Sean Baker on the politics in his films: “We’re telling stories that can be discussed by both sides” – LFF Screen Talk
Sean Baker, director of the Palme d’Or winning Anora, spoke to the LFF audience about wildly differing reactions to his films, and why ‘non-professional actor’ is a damaging term.
Not everyone attending a Screen Talk for a filmmaker with new work at the festival will have had a chance to see the film in question before – especially for such a hot-ticket movie as Palme d’Or winner Anora (2024): the story of Ani (Mikey Madison), a New York exotic dancer caught up in a whirlwind romance with the son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch. Much to the apparent amusement, then, of director Sean Baker and moderator Ian Haydn Smith, it seemed like over half the audience at Curzon Soho had seen the film already. Baker definitely didn’t watch it with them, though. “I don’t like to watch my films at all,” he said. “At Cannes, you’re forced to. It looks weird if you suddenly leave.”
The lively conversation went through Baker’s features as director in chronological order, though he himself briefly brought up a TV sitcom he co-created, Greg the Bunny (2002 to 2006), much to the delight of a lone cheering audience member. Mostly comic clips from all of Baker’s features were shown, with one exception: the “Linklater-inspired” Four Letter Words (2000). Baker didn’t suggest when or how his reportedly recently restored debut will reemerge, though he did reveal that he’s shot extras for a new release of his third feature, Prince of Broadway (2008), coming from Criterion.
Set in New York’s West African community, that film is indicative of Baker and his collaborators’ approach to authenticity by structuring stories around newcomers to filmmaking, such as Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor in Tangerine (2015). “It was the wholesale district of Manhattan,” Baker said of his third movie’s setting. “It’s totally been gentrified since we shot this film, but at the time it was bustling. I started to understand that there was a relationship between the West African hustlers on the street selling counterfeit goods and Lebanese shop owners. We spent about a year interviewing these guys.
“About six months in, we found [star of the film] Prince Adu, and [he] was the only one interested in actually talking to us. I think most of them thought we were either cops or just very annoying film students, and they wanted us to go away! It was Prince [Adu] who said, ’If you put me in your film, I will show you the real African experience in Manhattan. I will find you locations, find you extras, bring you into the back rooms where these counterfeit goods are sold.’”
Prince Adu, the Tangerine stars, and Bria Vinaite, star of 2017’s The Florida Project, were all labelled ‘non-professional actors’ in contemporary reviews, a term that Baker greatly dislikes. “You put that out into the world and when the industry hears ‘non-professional’, they think ‘unprofessional’,” he said. “It’s sad because it’s true. Adam Kersh, my manager, manages Mya Taylor, and we’ve been trying to get a vehicle for her ever since Tangerine. Yes, she’s had a few projects, but the industry as a whole hasn’t accepted her. It’s ridiculous. She won historic awards… the first trans actor to win an award at the Gothams. I like saying ‘first-time actors’, because when you say ‘non-professionals’ it doesn’t help those individuals.”
Since Starlet (2012), and including Anora, Baker’s films have focused on various forms of sex work, from lap dancers to adult film stars. Empathetically exploring such stigmatised industries makes his films inherently political texts – at least “small ‘p’ political” as Smith put it. But Baker was keen to insist that while his own political leanings can be found in some of the films, he makes sure to not explicitly preach his own personal views: “I decided my politics are gonna be either subversive, buried or disguised.”
Referencing how some critics interpreted cutaways to the 2016 Republican National Convention on TV during Red Rocket (2021), he said that he did want to make a statement “on how politics had just become a game show and absorbed like reality television”. That said, the use of that footage was more to contextualise the setting for his story, which tells of a washed-up porn star returning to his Texas hometown and trying to take a 17-year-old girl under his wing as a potential golden ticket back to his industry in Los Angeles. “This story actually couldn’t take place any later,” Baker said of the 2016 setting. “The whole industry [then] changed. Young sex workers started working on OnlyFans. I did it for that reason, and a lot of people think I was making a statement, saying that [Red Rocket’s lead character] Mikey is Trump. That wasn’t my intention. But for those who like to think that, that’s great because this is all for interpretation.”
“The reaction to The Florida Project was very interesting,” Baker added. “There were extremes. One side was: worst mother ever, I’m so happy that child was taken away. And the other side was: best mom ever, the system is broken, you can’t split families. The fact that both Democracy Now! and Ben Shapiro loved it and thought it was the best film of the year, that said a lot to me. We’re doing the right thing, actually, because we’re telling these stories that can be discussed by both sides.”