![]() ![]() And I was so pissed, I was like, “Every one of my peers is jumping up to, like, $30 million, or S100 million,” and I had that pity-party thing where I’m like, “What am I doing wrong?” But then I thought, You know, who cares? I’m just going to do it anyway. A24ĭEADLINE: How did Red Rocket come about? Did the success of The Florida Project get you the kind of budget you wanted?īAKER: I thought that it was finally going to allow me to jump way up into the $10-15 million or whatever bracket. In this interview, the director talks frankly and often hilariously about the highs and lows of the story so far, how a kid from New Jersey discovered Universal horrors, fell under the spell of Steven Spielberg, then turned to the inspiring examples of Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch to become one of the most interesting directors on the planet… Simon Rex, right, is an aging porn star with designs on local teen Strawberry, played by Suzanna Son. Filmed under lockdown with strict Covid protocols in place, this freewheeling story showed no evidence of its complicated production. Ironically, the result- Red Rocket-has been one of his best-received yet, upgrading him to the main competition in Cannes and reinvigorating the career of Simon Rex, who stars as Mikey Saber, a down-at-heel porn star forced to return to his smalltown home. Fate, however, had other plans, and Baker was forced to pivot to something smaller instead. ![]() This seemed to augur well for his next film, an ambitious project about drug activism, a subject close to his heart. box office and driving Dafoe’s supporting performance all the way to the Oscars. In both instances, he was way ahead of his time.įinally, The Florida Project was the film that saw him pop, taking $11 million at the U.S. He was perhaps a little too successful when the film premiered at Sundance, the reviews didn’t focus so much on the sympathetic portrayal of trans sex workers in Hollywood but rather its production (it became known as “the iPhone movie”). But his next film didn’t fare much better, even though he pulled off something almost unthinkable-faced with an impossibly low budget, he shot 2015’s Tangerine using iPhones. Baker freely acknowledges that the film was a hard sell, largely due to a graphic-but by no means gratuitous-sex scene, of the kind that doesn’t fly too well outside France. Indeed, many industry insiders thought that his career would have popped long before now, notably with 2012’s Starlet, a beautiful odd-couple buddy movie about a porn actress and lonely old lady, which admirers of Baker’s recent film Red Rocket are advised to track down, since it adds a lot of off-screen detail to the main character’s backstory on the fringes of LA’s adult movie industry.įor some reason, though, Starlet didn’t break. ![]() After that came the ultra-low-budget Take Out (2004), which showed a day in the life of a Chinese immigrant worker, then the festival hit Prince of Broadway (2008), an extraordinary look at life on the margins of modern-day New York that crystallized what would become the director’s trademark: an intense empathy for outsiders leavened with moments of unexpected comedy.Īcademy Will Now Let Films Bypass Inclusion Report By Opting Out Of Best Picture Raceīaker’s dry sense of humor might be the biggest weapon in his arsenal, and it’s a reflection of his unassuming personality looking back on his career, he has the good grace to laugh at his younger self’s naivety and is nothing but transparent about the process that has carried him this far. But the acclaim had been a long time coming: The Florida Project was Baker’s sixth film in an extraordinary run that began 22 years ago with the little-seen hangout movie Four Letter Words (2000), which the director has restored and is hoping to re-release shortly. Critics were immediately impressed by Baker’s mix of scripted drama and intimate cinema verité-style cinematography, which were made to look even more effortless by the casting of Willem Dafoe as Bobby Hicks, the manager of a Florida motel where single mother Halley lives with her little girl Moonee in the shadow of Walt Disney World. Sean Baker used to be the indie world’s best-kept secret, until The Florida Project opened in the Directors Fortnight strand of the Cannes film festival in 2017. ![]()
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