Sean Baker stays with his characters every step of the way. Not only does he write the script and direct the actors but he then edits the footage himself. There was one surprising throughline from the beginning to the end of Anora: despite serious themes around sex work and transactional relationships, it remained funny.

“It was so fun to shoot,” the Tangerine and Florida Project filmmaker recalls when I sat down with him and lead actress Mikey Madison. “There were many days when we were shooting where I’d have a laugh-out-loud belly laugh. They say don’t laugh—if you’re laughing too hard on set, it’s not actually funny in the edit.” He pauses. “But this one...”

“I was literally in hysterics every single day,” Madison tells me, thinking specifically of a courthouse scene in which the entire cast is shouting differing viewpoints at a disillusioned judge. “Our movie’s funny.”

Madison plays Anora—Ani to her friends—a full-time dancer at a New York strip club and a part-time escort when she opts to start seeing Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), a visiting Russian with a mansion in Long Island, the son of an oligarch. After a lap dance, he hires her to be his girlfriend for the week.

In addition to sex, Anora is his paid companion at a flurry of video game hangouts, parties and an impromptu trip to Las Vegas, where the two impulsively get married at an all-night chapel. To Ani, this is a real commitment she wants to make. To Vanya’s family in Russia (who dismissively refer to her as “the escort”), it needs to be annulled as quickly as possible. Some local muscle, employed by Vanya’s father, are sent to ensure that’s what happens.

With Anora, his follow-up to 2021’s Red Rocket, Baker has made a dramatic chronicle of a sex worker trying to maintain a fairy-tale dream with mixed-in screwball elements as she fights to keep her man. Anora elicits belly laughs, but it also punches the audience in the gut many times, as Kit points out: “Simultaneously both one of the funniest and one of the saddest movies of the year. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.”

But despite the laughs, in the end, David compares the film to a 1930s classical weepie, “Anora with those welled-up Alice Adams eyes, going to that swanky party and only able to watch. You cry by your windowsill after, and we’ll cry with you.”

That balancing act of laughter and pain not only won Baker the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (the first American movie to do so since 2011’s The Tree of Life) but it also shot his picture onto Letterboxd’s official list of the top 250 narrative features of all time, with a rating that has climbed to a 4.3 average since release. Anora, which has played in limited US release since October 18, has also posted the highest per-screen average at the box office of the year. No laughing matter.

​​A Night at the Improv

Anora opens at Ani’s place of work: the strip club. “In many ways, we wanted to show her work environment as like any other work environment for the hope that somebody who might have an office job could see similarities and actually empathize and connect and identify with her,” Baker tells me. “So, the locker room where Ani’s eating from her Tupperware and talking to other dancers, that’s essentially the watercooler moment at the office. And then you have the friends at work that you get along with, and then you have the ones that you clash with. Then, you have the boss who ultimately has the final say. We’re setting up this world so as to show you sex work is real work. This is real.”

Baker notes that there was a full-length screenplay, but the one blank slate that he wanted Madison to fill in was the opening, in which she works the club and approaches numerous men to try to talk them into a private dance. “I wanted to capture this club that Ani works at and really show the mechanics of it and what an average night would be like for [her],” Baker says. “We wanted to set the club up as if it was running. We weren’t worried about the sound, because we wanted to make it sound like an active club.” Baker notes that producer Alex Coco DJ’d music, and Madison says that all of the actors were instructed to be in actual conversation.

“The club [scenes] definitely felt like its own movie in some ways,” Madison explains of the shooting style and her freedom to create many shades of her character in that environment. “There are so many different sides to Ani. Who she is in the club is very calculated, and then who she is in the dressing room is different.”

Madison recalls, “We shot a bunch of the lap dance scenes all together—like, lap dance, lap dance, lap dance—which was kind of fun actually, because I got into a rhythm of [figuring out] how to pick a guy up and what that conversation might be like.”

“We had Mikey on a wireless mic making her rounds around the club and we were documenting this on a telephoto lens, just shooting for ten minutes straight,” Baker elaborates. The length of a 35mm reel with sound is eleven minutes, so the opening of Anora is a series of film reels condensed into a handful of minutes, showcasing a full landscape of her work in the club, plus her personality when she’s not on the floor.

“It’s a dream for an actor to be able to experiment in a situation like that,” Madison says. “You have no idea where a conversation is going to take you or what this person is going to be like. You’re walking up to [these guys] for the first time, unrehearsed, so we got some really interesting, funny, magical moments from that.”

Prior to shooting, Madison spent time tailing dancers and observing how they interacted with clients. She also made up her own backstory for Anora and her relationship with the other dancers; all of this prep work made the opening shoot feel more authentic. “It was very Robert Altman-inspired,” Baker says of the Nashville filmmaker, well-known for his naturalistic dialogue scenes.

“Altman had a style like this where he would capture conversations from afar,” he continues. “We nailed that style because of Mikey being able to hold her own for literally 30 minutes, meeting people for the first time, having to engage with them, and then always having Ani’s hustle come out in the last couple of seconds [of each conversation].”

Before filming, Madison spent “a few weeks” living in Brighton Beach, where she would walk the beach and “listen for voices.” As fun as finding the accent itself was—and determining when it’s the most forceful—Madison wanted to make sure Anora remained modern and lived in her culture. There’s “a way that young women talk now,” she muses. “I wanted to have some hints of [how] some girls in the club speak.”

The actor notes that where her accent comes on the strongest is when she’s angry—it develops a force that pushes directly “from the chest.” To this point, Baker notes the lengthy home invasion scene that is the centerpiece of the second act, when Anora’s rage and attempt to hold on to her new life changes Madison’s performance and pushes the accent to the forefront. “You have this moment where she’s on the couch, tied up, saying, ‘I love my husband. I’m going to be with him forrreevvvver,’” he imitates Madison again. “And [the words] just draw out. It’s my favorite read of yours in the film.”

This section has enraptured audiences. Sneakers calls the home invasion sequence “pure entertainment. It was intense, funny, batshit crazy and well executed from beginning to end.” It’s also when Madison and Baker experienced a mind meld, coming up with the line “fuck your boss” in tandem—with full Brooklyn force in her voice. They were rehearsing the most physical part of the shoot, where Anora is tied up but fighting back with all her might.

“I never wanted to go off the rails, and I trusted Sean completely to rein me in if needed,” Madison says, while Baker reaffirms, “You never went off the rails.” (Nathan begs to differ, but in a complimentary way: “Anora is a star, Anora is amazing, Anora is CRAZY, Anora knows how to yell really loud, Anora slay, Anora yay, Anora”.)