The first thing I noticed when I logged onto a press day with Sean Baker was the exquisite selection of posters he had on the walls behind him. The iconic one-sheet for Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and the impeccably designed poster for Fleshpot on 42nd Street (handsomely restored by Vinegar Syndrome only a few years ago) are the most prominent, but it’s the third one he draws my attention to. It’s for Anita: Swedish Nymphet, which he has a theory about. “I have to ask Von Trier this,” he says, “but I think that’s an unofficial prequel to Nymphomaniac. That film stars [Stellan] Skarsgård at 20-something years old playing, essentially, the same character, and Christina Lindbergh is basically Charlotte Gainsbourg. So he must have seen it growing up on Scandinavian television or something and was like, ‘I gotta make a sequel.’”
Cinema is to Baker as water is to a fish: The man is immersed in it, practically needing it to survive. The past year certainly hasn’t dulled his enthusiasm for the medium. If anything, the Criterion Collection’s releases of Anora and Prince of Broadway are his Kirk Gibson-like fist pumps as he rounds his way home, having hit the filmmaking equivalent of a grand slam with Anora. The Palme d’Or. Four Oscars in a single night (a record for a single director-producer). Best Picture.
All that, and he still delights in chatting about Swedish skin flicks and even the vintage poster I have on my wall nearby (The Postgraduate Course in Sexual Love, which posts a 99 percent on Screw‘s Peter-Meter) before we dive into talk Letterboxd, Criterion, and just what those “director-approved” seals mean on the packaging.
Vanyaland: I’ve told a couple of my friends that I’m interviewing you, and a common response is, “Oh my God, you have to ask him about his Letterboxd.” You’re one of the masters of the platform. But the average user sees all this incredible wild genre exploitation material on there, and they just wonder, “Wow, how does that factor into how he makes these empathetic, sensitive, funny as hell, and moving films?”
Sean Baker: Well, number one, I think that what people don’t talk enough about is that some of those films really do excel at craft, and there’s a lot going on in the filmmaking that people don’t give them credit for. So, there’s a lot I learn from them. If you’re talking about a violent genre film, it’s in the use of violence, the pacing, and the building of stress and tension. If it’s an erotic film, it’s in how they actually pulled it off. You know, there’s a real art and craft that goes into portraying eroticism on camera. How do you turn an audience on? It’s not as easy as you think. It takes skill, and you can learn a lot from that.
Also, I think these films weren’t categorized right back then. If you look at all the early [Paul] Verhoeven films, they were — I have a Turkish Delight poster to my right here [gestures to the wall] — that film specifically was considered complete sexploitation. And okay, it is one of those types of movies. But to tell you the truth, if you look at it now, it’s, in my opinion, highbrow. It’s arthouse cinema, and I think many of these films were, but they were just categorized as exploitation or genre.
But they had aspirations to be much more than just that. They were commentaries on our times, on sexual relationships, on where we were in terms of politics at the time. These films were actually saying a lot, but I think they were unfairly labeled as just something for salaciousness or… you know what it’s like, just get labeled as pure exploitation, which is unfair. It’s not a fair term.
Yeah, 100 percent. There’s been such an interesting rise in the number of distributors doing Criterion-level restorations of exploitation cinema over the last decade or so. Do you think that trend reflects the fact that it’s gaining academic or cultural momentum in becoming the art it should be regarded as?
I think so, most definitely. And if you think about, and not just exploitation, but genre in particular. If you think about genre films, they’re the ones that cross over. These are the first films that you usually hear about from another country. And when you’re thinking of foreign films, they’re usually the genre films that break through because they’re the ones that have a universal language. We can all, whether it’s sex or violence or whatever, it’s stuff that is accessible by everybody.
It’s perhaps harder for mainstream audiences to do a deep dive into French New Wave or whatever because that’s [a] very particular [taste]. You have to lose yourself in the dialogue and character study, whereas sometimes, genre is easier and more accessible for everybody. So I think that that’s being recognized now.
And yes, and as you said, I think that these films that were once labeled as just something very simple are now being reevaluated as something that is much more than just simple entertainment.
It’s wild that we live in a world where you can get a slipcase edition of Hell Comes to Frogtown. [both laugh] But back to Letterboxd just for a second: Do you use that platform primarily just as a diary, or do you use it, say, as a form of recommendation or curation? Do you get stuff from it as opposed to just logging on there?
I do follow some of my friends whose tastes I trust, but for the most part, it is really just a tool for me to log my films and what I’m seeing. And unfortunately, because I’m now more of a public figure, I guess people are looking to see what I’m watching and, perhaps, even judging me on it. But hey, I don’t care.
I’m sorry. I have to use a platform to log my movies, sorry. Sometimes, I will log a title in which I’m like, “Oh god, somebody out there is going to seek that film now out and watch it.” [laughs] I’m not condoning it, I’m not condemning it, I’m just listing it. I’m just stating that I watched it, but now
somebody will be very confused. I think I got a lot of people coming my way, DM’ing me saying, “I just watched Gorgeous because of you,” which was that 1999 Jackie Chan/Shu Qi romantic comedy action movie. And for Jackie Chan and Shu Qi completists, yeah, it’s a good movie and whatever, it’s fun, but it’s not exactly highbrow.
And people sometimes look at my stuff like, “Okay, I have to watch this film because he’s watching it.”
Well, not everybody has to watch Gorgeous. So sorry for those people who did and didn’t like it. What
more can I say? [laughs]
Cool. Now that you’ve mentioned that, there’ll be a gorgeous restoration in six months, and it’ll play at all the art house theaters near me. But yeah, it took me a really long time to learn how to say, “I really like this, and I think it’s a good movie, but you’ll absolutely hate it,” to a loved one without it coming off as a dig.
