shooting 35mm and Going Union
I experience a bit of a disconnect when setting up my interview with Sean Baker about his indelible new feature about childhood, The Florida Project. The publicist tells me to meet Baker at the storied Stonewall Inn, where, before me, Baker will be doing an interview about the iPhone. It takes me a second to piece that together, but then I get it — Baker’s last film, Tangerine, starred trans actors and was shot on the iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this September. Baker, I guess correctly, is being interviewed for some tech website’s history of the transformative tech […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #3: Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc; The Florida Project; Good Time
Cannes, like virtually every other major international film festival showcasing feature-length filmmaking, is largely devoted to cinema that participates in a primarily theatrical mode — dialogue- and performance-driven works that feature subjects with whom we are meant to empathize to some degree. This is an expectation, fused into the medium’s DNA when it was still young, that is embedded in the layout of the festival itself; it’s the world’s largest film market (and therefore tilts mainstream, toward things that can make money), and the prizes it offers — honouring exemplary screenwriting and thespian turns rather than, for example, montage, photography, […]
by Blake Williams on May 26, 2017 -
Watch: The Radical Beauty of Tangerine
When Tangerine was released in 2015, much of the press attention focused on the fact that it was shot entirely on an iPhone 5s. Though that technical feat is impressive, the raw beauty of the film is equally striking. Set on Christmas Eve, Tangerine follows transgender sex workers and best friends Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) on an odyssey through various Los Angeles subcultures. At Fandor Keyframe, a new video essay (above) by LJ Frezza examines the film’s unique aesthetic and how director Sean Baker and DP Radium Cheung found beauty from a position of marginalization.
by Paula Bernstein on Jun 14, 2016 -
“We Didn’t Fictionalize Much”: Sean Baker on Tangerine
Shot on three iPhones 5s’s with a pair of unknown actresses as leads, Sean Baker’s Tangerine was a hazardous proposition, but the finished product justifies every ounce of risk involved in the production, showing just how far the crew could stretch a minuscule budget. Shot on and around real Los Angeles streets and shops, the film keeps pace with transgender sex workers Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) as they zigzag around the city on Christmas Eve on dual missions. Sin-Dee’s embarking on a “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” revenge mission against her two-timing boyfriend […]
by Alice Stoehr on Jul 8, 2015 -
Chronicle of a Dream Foretold: BAMcinemaFest 2015
“Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy,” comments one of the tenuously overlapping characters in Richard Linklater’s 1991 game-changer Slacker. The word itself, fairly recent at the time of production, is a moniker the speaker fully embraces. The branding may sound tactless, if not downright pejorative, but it’s not at all: It implies enough empathy and humanity to seek out options to offset destructive disinterest in matters tangible, ethical, or both. In the creative sphere, the shift in course can lead to an untried M.O. and the models it might generate — if the stars are properly aligned, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 16, 2015 -
Red Band Trailer Watch: Sean Baker’s Tangerine
Sean Baker’s Tangerine went into Sundance with two secrets of sorts kept firmly under wraps. Festival materials noticeably left off that the film starred two transgender actresses and — the eventually headline grabbing news — that it was shot on an iPhone 5S. The first red band trailer gives you a square look at both starring components, as the added graphics and musical effects play its kitschy style to the hilt. An episodic comedy about a jilted prostitute on the hunt for her pimp, Tangerine is set for release by Magnolia on July 10.
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 30, 2015 -
Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
“I Don’t Particularly Like Networking…. I Just Care About Making Good Films”: Shih-Ching Tsou on Producing
I’m walking up the ballroom steps of Berlin’s Ritz Carlton on the third night of the Berlinale. Around the circular balcony are crowds of men, drinks in one hand, cigarettes in the other. Between sips and drags they survey the arriving guests. The scene is worth checking out — it’s a mix of German film celebrities, socialites and a smattering of film industry who are seduced less by the scene than by the promise of free food. But the sustenance provided during the first two hours is limited to frosted flutes of vodka and second-hand smoke. Feeling starved throughout a […]
by Taylor Hess on Feb 10, 2015
