‘Awards Magnet’: ‘Anora’ filmmaker Sean Baker on what impressed him about Mikey Madison
Long before Anora won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and moved into the pole position in the Oscars race with its wins last Saturday at the Producers Guild and Directors Guild Awards, filmmaker Sean Baker sat in a movie theater watching Mikey Madison in 2022’s Scream. As the story goes, Baker turned to his wife and co-producer, Samantha Quan, and said they had to call Madison’s representatives as soon as the movie ended.
“She showed the attitude I needed,” he says on the new episode of Awards Magnet about what specifically drew him to Madison for the title role in his acclaimed Oscar favorite. “I also personally love behavioral humor — just sometimes laughing at somebody’s attitude — and there was a sense of humor in her performance in Scream, which I really appreciated. There’s that moment where she’s with the knife, and she’s mocking [Neve Campbell’s character Sydney] — just that alone, it’s an image that sticks with me. How she was having fun with that performance.”
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But when Baker finally met with Madison, what impressed him the most was how different she was in person from either the Scream character or the unhinged Manson family disciple she played in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“She is reserved. She is actually quite soft-spoken, and she’s a listener, not a talker,” Baker says of his star. “So I was automatically like, ‘Oh, well, she wasn’t typecast, and they are performances, and that’s impressive.’”
But what else stood out for Baker was Madison’s enthusiasm for Anora before the script was written. “She told us how interested she was in exploring this world, taking on an accent. And if pole dancing were involved, she would start with lessons immediately,” he remembers.
The rest is history, with potentially more to come. Already the biggest financial hit of Baker’s career, the Neon release has vaulted ahead of its competition in the race for Best Picture thanks to its guild wins last week. Since 2000, the only movies to win awards at the Directors Guild and Producers Guild but then lose Best Picture at the Oscars are Brokeback Mountain, Gravity (which tied at the Producers Guild Awards with eventual Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave), La La Land, and 1917.
That puts Baker in some unfamiliar territory. The Academy had never nominated the indie film veteran despite acclaimed work on films like Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket. However, this year, he’s a four-time nominee as co-producer, writer, director, and editor. At this weekend’s BAFTA Awards, Baker has a fifth nomination for casting. Baker is positioned for a potentially historic Oscars windfall: If he were to win all four of his nominations, Baker would become the first person to take home a quartet of Oscars since Walt Disney in 1954.
Baker spoke to us last week before the big Anora weekend. But even before those victories and the film’s widely embraced status as Best Picture frontrunner, Baker expressed a level of contentment with the reactions to his film. Asked if the awards response to Anora is “more satisfying” because he’s being celebrated while still directing the small-budget independent films he wants to make, Baker says he can’t deny the feeling.
“Anora was so independent. This wasn’t even made under a mini studio. We made this with a private financier, then sold it so that we didn’t have to answer to anybody. We made it the way we wanted, with no caveats. We weren’t forced to cast anybody. If you look at my casting, it probably wouldn’t fly. Now, Mikey is a star. But if you think about it, when I was pitching this film, I was saying Mikey Madison and a bunch of Russians you don’t know. So the fact that I was even able to make this film… yes, it’s very satisfying. But it also helps me, not only what’s happening right now but the Palme d’Or win. It’s allowing us — my team of Samantha Quan and Alex Coco — to move forward and continue to make these sorts of movies the way we want to. So it’s really nice. It’s helping us with what’s next.”
As for what’s next, Baker says he has plans to start traveling in April after the Oscars to figure out his next location. “Because location is very much involved with the development of these movies and these screenplays,” he says. “I do feel that we will continue with the comedy and lean towards what we’ve been doing already. And all I can say is this: it might have a Jonathan Demme feel.”
Anora received six Oscar nominations this year: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Actress for Madison, and Best Supporting Actor for co-star Yura Borisov. Watch the entire conversation above.
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