NEW YORK (AP) — Sean Bakers The interest in the lives of sex workers began with his 2012 drama “Starlet.” For that film, set in the pornographic world of the San Fernando Valley, Baker listened to the stories of sex workers. Some played in the film. Many became friends.

“I remember being on set and Radium Cheung, my DP, said, ‘There’s a whole other movie. And there’s a whole other movie,” Baker recalls. “I was like, ‘There are a million stories to tell in this world.’”

Since then, Baker has traveled across much of America in films set everywhere from donut shops in West Hollywood to industrial, rural Texas. But he has kept the lives of sex workers in focus. The iPhone recording “Tangerine” (2015) does about a bunch of transgender sex workers from Los Angeles to avenge a cheating boyfriend. In “The Florida Project” (2017), a single mother turns to sex work to support herself and her daughter in an Orlando motel. “Red Rocket” (2021) captures a washed-up porn star in a comical way.

When his latest film ‘Anora’, starring Mikey Madison as an exotic dancer from Brooklyn who spontaneously marries the son of a Russian oligarch, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival Earlier this year, Baker took the moment to speak about removing the stigma of sex work. He dedicated the award to “all sex workers, past, present and future.”

It was a crowning achievement for the 53-year-old who has long regarded the French festival as the highlight.

“It was the dream. After that you’re in a bit of an existential crisis. To be honest, I’m still figuring it out,” Baker said in a recent interview. “It’s not about opening doors. It’s definitely not about trying to get into the studio. To tell you the truth, it does the exact opposite. It says: Okay, fine. Now we can continue to do this.”

A resolutely independent filmmaker, Baker is less comfortable being the center of attention than behind the camera. His films also delight in the communities of rarely described American subcultures. Samantha Quan, producer of “Anora” and Baker’s wife, says he has always been interested in “people and situations that are always there, but people choose not to see them.”

But “Anora,” one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, has brought Baker dangerously close to the mainstream. “Anora” is widely considered a contender for best picture the Academy Awards, among other categories, including Best Actress for its acclaimed young star.

Baker has arrived at this moment despite charting what is an unconventional path for a filmmaker today. He no longer has any interest in television or franchise films dedicated to the big screen. He makes messy indie films built from real-life experiences and research, balancing both comedy and social realism. ‘Anora’ is the unusual film that draws comparisons with both British social realists and Mike Leigha favorite of Baker’s, and masters of farce Ernst Lubitsch.

In a Hollywood that produces big-budget fantasies, Baker has risen by creating what you might call anti-fairy tales. His films suggest that there is something bankrupt about what and who we collectively value. The poverty of ‘The Florida Project’ took place in the shadow of Disney World. In “Anora,” Madison’s Ani isn’t the only one selling herself. The Russian oligarch’s henchmen do work they would rather not do. The transactional nature of it all is both absurd and tragic.

“If I’m too calculated, like, ‘This is my big statement about late-stage capitalism,’ I get a little contrived, a little preachy,” Baker says, smiling. “But it is difficult to ignore this in a country that is becoming more divided by the day.”

It’s a feeling Baker has acquired through both experience and research.

“In no way would I say that I have ever faced the hardships of an undocumented immigrant or a marginalized sex worker,” he says. “But because I was an independent filmmaker for thirty years, it was a hustle. Until recently I had trouble paying the rent.”

Baker, the son of a patent attorney, grew up in New Jersey, outside New York City. He went to film school at NYU. When he started, he envisioned himself making “Die Hard.” But as his exposure to arthouse and international film expanded, so did his interest as a filmmaker. His anyway Richard Linklater-influenced first feature film, 2000’s ‘Four Letter Words’, drew heavily on his suburban upbringing.

But in the four years between that film and his next, he “finally” had some life experience, he says. Baker became less interested in himself than in other parts of the world. He also developed a debilitating drug addiction that took years to kick.

While living above a Chinese restaurant, Baker chatted in the stairwell with the delivery people, many of them undocumented immigrants. Those conversations led to ‘Take Out’, co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou.

