NYFF: How a Palme d’Or Winner Pulled Off an ’80s-Style Action-Comedy Set Piece Involving a Sex Worker
[The following story contains spoilers from Anora.]
It’s the scene of the movie and perhaps of the season: Halfway through his sex-worker dramedy Anora, director Sean Baker somehow puts on the board a 28-minute real-time scene in which a pair of heavies out of an ’80s action-comedy seek to rein in Mikey Madison’s tough-but-vulnerable escort as she fights back.
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What starts as something broad and comedic soon morphs into a much more disturbing tableau — a piece of violent misogyny that implicates a culture of toxic masculinity, class elitism and even the audience itself. Soon it will be hard to go anywhere in film circles without hearing about it.
“I wanted to do a set piece centered on a real-time home invasion and it fleshed out from there,” Baker told the audience at the Palme d’Or winner‘s 2024 New York Film Festival premiere Saturday night, explaining how the ambitious and shape-shifting sequence came to be.
The movie concerns Madison’s title character, a strip-club dancer and sometime escort, who impulsively marries her client, the goofy, dissolute son of a Russian oligarch. The scene concerns the son’s mobster-y protectors, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), who come to the mansion where Anora’s staying to get her to annul the marriage.
After forcing their way in, they try every form of physical and psychological violence to coax her to agree. Lamps shatter, biting and choking ensues, and by the time the 28 minutes are done, mayhem — literal and emotional — spills out from every corner.
The aim, Baker said, is “to pull the rug out from underneath the audience’s feet … this very scary incident that this young woman is going through. So I’m really trying to put the audience in that moment and have them live in it the entire time.”
(In Cannes, jury president Greta Gerwig said, “There was something about [the film] that reminded us of the classic structures of Lubitsch or Howard Hawks, and then it did something completely truthful and unexpected.”)
To get the scene right, the actors rehearsed an intense amount. Madison also did all her own stunts.
“I mean, we rehearsed it probably more than we rehearsed everything in total,” Madison told the NYFF audience. But she said when it came to fight-training, she relied on a more improvisational style.
“I don’t think there’s really any preparation you can do,” she said. “You just have to be like ‘OK, I’m just going to fight this guy, let’s just say action and let’s just go for it.'”
The scene was supposed to shoot for six days. It took eight.
To complicate matters, Baker was often rewriting the night before, embracing and discarding ideas about the violent paces the characters would put each other through.
So involved was the process that it led Karagulian, who plays Toros, to have a mental-health reaction.
“It was 11 pages of me having a dialogue, so I had a full-on panic attack over it,” he said at the festival. “The night before [Baker] texted me, ‘Make sure you’re prepared for tomorrow.’ So I show up and he’s like, ‘It’s going to be different.’
“Lots of panic. Lots of panic on everybody’s face,” Baker said with a smile (now).
Neon opens the movie Oct 18, when the public will begin to dissect the sequence. Expect Oscar voters and the industry to be talking about it all the way through February.
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