Making ‘Anora’: A Deep Dive Into a Brighton Beach Classic

Director Sean Baker and his cinematographer, Drew Daniels, had a bit more to work with on Anora than they had on their previous project together, Red Rocket. “We had six times the budget, which allowed us more tools,” Baker says. That increased scale shows throughout the film in the range of locations captured, and in complex shots that balance subtle nods to ’70s cinema with an original, sophisticated style. “The bar was set very high for us,” Daniels says, “and so we really wanted this film to feel bigger and go further.”

Spirit Award nominations and earning a spot on the American Film Institute’s coveted Top 10 Films list, it’s clear that he has officially made that leap.

But these guys still make their movies their own way: on the fly, with room for surprises and a deep, textured love of cinema. All that and much more is evident in their breakdown of six crucial shots from Anora.

The Eyes

After Ivan’s family finds out that he’s hastily married Ani, handlers arrive at his mansion to force the couple into an annulment. This gets more complicated when Ivan runs away—leaving Ani to fight off the henchmen. When she proves tougher than she looks, they tie her up, leading to this moment where she’s considering her options.

Sean Baker: We were trying to take advantage of the framing, using the really special characteristics that a vintage anamorphic lens brings to the table when it comes to some of these close-ups.

We leaned into the full color palette, the rainbow spectrum. Knowing that it was going to take place in the winter, in New York City, we were expecting a gray overcast, and that’s essentially what we got for most of the shooting days. It was more about focusing on individual colors, red and blue being the two primary ones, and working with Stephen Phelps, our production designer, on how to place that color in almost every frame.

Drew Daniels: Even in this frame, I can see the little hint of color coming from her hair—even if it’s just a close up of someone’s face like this, to have a little hint of color and feel a little bit more like there’s some personality behind it.

This shot felt straight out of one of those Italian films from the ’70s. If you think of even Sergio Leone, this is a Western shot. To me, it’s also a really subjective shot. We’ve just been watching her go through all this hell, and then we get this really extreme close moment of her contemplating her next move. The shot tilts down to her mouth, and I just love how intimate it is. We always talk about American ’70s cinema when we’re talking about Anora, but this feels like more of a spaghetti western or Giallo vibe. A close-up of a character’s eyes is not something that every movie does or feels like it has permission to do.

Baker: Subtextually, this character is not being heard. She’s being silenced, literally; she’s being gagged. So all of the communication has to come from her eyes. The audience wants to know what she’s thinking. We don’t have narration. We don’t hear her inner thoughts. We are trying to understand how she’s processing the moment through her eyes, and we’re also trying to detect what her next move is. Does she tell the truth? Does she bluff? That’s actually left up for interpretation.

The Car

Just before they arrive, we meet henchmen Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) in a long tracking shot of them driving toward Ivan’s house. It’s our first glimpse of them, and our first hint at the pivotal role Igor will play in the film’s final act.

Baker: This is one of the first indications that we are slowing down almost entirely to real time. There is a little bit of a time jump, obviously, because Garnick has to pick up Igor.

Daniels: It feels like a complete pivot for the film. All of a sudden, we’re hanging with these two characters in this long two shot. We had them run the dialogue so that it would be perfectly timed out for them to hit the gate right at the end of their dialogue. It feels like a gangster movie all of a sudden. It feels like The Godfather or something.

Baker: It’s the second time [in the movie] that shows disrespect to sex work. They both laugh the minute one says it’s rumored he married a prostitute. It also shows that Igor is even more in the dark than the audience, and he’s already asking questions—he’s trying to figure out what the hell he’s being asked to do, setting his character up as somebody who is searching for the truth.

We wanted to always be setting up stereotypes, and then breaking them. At first, we wanted the audience to think that he could be very dangerous. We don’t know what he’s capable of. When he goes into the house seconds later, he’s literally going in there with a hoodie. You barely get to see his face. You can imagine how scary and intimidating that would be to a young woman who has no idea what the hell is happening. I think that does harken to classic moments from older films—and one could say pulp, since pulp takes from a lot of the same stuff.

Daniels: The two gangsters driving around in the car.

Baker: That comes from The Italian Connection. All of those Euro crime movies.

The Homage

Anora’s references to classic cinema run deep, if subtly. Here’s the most direct reference in the film, in which family handler Toros (Karren Karagulian) is desperately trying to get a handle on the situation as he learns of Ivan’s marriage.

Drew Daniels This is our French Connection homage, which I’m really proud of. We shot it under the exact same bridge that they shot their crazy train sequence where Gene Hackman is chasing the train and looking up at it. But it’s our style—it’s anamorphic. I think that was a 100mm LOMO close-up lens. Natural light. And these are our actual actors driving around the streets.

Baker: It’s underneath the elevated tracks along Stillwell Avenue and 86th Street—the same stretch that they used in French Connection. And we realized why they use that. It’s one of the few stretches with very limited traffic lights, so you can actually get some speed. Now, look, we weren’t nearly as dangerous as I hear they were back in the day. We played it safe. [Laughs] But we were able to get extended amounts of time where we didn’t have to keep stopping at a red, and capture what looks like speed.

There’s a line between a simple nod of respect and acknowledgement, and then a full-on homage or even just a ripoff. I try to stay away from that stuff; just shoot a parody video and put it up on YouTube. We’re trying to present something fresh to the screen, but there can still be the nods to those in the past that have helped inspire and influence your aesthetic as a filmmaker. I almost want them to be undetectable, where true cinephiles will be like, “I think that’s a reference there.” This one is probably the most obvious in the film. But there’s other stuff.

