Sean Baker & Co. on Getting a Sex Worker's Hair Tinsel Just Right
The 'Anora' team reveal painstaking details behind the production. Plus: Is the next 'To Leslie' here? And this week's awards chatter from L.A.
Even as an avowed extrovert who has made a career of talking to people, I am feeling the need for a silent retreat after the last few days I spent in Los Angeles. I conducted a few interviews you’ll be reading in the coming weeks but mostly I just seized the opportunity to chatter; at this point in awards season, when there are precious few nominations out there and a lot of buzz building, chatter is pretty much all we’ve got.
I’ve got a great conversation with Sean Baker and much of his production team on Anora to share today, but first, a few observations from Hollywood.
I Found the Gladiator II Gas Station Bus Stop
A few hours before my flight out of L.A. Tuesday night, I spotted the famous locale I’d been looking for the whole time: the Daniel Craig Gladiator II Gas Station Bus Stop:
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I’m told this video, shot on Sunset Boulevard, was Craig’s idea, and it certainly fits the wry humor he brought to his Governors Awards speech on behalf of Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. I wasn’t the only person who didn’t quite know what to make of Queer when I saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival, and since then I’ve been skeptical about Craig’s odds in the best actor race, despite him being undeniably overdue for his first nomination.
But watching Craig work the room at the Governors Awards as well as showing a knack for viral TikToks, I wonder if I’ve been underestimating him. With The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody, Conclave’s Ralph Fiennes, Sing Sing’s Colman Domingo and A Complete Unknown’s Timothée Chalamet (more on him below) presumed as locks, there’s a tantalizing fifth slot in best actor for the taking.
Everyone’s Catching Up With Bob Dylan and ‘Nosferatu’
After months of talking about the same festival releases or even the weeks of promotion for this weekend’s Wicked and Gladiator II, there’s nothing more tantalizing than the promise of a new movie on the horizon that might just shake up the race. I still haven’t seen A Complete Unknown, the James Mangold biopic of young Bob Dylan starring Timothée Chalamet, but in L.A. I was hearing very good things from those who have. Given that Mangold’s last film Ford v Ferrari was a best picture nominee, that’s buzz you have to take seriously.
The other major December new arrival, Nosferatu, has been screening a bit more widely in both New York and Los Angeles, and with post-screening Q&As moderated by no less than Guillermo del Toro and Todd Field, proving the widespread admiration for director Robert Eggers. A big, splashy genre play opening on Christmas, Nosferatu, a remake of the classic silent Dracula film, is not the same kind of traditional Academy gambit as A Complete Unknown. But I’m hearing great things about the lead performance from Lily-Rose Depp as well as Willem Dafoe’s supporting turn. If novelty is what this Oscar race needs, Nosferatu could have it in spades.
Has This Year’s To Leslie Emerged?
On Tuesday evening, I met up briefly with my old colleague David Canfield, before I headed off for a post-screening conversation composer Andrew Wyatt and songwriter Lykke Li about their work on The Last Showgirl, and he went to moderate a conversation with Kate Winslet after a screening of her war drama Lee.
Most screenings like these don’t make gossip headlines, but then again, most of them aren’t introduced by Leonardo DiCaprio, who stood before the Lee audience to praise Winslet for her “strength, your integrity, your talent, and your passion to every single project that you create.”
Lee, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and had a quiet release from Roadside Attractions earlier this year, hasn’t been high on too many prediction lists, particularly given this year’s crowded best actress field. But Winslet is an icon you can never rule out, particularly when she’s got people like DiCaprio — a rare sight even when it comes to promoting his own movies — as well as The Rock willing to get out there for her.
One of Winslet’s Lee co-stars was also there on Tuesday night: Andrea Riseborough, whose best actress nomination for To Leslie is the best modern example of how it helps to have celebrity friends in these campaigns. Could Winslet now be primed for her own To Leslie-style surprise?
The Name On Everybody’s Lips
When chatting up awards voters or the hopefuls themselves, there’s no easier icebreaker question this time of year than What have you seen that you’ve liked? At a cocktail reception for The Piano Lesson on Sunday before the Governors Awards, I chatted with Katia Washington, a producer on the film and sister of star John David and director Malcolm; she was still enamored with the papal drama of Conclave after seeing the film at Telluride months ago. John David, meanwhile, had recently seen The Brutalist and was singing the praises of director Brady Corbet.
The title that came up over and over again with everyone, though, was Anora, which cracked $10 million at the domestic box office on Sunday. Despite its sex and nudity and gorgeously profane language, it’s emerging as the movie that everyone can agree on this season; with screeners now available for critics groups, some ambitious voters might even try putting it on a post-Thanksgiving watch for all the grown-ups in the family. Maybe!
The Making of Anora
Sean Baker has talked a lot about Anora since its premiere at Cannes and Palme D’Or honors — but I am pretty certain you’ve never heard him quite like this. Hopping on Zoom alongside many of his key creative collaborators from the film, including cinematographer Drew Daniels and costume designer Jocelyn Pierce, Baker dove into the nitty-gritty details of how the film was made, from the hair tinsel that became the title character’s signature look to the fake snow in the enigmatic final scene.
Starring Mikey Madison as the titular sex worker and stripper, Anora is a raucous tragicomedy that starts as a Cinderella story, when Anora marries a Russian oligarch’s privileged son Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) after a whirlwind romance. When his parents get wind of the marriage, they send henchmen — played by Yura Borisov and Karren Karagulian — to force an annulment, a process that starts with a comic attempted kidnapping and results in Anora joining the men to crisscross the city and track down her new husband.