“That really gave me a chance to reboot myself, because I was down and out,” Baker says. “I lost all my friends. I lost everything. I had no contacts anymore. Everyone I went to school with had worked in Hollywood. Todd Phillips, who I went to school with. He was already making his first film, and I was off heroin.”

With ‘Take Out’ Baker has followed an approach that he implemented in ‘Anora’. He immersed himself in immersive research, after which he built screenplays that served as blueprints for improvisational films, eclectically populated by professional and non-professional actors, vibrant with real life. His next film, “Prince of Broadway,” followed a Ghanaian immigrant selling counterfeit designer products in Manhattan.

For years, Baker thought about a movie set in Brighton Beach. He and actor Karren Karagulian, a regular in Baker’s films, had discussed “a bro movie with Russian gangsters.”

“I’m glad that didn’t happen,” Baker says with a chuckle. It went on the back burner. But after Baker heard a story about a young woman abandoned by her partner and then held as collateral, he began reimagining a Brighton Beach film centered around a sex worker. To think about it, Baker and Quan moved to the Brooklyn borough for a few months.

“We really settle into those places,” Quan says. “We don’t like to go to a place and say we just want to get a superficial view. We really embedded ourselves in that place. We talk to people. We get to know everyone. The research is us being there and sniffing things out.”

Before Baker has a script, he usually casts his leads. For ‘Anora’ this meant the efforts of Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn and Madison. After seeing Madison in 2022’s “Scream,” Baker was convinced she was perfect — even if his approach took some convincing with financiers.

“I remember when I pitched it, they said, ‘Mikey Madison and who else?’” Baker says. “I’m like, ‘No, no. She is the star. ”

When Baker met Madison, they spoke only vaguely about the project.

“He gave me a very loose idea of ​​what the story could be, the character,” says Madison. “I basically just agreed to work with him.”

While writing the script, the two stayed in regular contact, chatting and gradually creating the central character with the help of consultant Andrea Werhun, author of the memoir “Modern Whore.” Baker, whose work apartment has a kitchen with Blu-rays in the cabinets, also gave Madison a handful of movies, including Federico Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria.”

Meanwhile, Baker looked to things like “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” for photographing New York at night. He later filmed on the same stretch of Brooklyn Road under the elevated subway, immortalized by the chase scene in “The French Connection.” He and his production designer, Stephen Phelps, decided to add a touch of red to every shot, a nod to films like Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt.” In the credits, Baker thanks director Jesús Franco for the red scarf and colors of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’.

“Even though my films are set virtually now, they are contemporary stories. I want it to feel like the film was shot in 1974,” says Baker.

During production, Baker sometimes used guerrilla filming techniques, sending Madison into a pool hall or restaurant to interact with the people inside. (“The scene could go either way, because it’s not really a scene,” says Madison.) For the sex scenes, Baker and Quan themselves would model the moves for Madison and Eydelshteyn.

“He was really committed to creating a safe space where we could do those scenes and feel comfortable,” says Madison. “He wanted us to see what the positions would look like so they would show us – obviously fully clothed and everything. It was funny and it broke the tension a bit. Sean is a unique director.”

As much as Baker associates his films with a ’70s sensibility, he’s mostly focused on where films might go from here — and how he might change their direction a bit. He is proud that “Anora” is part of the Oscar conversation, but is especially supportive of his collaborators. “Because I already won my thing,” he says, laughing. But Baker hopes the attention can help bring independent arthouse cinema to a broader arena, renewing audiences’ awareness of the big-screen experience and perhaps convincing Hollywood that smaller, cheaper films are far above their prime. can lift weight.

That “Anora” and Brady Corbet’s ‘The Brutalist’ – a three-and-a-half-hour epic shot in VistaVision and made for less than $10 million – appears to be part of the awards mix, Baker says, and signals a shift.

“That will be a signal for the sector. There’s panic in LA right now. I’m like, we don’t need to make films for that much. They don’t have to cost that much,” says Baker, who advocates changing guild rules for lower-budget indie films. “The rules will have to change. And attitudes about watching movies changed because of streaming and because of COVID. We need to remind audiences that some films are made for the big screen.”