Cannes-winning Anora director on mashing genres: 'I love tonal jumps. I love roller coasters.'

The subtitle of Anora, the latest film from director Sean Baker, is “A Love Story.” Several of Baker’s past films trafficked in irony — 2017’s The Florida Project, for instance, juxtaposed the struggles of poor people living in public housing right next door to Disney World — but both he and star Mikey Madison insist that their new movie is not cynical. 

When Madison’s title character, a Brooklyn sex worker who prefers to go by “Ani,” falls into a whirlwind romance with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, she really believes in it. After all, with access to that kind of international wealth, she’d never have to give another lap dance again. Isn’t that what the American Dream is all about? 

“I've heard a couple of people refer to her as ‘cynical,’ but personally I never felt that way about her when I was playing her,” Madison tells Entertainment Weekly in a Zoom call from the Telluride Film Festival. “I think that she actually is quite hopeful in a lot of ways. She sees this opportunity to have this fairy-tale relationship, and I think she just takes it because why not? I also think she feels like, ‘Well, of course this would happen to me.’”

But there's more to this story than romance. As Ani and Vanya's love story unfolds, it gets blended with elements of rough-and-tumble action and slapstick comedy.

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“I love tonal jumps. I love roller coasters,” Baker tells EW, Zooming alongside Madison but from a separate Telluride hotel room. He doesn't just mean the Coney Island Cyclone, which features in the film. “It is scary, though. It does throw an audience off sometimes if suddenly they're slapped with a tonal shift that they’re not used to, so you have to do it delicately. But I was very interested in covering different genres with this movie."

When Ivan (or “Vanya,” as he’s more commonly called) and Ani are living the rush of having sex and smoking weed and gallivanting from one superrich party to the next, Anora feels as fun and soaring as the heights of the best Nora Ephron movies. Then the story keeps going. 

“I just wanted to flip it on its head,” Baker says. “So we give you a romantic comedy for the first 50 minutes, and we even sandwich it with a quintessential song, Take That’s ‘The Greatest Day,’ which is maybe a song you would hear in a Love Actually sort of movie. But then we’re giving you another 90 minutes of reality after that.” 

As a sex worker, Ani lives the American legend of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” Every dollar she earns comes from the sweat of her own lap dances and pole swings. The global 1 percent, and their spoiled scions like Vanya, don’t live like that. Their wealth involves a whole galaxy of servants and hangers-on who might feel threatened by a big change in their patron’s status quo. As news of Ani and Vanya’s marriage spreads, many other interested parties enter the picture — and bring new textures and tones to the movie along with them. 

Will audiences and the Academy reward a story that revolves around a sex worker? Such characters are mainstays of Baker’s films, but the only previous nomination was for Willem Dafoe’s performance in The Florida Project. Baker thinks things are getting better, and this multi-genre roller coaster might make for a cultural breakthrough. 

“I think that the industry itself is more empathetic. Sometimes that gets to the point of being condescending, but we try to stay in that place where people can still have flaws,” Baker says. “We want audiences to recognize themselves in these characters, so you have to see the flaws. You have to see where the person unfortunately fumbles, because that's what makes them human, and that's what makes us root for them.”

Anora hits theaters on Oct. 18.