From studying the outfits worn by real strippers to finding the right Brooklyn mansion to be Ivan’s home, Baker and his team knew they had to get the details right for the world of Anora to come to life. Ahead they discuss five small things that give the film such an enormous impact:
I. The Eyes Have It
Though Madison’s Anora is on screen for nearly every moment of the film, she holds herself at a distance from the people around her — and the audience — for so much of the film. As Baker notes, we never really hear her inner thoughts, “so we're going to have to see a lot through her eyes and through her expression.”
He initially brought makeup artist Annie Johnson inspiration from 1970s films with “thick black eyeliner,” Johnson recalls, but the distinct shape of Madison’s eyes persuaded them both to change course. “Annie struck that perfect balance between giving me something that was obviously realistic and appropriate for the Ani character, but also allowing it to be open enough and clear enough for us to see her expression in her eyes,” Baker says.
II. A ‘Real Housewives’ Inspiration
When Baker met with Johnson and hairstylist Justine Sierakowski, he had a very specific request for Ani’s look: Sparkle, but not too much of it.
Johnson’s job then was not only to keep Ani’s makeup understated, but apply it in a way that signaled she could have made herself up, or at least with a friend. When she arrives at Ivan’s New Year’s party with glitter on her face, for example, Madison suggested that it look like something she and her friend Lulu (Luna Sofia Miranda) could have applied for each other. “Every single makeup choice was very deliberate,” says Johnson, “and it was a really collaborative process with Sean and Mikey.”
Sierakowski, a huge Real Housewives fan, eventually remembered Adrienne Maloof, who was famous for wearing tinsel in her hair in the show’s early seasons, as she interpreted Baker’s direction.
“It was definitely a bigger beast than I expected it to be,” Sierakowski says of the painstaking process of tying more tinsel into Madison’s hair each day, and then removing it for scenes later in the film when Anora’s too busy hunting down her new husband to tend to her beauty routine.
As a director, though, Baker insists the multicolored tinsel was “the greatest gift in the world. Every time Mikey would move even just a little bit, it would catch different light. It was our color palette in her hair.”
III. Clothing More Practical Than It Looks
Like many of the other film’s key players, costume designer Jocelyn Pierce spent time with real strippers and sex workers to learn more about their world before depicting it on film. “All the women were really generous with their stories and their personal feedback,” Pierce says. “I think it really shows up in the film. It’s sort of just priceless when people get to bring their own special sauce to things.”
With a well-honed eye for detail, Pierce noticed that even the most elaborate stripper outfits relied on very practical zippers or buckles to make their work possible. In the film’s opening sequence set at Ani’s club, HQ, Madison wears a black dress with Western details and “it zips down the front,” Pierce notes, “so it’s got practicality to it.”
Anora is a film of many colors, that tinsel hair included, but Baker wanted the title character in black for that first scene. “We knew we were using color later, and this was our intro to Ani,” he says. “We wanted it to be just sleek and sexy and something that would represent her every night.”
IV. The Lens Flares
With so many scenes set at night, sunlight can sometimes come as a shock to the system in Anora, from the golden sunrise that turns out to be sunset the day after a long New Year’s Eve party to the sun coldly glinting off the private jet that Ivan’s parents take to break up his and Ani’s fledgling marriage.
Sometimes, though, the sun simply makes for a spectacular backdrop for the film’s action, as in an early scene when Ani presents a carefully choreographed striptease for Ivan as he lounges on the couch. “I can’t remember if it was like, ‘Hey, we have a really great sunny day. Let’s pull this scene up,’ or if it was just scheduled that way and we got lucky,” Daniels says, acknowledging the kismet it takes to make even a movie as rigorously crafted as Anora.
Madison choreographed the dance in this scene herself and inspired Baker to turn the moment into “a set piece,” he says. “Make it a music video, even take on the gaze of a client or Ivan. So that obviously elevated us out of reality.”
“The idea was to give him the Ani experience, and to give the audience the Ani experience,” adds Daniels. “It’s part of the seduction, believing that this [relationship] could go where it goes.”
There’s another bit of kismet in that scene that Baker, on our call, wasn’t sure even Daniels had noticed. “The lens gives these really cool orbital flares, but in that particular case, because of our angle or whatever — check it again,” Baker says. “Next time you watch that scene — the flares become phallic. It's really weird. There's a big phallus right in the middle of the frame.”
V. The Snow Globe (SPOILER ALERT)
Everyone involved with Anora has been asked about the film’s wide-open ending. After surviving their all-night hunt for Ivan and reluctantly going to Las Vegas to have the marriage annulled, Anora and the henchman Igor return to Brooklyn and finally share a moment of connection in Igor’s car. The film ends just as the emotions of the experience finally seem to be hitting Anora — and no, Baker wouldn’t tell me what happens after that cut to black.
But much of the magic of that final scene comes from the snow falling outside of Igor’s car; Baker specifically wrote in the screenplay that the snowflakes would build up in the windows and cocoon the two of them from the outside world. Writing for snow in New York City is one thing, but actually getting it is never that easy.
“I was extremely stressed out about it,” says Baker. “We were waiting for real snow, and we kept pushing the scene back further and further in the schedule hoping that we get it.”
In the end, production designer Stephen Phelps filled in what nature couldn’t, using a substance called Bio-Snow and what he describes as “salt shakers” to blanket the car with it. “I said, Stephen, this snow has to look more than real — realer than real — or I'm not going to accept it,” Baker says. “He really, really nailed it.”