If you were often outdoors as a child in the summers, you likely a series of keen sensations: having your palms licked by blades of grass, the soft scrape of tree bark against flesh, sinking fingers into soil. Memories of aimless warm days in July might conjure a sense of unblemished bliss. But in Janet Planet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s 1991-set debut feature film, these lilting moments are complicated with one child’s formative, tender bummer summer.

Months before beginning middle school, eleven-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) saunters in the belly of the Massachusetts wood and becomes acquainted with notions of loneliness and departure, with and without the help of her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson).

Throughout Janet Planet, Janet welcomes adults into her home, expanding and closing space between herself and Lacy in the process. There’s Wayne (Will Patton), an iron-wired male partner, Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend and devout theater hippie, and Avi (Elias Koteas), a charismatic leader in Regina’s New England theater scene.

Baker filmed this triptych of visitors and their respective acts in sequence. “We did shoot, not in scene order, but in act order,” she tells me. “We shot the Wayne section, then the Regina section, then the Avi section with little overlaps. That’s what made sense in this schedule and with the actor schedules, but it was also fun, and actually really productive to meet the characters in order, especially for Zoe and Julianne.”

Nicholson concurs, “It was so lucky that we were able to film in that way, actually. It’s not always the case where you can film in somewhat a sequential order as the story’s being told. And it shifts because we shift depending on who we’re with—who’s the important person in our life or who’s even in the room—dynamics change. All three of those people are wonderful wackos, and I hope to include myself and Zoe in that same category… To be with each of those people as those characters was just pure pleasure.”

As refreshing as it is to see Janet in her element (her own planet) and individuality beyond her obligation to Lacy as a mother, Baker also invites us into Lacy’s loneliness: for example, she tends to a band of homemade salt-and-pepper shaker dolls that she clothes, speaks to and tucks into bed at night. As she witnesses her mother experience emotional intimacy with friends and lovers that come and go, Lacy comes to understand that her mother does not belong only to her, that she’s an imperfect person out in the world. Only in films like Whale Rider and Where the Wild Things Are have I seen the childhood anxieties, feelings of alienation and ardor for places be visually legitimized with such care and permission.

Sound designer Paul Hsu completed more than 100 hours of field recordings to craft the sonic personality of Lacy and Janet’s forested universe. Baker and her director of photography Maria von Hausswolff revisited films like Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady and Ingmar Bergman’s melding female psyches like Persona and Autumn Sonata.

I spoke with Baker about these creative collaborations, childhood and the power of place in Janet Planet.

What fascinates you about mother-daughter stories? Are there mother-daughter stories either on the stage or on-screen that you really love, that really frustrate you, any that you have big emotions about?
Annie Baker: I wouldn’t describe myself as interested in mother-daughter stories, per se. I am the daughter of a mother and the mother of a daughter, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started writing this movie after I had a daughter, but also it wasn’t a conscious choice. I’m trying to think of my favorite mother-daughter story. No one’s asked me that. That’s such an interesting question. I really liked Furiosa. I can’t say it was an influence on Janet Planet since I saw it last weekend, but I’m a big fan. I’m a big fan. Furiosa, retrospectively influential on Janet Planet.

There’s a way Bergman photographs and thinks about motherhood and relationships just between female relatives, period, between sisters, too. And there’s a kind of sensuality, there’s a kind of eroticism to the closeness between mothers and daughters and between sisters and between friends that I think he gets at that I definitely talked about with my DP [Maria von Hausswolff].

What conversations did you have with Zoe about Lacy’s relationship to place and to her mother, if any?
I learned very quickly to not try to describe the character too much to Zoe, which is not to say she’s the same person or even that similar to this character, but I realized very quickly that she understood the material in a bordering on telepathic way. If I got overly psychological about it or overly analytical, I would ruin her performance. So we did not talk about the character at all; if I tried to, I saw it go wrong very quickly. She learned the lines. She showed up, she listened—which is everything—obviously she reacted…

There was a lot of choreography. She’d never been in front of a camera before. In of her body and her head movements and how many times she blinked, we really had to figure a lot of the technicalities of that out. But psychology-wise, she was in her own private psychological universe, which was, looking back, as it should be, for that character.

Can you speak more about working with Sophie Okonedo?
Sophie’s one of my favorite actors that I’ve ever worked with. She’s such a theater animal, too; we’ve both spent so much time in rehearsal rooms. It was actually amazing when she came to set, because there was a funny, fast and furious, witty way she likes working that feels just like spitballing in a rehearsal room together. She’s very intellectual. It was through philosophical jokes about and around the character that we found the performance together, and she’s very not precious. This is also one of my favorite things about her, and I learned a lot from working with her: if I gave her a note that she didn’t like, she would just really politely be like, “I don’t like that note. Can you give me another?”

I feel with other actors, you give them a bad note and you feel them freeze up and you have to backtrack or they don’t tell you… There was a clear, unforced, really transparent way she works that was, oh, my God, so, so fun. It felt like we could try really stupid stuff together and be honest with each other. I could just be like, “Sophie, it’s not working,” or she could be like, “Annie, it’s not working.” That’s the best, when you’re in dialogue with someone and you’re like, “We’re not going to hurt each other’s feelings. We are going to try everything and we will be honest when it’s not working and nobody will be offended.” That’s when you can really be creative. I would love to work with her again.

She also has done outdoor hippie theater performances, [and] was part of a hippie theater company in her youth, so she just came right into that theater company and knew exactly what she was doing and could inhabit that world so effortlessly—both the world of subtle film performance and the world of wild projecting—so 200 people can hear you outside, kind of like theater acting.