Yeah, that happens a lot to me, actually, because of what interests me and what I’m exploring. Sometimes, I watch films because as I get closer to my next film, I watch films for reference and research, and sometimes, they can be films that are definitely not family-friendly or not for everybody.
And just recently, I’ve been on a Pinku [kick]; the Japanese “Roman porno” or “pinky movies.” They’re softcore, but they were erotic films from the seventies made primarily by the Japanese film studio Nikkatsu. These films were definitely not for everybody, and they have themes and sometimes imagery that could even be considered triggering in today’s day and age. I’m watching it because for the craft. I think that these films were beautifully made, provocative and also quite groundbreaking. But not everybody will see that.
Sometimes, it’s hard for me to recommend a title to the public without a whole disclaimer if this sort of thing triggers you or if this might not be for everybody. I can’t do that every single time I watch a movie.
So it actually is a little distressing that my viewing history is so public. At the same time, I don’t want just not to acknowledge these movies. A lot of these films that I watch are quite inspiring, and I study the craft of these movies.
I imagine you’ve got a pretty big media collection. Do you remember what was your first-ever Criterion purchase?
Oh, it was way back in the Laserdisc days, and I still have them in storage somewhere. I had Mike Leigh’s Naked, that was one of my early purchases on Laserdisc, and Sling Blade. My friends had Armageddon. That was that controversial release back in the day because everyone was like, “how is this in the Criterion Collection?” It was Armageddon, right?
I think they had that and The Rock, I believe.
Yes! Maybe it was The Rock that my friends had. But yeah, my Criterion collecting goes way back to that time.
I imagine this has changed over the years based on just the size and scope of your movies, but how much thought do you give a home video release while you’re in production?
Well, these days you know that you’re going to, on a technical level, be able to [preserve a lot of the film’s integrity between formats]. It’s not like the pan-and-scan era of yesteryear where I’m sure filmmakers were very frustrated at how their work would look at home. These days, for example, with Anora, it’s a 4K UHD. It seems close to what one was seeing in the theater, and it’s as good as a home release can get. The aspect ratio is correct, the colors are correct, and the presentation is optimal. So I know that that will be delivered. And then we do give some thought ahead of time about extras. We know we need somebody on set to document as much as possible. You realize, in hindsight, you never document enough or photograph enough, but you do make sure that that’s happening so that, when the time comes, you provide a lot to fill out a package with extras and featurettes.
Also, the packaging! We didn’t know about the Criterion release when we released the movie, but we were, of course, hoping that it would get a really nice release, somehow, some way. Now, it happened sooner rather than later, but in this case, I always knew what I had in mind with the packaging, and it was very important for me to get it right. So this photoshoot that we did with Mikey [for the cover], these photos were held back for the Criterion release. They were exclusive pictures that we never released publicly during publicity. Criterion worked with me closely because I told them — speaking to what we were talking about earlier with exploitation cinema — how a film like this, if it was released in the ’70s, would be promoted back then, [given that it] was inspired and influenced by seventies cinema.
[To that,] the essay booklet is modeled after the old Continental Film Review magazines. Continental
Film Review was a UK publication that ran between 1953 and 1984. And I have almost every single one, by the way. I’m a collector. And we made sure that, in the way it’s laid out, the way that things were worded, the little ads here and there, that this 100 percent represents how Continental would cover a film like Anora. So I’m very proud of this release, and because of the way that Criterion was just so open to working with me to deliver something like this.
That was going to be my next question. You see the “director-supervised” label on the packaging and I think a lot of people don’t necessarily know what that entails. You had a very hands-on approach, it sounds like. It really isn’t, I guess just pointing criteria in a direction involved with packaging with everything.
Kim Hendrickson over at Criterion is a dream to work with. I’ve worked with her on all three of my
releases so far, Takeout, Prince of Broadway, and Anora. She cares about what the filmmaker thinks.
When they say “director approved,” it’s not just the film, but everything that goes along with it, the
featurettes, the extras, the packaging, the everything, the artwork. And yeah, they were, yes, I have to
say that their designers, graphic artists, and the other people who worked on this are incredible artists.
It wasn’t just that I said “This is what I want.” We worked together, and they were the ones who really put all the heavy lifting into this, and all the graphic design really comes from them in conjunction with Neon, too, because Neon was the one who actually [put together] the photo shoot [for] Mikey [Madison].
And [a lot of it was] Mikey’s. She wanted to ensure this was a unique release and that she was represented right. And we knew that we had already gone through the movie’s release, and we were already in award season by the time this was being fleshed out. And we were like, well, what’s the next stage of Anora? What happens now that people know this character in this world and maybe even the story? What can we give them that’s new and fresh? And she was very happy to be part of the cover photoshoot. It spoke to the nature of the movie and also really allowed her to get back into the character again. We shot the film over two years ago, and she could get back into character and own it even after all that time. And I think she loved doing that.
And I mean, I just have to acknowledge the cover of Prince of Broadway. That’s an absolutely incredible design.
Thank you! Basically, this is what I said to Kim and the team. I was like, “The film is about a hustler who sells counterfeit goods, and people used to sell these bootleg DVDs on the street corners and sidewalks back in the day. How can that work into it?” They’re all New Yorkers at Criterion, and they knew what I meant. And then they just came up with this, which I love.
It’s literally on the sidewalk, on a tarp, with other DVDs. As you can see, there’s one above it that’s like a Nigerian knockoff of a Beyoncé concert. And then over on the right is probably Dark Knight. It’s sitting next to a bunch of other bootleg DVDs on a sidewalk in New York City on a tarp being sold illegally. So they came up with this, and I love it.
And that’s my time. Thank you so much for talking with me today, and congratulations on an absolutely incredible 12 months.
Oh, thank you so much, man.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.