BTS: Anora

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As the needle drops on Take That’s ‘Greatest Day’ and before the opening credits have unrolled freewheeling sex dramedy Anora deposits the audience in a strip club. It’s one of many semi-improvised sequences in the Cannes Palm D’or winning feature written, directed and edited by Sean Baker who calls his style “guerilla.”

“We're setting up this whole first hour of the film like a Hollywood romantic comedy,” the filmmaker said after a screening at the London Film Festival. “Pretty Woman is a good comparison.”

That would be if Pretty Woman were reworked with Laura San Giacomo’s streetwise hooker rather than Julia Roberts’ Cinderella as the heroine.

Cannes jury president and Barbie director Greta Gerwig wasn’t sure how to classify the film. “There was something about [Anora] that reminded us of the classic structures of Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks,” she said, “and then it did something completely truthful and unexpected.”

Baker himself acknowledges a debt to Frederico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) about a prostitute living in Rome and Gloria (1980) John Cassavetes’ drama about a seemingly meek mobster's girlfriend who takes no prisoners protecting a child from a hit squad.

The origins of Anora lie in Baker’s career-long collaboration with actor Karren Karagulian, who has worked with the filmmaker since his debut feature, Four Letter Words (2000). Karagulian is married to a Russian-American woman from Brooklyn, which gave Baker a starting point.

“I’ve wanted to find a vehicle for Karren Karagulian for a while now,” Baker affirms of the actor who plays Toros in the film. “I knew I wanted to do a story about Russian speaking populations in the Brighton Beach/Coney Island area, being that Karren has ties to the community. We just couldn't figure out what it was and took about 15 years to get here. When I started to explore this idea of a young woman who realises a little too late that she married the wrong man, we applied that to that world.”

That was where Ani – short for Anora – came in. Baker conceived the character as a Russian-American dancer and sex worker from Brighton Beach who impulsively marries the oligarch’s son, Ivan.

Baker cast Mikey Madison after seeing her in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. She’s the Manson acolyte in the final scene who gets torched, screaming, in a swimming pool by Leonardo DiCaprio. “She stole the last 15 minutes of that movie,” he says and wrote Anora with her in mind.

Docu-style improv

For the movie’s first scene, an immersion into a strip club, Baker asked Madison to mingle with Ani’s colleagues and clients in the scene without saying any specific dialogue.

“I shot that in a docu-style way relying on improv from Mikey,” he explained. “I had Robert Altman on my mind. I basically had this live set where we knew everybody in there, but we asked people to speak at regular volume and interact with one another naturally.  My producer, Alex Coco, was DJing and literally blasting music out into the club. That's usually a no, no. You're not supposed to mix live music with your location dialogue recording, but I wanted it to feel real and I wanted to see people bouncing and just for that vibe to be there.

“Mikey wore a wireless mic and we had a telephoto lens and just followed her. I’d say into her earpiece ‘Go to that gentleman over there’. ‘Okay, we got enough, now go to that gentleman over there.’ I was getting gold from Mikey. Each interaction was showing us something slightly different. She basically set the film up by showing us the mechanics of her world.”

The actor herself (also at LFF) says, “The way that Sean writes, there might be a paragraph that says, ‘Ani’s at the club and she walks up to customers.’ And I would then bring that to life. I've never experienced anything like that – a 10-minute-long scene where I’m just going from customer to customer and talking to them in character, and they’re recording me. It's a completely live set and feels absolutely real.”

Audacious set piece

In an audacious centrepiece running in realtime for about 25 minutes, Anora is threatened by a trio of the mobster’s goons attempting to force her to annul the marriage. 

Baker calls it the ‘Home Invasion’ scene and they spent eight days filming it.

“The fight scene is meant to be shockingly funny,” said Baker. “I knew I wanted it to take place in real time in the middle of the film, so the screenplay was structured around that. We were covering every second. It couldn’t be montaged. Every angle was calculated, shot-listed, stunt coordinated.”

The Crawl

The most guerrilla part of the shoot and the least scripted took place in Brighton Beach in a section the filmmakers dubbed ‘The Crawl.’ In it, Anora with henchmen in tow are searching for Ivan among restaurants, a pool hall and video arcade, beachfront and clubs.