Daniels: You cut to this shot as this rhythmic comedic cut. “What did he say? Is he leaving?” It’s so jarring and weird. That’s something to think about in all these shots: Whenever we’re finding our shots, we always think about them in the context of the shot before or the shot after. We wanted to arm ourselves with that inner cut—with really strong, really fun images

Baker: Also, one of the biggest curses of the modern age with screenwriting is having to work in technology. We all know that cell phones are essentially the death of drama these days. Everything can be figured out with a cell phone. So many classic films have plots that could be solved with a cell phone call. I tried to figure out: What can we do with the cell phone that will make and still be tackling this theme of communication? This sequence really exemplifies that, and shows, “Okay, so how much is he actually hearing on that speakerphone? How much is being conveyed? How much does he understand, and how much does the audience understand?” That’s why he’s still shocked to find out Ivan did escape when he arrives at the house. Playing with this technology, with this phone, was something that really had to be figured out while we were blocking the scene.

The Apartment

Baker’s goal coming into Anora was to make a great Brighton Beach film. Here we find Igor outside of his grandmother’s apartment building in a shot that captures that aesthetic.

Baker: We wanted to not only immerse ourselves in the Russian-American community of the Brighton Beach area, but really show the color of it—showing it in a way that hopefully other filmmakers had not in the past. We wanted to get further immersed than others have, and that’s because of my relationship with Karren Karagulian, who plays Toros in the film, his connection to that world as an Armenian-American immigrant married to a Russian-American. Just from a visual point of view, it’s an area that I find very cinematic. Brighton Beach has this elevated subway system that’s really special and visual, and also audibly very unique.

On the right there—I always imagined I was living in Igor’s grandmother’s apartment. It’s an iconic property right between Coney Island and Brighton Beach.

Daniels: We always thought it looked like a Russian block of buildings, and it has that train back there. We timed it with the train, as we did many shots. When you pan over to the left, it then reveals the Cyclone in the background, and you can actually see in the context of where they’re going. We try to have it geographically make sense, all of our shots, for all of our journey. And the palette of the shot is just so fucking New York in the winter, bright and visual. It has that distortion, has that softness to it.

Baker: We also still get our color palette in there. When it pans, you see the sign of the Cyclone has red in it. There’s no red in that shot until it settles.

The Landmark

And here we see the Cyclone, the iconic Brooklyn roller coaster. Ani accompanies Toros and the henchmen to try to find Ivan, kicking off a lyrical search party through wintry Brighton Beach and Coney Island.

Baker: Coney Island feels stuck in time. It looks very similar to the way that Walter Hill shot it in 1978 with The Warriors, and there’s these iconic attractions—the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel and Astroland in general. I wanted to shoot them as postcards, like this one, go wide with our characters walking through this beautiful landscape. This vintage location is shot with vintage lenses, so it really feels like it’s almost from another time.

Daniels: When we were finding this shot, we were going to lay track and do this whole thing. I ended up doing it with our Steadicam operator, Sawyer, and he did an incredible job on every shot in the movie that he operated. It’s hard to include someone top to bottom, and the entire height of the Cyclone; he auditioned framing it like this, and we both loved it. It’s such an odd way to frame it, cutting them off at the waist, but the actual physical constraints of shooting it lended itself to this totally iconic image.

The order they’re in says a lot: Karren leading; Ani always being trailed by Igor. We stuck to that order basically the whole time, and it just says so much about them as characters, and their journey—this real motley crew. It’s one of my favorite images from the movie.

Baker: When this shot is in motion, you have beautiful seagulls all over the place. We really liked the sound of that.

Daniels: Our PA was basically throwing out breadcrumbs and seeds and stuff. We’d get a bunch of seagulls, and then we’d have to shoot as quickly as we could before they dissipated. We only had so many takes with the seagulls because they’d get bored, and they wouldn’t want to do it anymore. It only got worse each take.

The Snow

The movie’s final scene jarringly shakes up its style, with Ani and Igor looking direct to camera as they address each other. The shift was very intentional—and complicated to pull off.

Baker: This shot, and the reverse of Igor, are the only purely subjective shots in the film. What was the lens choice on this one?

Daniels: I think this was a 50mm. It’s actually in his seat. So she’s just looking at the lens and no one else, with me behind the camera, and Igor is in the back seat, probably. I forget. It was important to not shoot it long-lens. The camera had to be Igor, and then the reverse. You would feel it if the camera was not actually in the car, if you were shooting through the window or something on a longer lens. I don’t think it would feel as intimate as this. It’s definitely a stylistic departure for the film, but one that feels very motivated by where we’re at in the story. The audience at this point wants this.

Baker: Hopefully it’s rewarding in a way; you’re waiting for two hours and 15 minutes, and then, finally, you’re getting this.

Daniels: Logistically, the circumstances behind this shot: This was day two of three days, and two different locations that were part of shooting this scene.The actors were able to piece it together with their performances in a way where you don’t even feel it—our production designer, the lighting, everything went into making three days in two different locations look like one continuous piece of time. Our production designer was even on top of the car. He hand-built this cardboard box with holes in it and was shaking the snow out of it so that it would build up on the back window, but not too much so it wouldn’t stick to it too much. At one point, because he was shaking the box, his body was actually shaking the car a little bit, and I had to tell him, “Dude, go easy on the shaking because I can feel the car moving.”

Baker: It was cold, too. It was very cold. We were shooting for hours and hours with the car door essentially open for our camera to be side-shots, because that was the only way. We had some sort of tarp over us, I think. I don’t remember. And it was scripted that the snow would build slowly on the window until they were essentially engulfed, and that was very important for me. We were running out of time. A light was growing on one of the buildings, so we had to stop shooting in one direction, and then the NYPD started kicking our cones once we went over our permitted time. It was stressful on many levels, many levels.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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