Sean Baker's (Tangerine, The Florida Project) most recent film, Anora, has already made waves at Cannes, earning the Palme d'Or award, before making its Canadian premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Certainly, this crew's journey from script to screen to the festival circuit has been a whirlwind, but if you ask Baker about it, he's blocked it all out.
To hear the writer-director describe it, Anora is a modern "fairy tale dream-come-true until it isn't" about Ani, played by rising star Mikey Madison, a Brooklyn-based sex worker making ends meet. The daily grind is constant, the work never-ending, until she meets Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein), a customer who's loaded and who offers Ani money in exchange for more time spent with him. The pair are swept up in a propulsive romance, but a bizarre reality comes crashing down on them when Ani discovers who Ivan really is.
While celebrating at TIFF, Baker and co-stars Madison and Yura Borisov stopped by Collider's media studio at the Cinema Center at MARBL to sit down with Steve Weintraub and discuss their Neon dramedy and that astounding 28-minute sequence. Baker, who's been mulling over this story for about two decades, discusses finally being able to pen the screenplay with his cast already in mind and including similar themes from his previous films. Madison talks about the preparation the role took, including learning Russian and training in dance, and she, Baker, and Borisov, who learned English for his role, break down how they approached filming a 28-minute-long, physically demanding sequence.
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