The actors wore wireless mics and entered each location interacting with unsuspecting members of the public while a single camera followed them around.

“It was very Candid Camera, but it allowed us to capture the vibrancy of the neighbourhood,” Baker says.

For example, one older woman in a cafe replies to their enquiries, ‘Perhaps he was kidnapped?’ a spontaneous and unscripted line oblivious to being part of a movie.

There was a limit to the improvisation because much of the film is spoken in Armenian and Russian. “This was my dialogue that I’d written in English and then had translated but we couldn't really deviate from that point because I wouldn't know what was going on, plus it would become very complicated in the edit.

“There were a few moments where I would allow our actors to just go to town. The focus of a scene set at a gas station was supposed to be on Mikey and Yura (Borisov) and we would hear the other two guys [Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan] off screen. I just allowed them to go to town and scream at each other. I didn't know what they were saying until I got to the edit.”

Shooting 35mm

Even more remarkably this was all shot on 35mm which required the reels to be changed every ten minutes. Indeed, Baker wanted the pressure on camera team and actors of the finite film time.

“There’s a discipline that happens on set when you tell actors that you’re shooting on film. They know we’ll be calling cut when that ten minutes runs out. Everyone has to deliver in the moment, and there’s only a finite amount of chances to do so.”

Cinematographer Drew Daniels (who shot Baker’s film Red Rocket on 16mm) used ARRI LT 35mm cameras and anamorphic lenses to evoke the cinema of the 1970s.

“Not only the New Hollywood films but also from the Italian, Spanish and Japanese films of the era – in both style and sensibility,” says Baker. “This is the mash-up I found inspirational: A formal aesthetic with choreographed camera moves caught with anamorphic wide-screen images, a deliberate colour scheme and unobtrusive but stylish lighting.”

Preparing for sex scenes

To prepare for her character Madison “took months of pole dancing lessons” according to Baker, for an opening scene that barely lasts a minute, “also just to get that physicality of a dancer.”

“She worked with a dialect coach to get the New York accent. She learned pages and pages of dialogue in a language she doesn't know (Russian) and her dedication was just far beyond any anything that I've seen from any other actor I've worked with.”

Madison knew what she was getting into. She said, “Ani was a sex worker and so sex is going to be a part of her job and I was very much in that same headspace. I approached it like a job too.  I did a lot of research into sex work and what that line of work is like. I read memoirs and talked to some really incredible consultants. I also went to clubs. I wanted to make sure that I was representing that world in an accurate and respectful way.

“Filming those lap dance scenes were fun and interesting because I'm essentially just giving a lap dance from start to finish. We’d would shoot the whole thing and I had no idea where the scene was going to take me or where the conversation was going go.”

Sex work has figured in Baker’s films Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket. “I don't like repeating myself though I do like exploring sex and sexuality.”

Surprisingly perhaps there was no intimacy coordinator on set although the actors were offered one. Baker says, “I’ve directed sex scenes throughout my career so I was very comfortable doing so and also as a producer on this film the number one priority is the safety and comfort of my actors. 

“We prefer to call them sex shots, not sex scenes, because they're blocked and calculated on set. The actors get to see the monitor and know exactly how they're being shot. It is approached in such an incredibly clinical way.”

Madison added, “We talked at length about each scene, what it would look and Sean and Sammy Quan [producer and Baker’s wife] would block out what it would look like so that we could see from the camera's perspective what it would be.”

Fairytale ending

The ending was also meticulously choreographed to time the moment the camera would close in on the actors with the amount of snow enclosing them on the windows of the car. “I wanted them to be encased in this cave of snow,” he says.

It is an ambiguous closure with the audience left to make up their mind if Ani lives happily ever after. “It's important for me to figure out the endings before I ever write a word. The ending is designed to be up for interpretation. We actually wrote an epilogue. I won't tell you what happened, but it was for me and the actors to sort of understand what I was thinking about. Whether they wanted to believe that or not was up to them, but there was an epilogue written.”