Midway through “Anora,” Sean Baker’s screwball Cinderella story, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, runs off from the extravagant southern Brooklyn mansion owned by his parents. His new bride, the title character known as Ani (Mikey Madison), and his handlers spend much of the rest of the movie in pursuit, a chaotic chase that culminates at the Manhattan strip club where Ani dances.
In December, I took that ride in more or less reverse with Baker, who wrote and directed, and his location manager, Ross Brodar. The trip was one way of gaining an appreciation of just how much geography informs the film’s madcap humor and class commentary. Starting at the strip club in Midtown and wending around the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, past the Parkview Diner, Coney Island and Brighton Beach en route to the mansion in Mill Basin that played Ivan’s home, you get a survey of high and low, the borough at its most touristy and its most exclusive.
“I try to do that with my films, try to show stuff that’s hidden in plain sight — areas that haven’t been shot out,” Baker said.
Follow along on our tour:
Ani’s Workplace
Headquarters, or HQ, Ani’s workplace, is a hybrid of two clubs that share a building and a back staircase. Each provided the movie with a different vibe.
Upstairs, HQ KONY served as their high-end spot, filled with neon signage and posters for gangster movies. (KONY stands for “King of New York,” the 1990 Abel Ferrara film.) This is where Ani gives Ivan her number, takes clients into V.I.P. rooms and shows off an upside-down pole dance. That pole had to be installed for the scene in a spot that Baker said was off-limits the first time they scouted the club.
“Whoever was in here had been here for 24 hours, and the party was still going,” he recalled. “And it was 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. the next day.”
The locker room where Ani and her co-workers get ready is on that floor, too. A stray shoe or two was strewn about when I visited, but Baker pointed out that for the 2023 shoot, it was made more colorful and busier with décor like pictures and cutout hearts on the lockers.
Downstairs in the daytime, Rosewood resembles a trendy members-only hangout spot like Soho House or even a co-working space more than it does a lap dance joint. The room is filled with slightly worn couches; between two of them sits a scratched, copper-colored bathtub. But that weathered look was part of what appealed to Baker, almost as if he were making a period piece about a sex worker. Brodar said the ambience suggested the type of place where courtesans might work.
The space often dictated how they filmed. When Baker discovered a row of leather chairs in a narrow hallway — a corridor just wide enough for a dolly shot — he and his cinematographer, Drew Daniels, knew they had found their opening sequence. And the main couch area afforded them an opportunity to show how the club worked: He used telephoto lenses to unobtrusively film Madison working the room, as he issued instructions in her earpiece.
Ivan’s Mansion
Yes, the mansion where Ivan lives is real, and so is that stunning view of the Mill Basin Bridge, a span of the Belt Parkway that runs over an inlet between Canarsie and Sheepshead Bay.
The house was at one point owned by a Russian oligarch, but for the past three and a half years, it has been home to Irina Davidov, who runs a medical spa business, and her husband, along with seven offspring, who range from 1-year-old twins to sons in their mid-20s.
When we visited, Ms. Davidov still hadn’t seen the film — or what happens to her house when henchmen (played by Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan) working for Ivan’s father try to tie up Ani. Never fear: The glass table and everything else that gets smashed was brought in. The crew laid plexiglass on the marble tile floor to avoid damaging it.
The Davidovs gave Baker the run of the place for three weeks. Three crew members, including Brodar, who appears onscreen as a guard at the front gate, even lived there then. Revisiting the space, he and Baker remembered some of the challenges of filming there. Mirrors by the front door made camera placement difficult. They used a helicopter to get a shot of the third-floor balcony, and that required them to scramble to hold down a tarp covering the pool. Other aspects of the home, like an electronic door-locking system, prompted Baker to tweak the script. And when Ani dances for Ivan there, it became a much bigger set piece than Baker had intended, due in part to the ample natural light. “We realized that if we shot it at a certain part of the day we’d have amazing sun,” he said.
Baker, who slept in Ani and Ivan’s bed when he needed a quick nap (the bedroom’s retractable TV is real, too), couldn’t look at the home without missing some of the scenes that he cut: a “Pretty Woman”-style bubble bath in which Ani smokes a blunt; a moment on the balcony when Ivan promises to kiss Ani the way he would in Red Square; and an interlude in a walk-in closet where the pile of designer handbags astonishes Ani. (The pile is still there.) Maybe most striking is a lounge with green, zodiac-themed artwork and a skylight. The room appears only in a brief scene involving drugs. “This is where I kick myself as a director for not doing total justice to my location,” Baker told me.
Tatiana Grill
This Russian restaurant, a Brighton Beach institution, is one of several spots where Ivan’s handlers, led by Toros (Karren Karagulian), search for him. Ani and Toros barge into the kitchen to interrogate an assistant cook before Toros, increasingly desperate, disrupts diners and dancers to ask them if they’ve seen the young man. “We got permission, of course, from Tatiana’s, but not everybody was in on it,” Baker said. “Sometimes we’d shoot some of that stuff ‘Candid Camera’-style, and it became apparent to some people on the second take that he wasn’t looking for an actual kid.”
With such setups, everyone who might appear onscreen needs to sign a release. Baker, who has used this strategy before, said he had encountered less resistance in New York than in Los Angeles, where people tend to be “more snotty” about signing. At Tatiana’s, several diners were eager to get on with their partying.
“The good thing with that crowd was, by the time we were done, they kind of wanted us to get the hell out of there, and so getting stuff signed was, like, ‘If we sign this, will you leave?’” Brodar said.
Baker said that Borisov, who played the henchman Igor, originally helped secure the location by making a visit several months before filming. He is a Ryan Gosling-level heartthrob overseas, Baker explained, and people kept wanting to snap pictures with him.
Williams Candy
Watching “Anora,” you might get the impression that this 1941 Coney Island candy shop — which Ani and Ivan visit early on and which Igor trashes during the search for Ivan — is on the boardwalk. But it isn’t. It’s next to Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, and the entrance opens inland, onto Surf Avenue. “That is something I was hoping locals would forgive me for,” Baker said.
Baker had originally envisioned using a vape shop. But the producer Alex Coco redirected him here, and the site was too good not to use. “The candy shop was so bright and colorful — and then, also, ‘candy shop’ is another name for a strip joint, right?” Baker said. Scattered gumballs and gummy bears made for a more visually exciting scene than smashed bongs would have. And as with several other locations, Baker found a cast member here. Billy O’Brien, who plays the boss at the shop, actually works part-time at Williams Candy.
Noelia Cuautle, the manager, said that customers had been mentioning the movie. In a phone conversation, O’Brien, 74, said that he had been working around Coney Island since he was 17. Baker’s pitch to him was simple: “He just asked me if I wanted to be in it,” O’Brien recalled. “I said, yeah, all right.”
Toros’s Church
There was some cheating, as is normal in moviemaking. St. Sarkis Armenian Apostolic Church, which provided the interiors for a comic set piece surrounding a baptism that Toros abruptly departs, is actually in Douglaston, Queens, not Gravesend, Brooklyn, as Baker imagined it would be. The final scene, in a car that’s ostensibly parked in front of Ani’s Brighton Beach apartment, was actually shot over three days in two locations, although you’d have to look closely to spot the discrepancies.
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