Anora’s Oscars Cinderella Story: “We’re Following Our Hearts”

The first year Tom Quinn and his then-nascent independent film company Neon went to the Cannes Film Festival, he had his eye on one particular movie. “We had desperately tried to buy and distribute The Florida Project,” Neon’s co-founder and CEO tells Vanity Fair. That 2017 stunner from Sean Baker was ultimately acquired by A24, as was the writer-director’s next movie, 2021’s Red Rocket. But Neon kept on—and nearly eight years later, Quinn finds himself coming full circle. About a year before Baker’s Anora premiered at last May’s Cannes, Neon bought the movie having seen nothing but the script. The movie went on to win the Palme d’Or—the fifth consecutive movie distributed by Neon in the U.S. to take home the prestigious prize on the Croisette—and gross more than $36 million globally against a $6 million budget.

having emerged as the Oscar front-runner for best picture, taking last weekend’s top honors from the producers’ and directors’ guilds, he may just make history by winning all of them. (The only person to do that in a single year? Walt Disney.) That’d be quite a feat for a $6 million film, and mark a new peak in Baker’s career as he approaches the 25th anniversary of his feature-film debut while continuing to advocate for the future of indie cinema in movie theaters.

Neon remains a very small company that plays a brilliantly scrappy Oscar game. This first came into view when Parasite pulled off its best-picture miracle in 2020. Last year, the French-language Anatomy of a Fall won the original-screenplay Oscar in addition to nominations for best picture, director, actress, and editing. In an unusually messy awards season, nothing can be certain, but Anora now appears poised to go all the way. What’s Quinn’s take? He’s not ready to call anything yet, but yeah—pretty good.

Vanity Fair: How are you feeling about last weekend? Were you surprised?

Tom Quinn: I was overjoyed…. For the campaign itself, of course it is fantastic and is a great indicator, as was the Palme d’Or. As were our great reviews, as was the incredible response to the film the first time we saw it with an audience in Cannes. To hear the laughter for the first time, to see that you turn around the room and you could hear a pin drop—and you’re breaking people’s hearts left and right as the story turns.

Where did your journey with this film start? You bought Anatomy of a Fall during 2023’s Cannes, for instance, but had secured rights to Anora well before.

My first introduction to Sean was Tangerine and I fell in love with that film. We didn’t get Florida Project and then tried to pursue Red Rocket as well and were not successful. But on the periphery, Sean was always someone that was our biggest supporter in the marketplace—wanting to see our films, being on set, asking for DCPs for him and his crew. There is not a single person out there that we felt is a bigger fan of cinema and a supporter of Neon in that way. The whole company is built on the same belief that cinema is everything in bringing people together in theater—while not the greatest business plan it’s absolutely the thing worth doing. It turns out it’s been a great journey for the company.

This film—I got the script a year before Cannes. It might’ve been somewhere around May to July in the summer. It was one of the quicker negotiations without question—“this is the number, we’re good to go.” I had no idea how he was going to pull it off. It’s a $6 million budget—the idea that they’re going to be in Vegas, on the streets of New York. The nostalgia of Scorsese making Mean Streets in New York is not dissimilar, but in today’s world and at this budget, how is he going to pull that off? To then see the film and to see the extraordinary performances across what is a massive movie, you would never know what the price of this film is. It’s priceless in that way. It’s a very honest and passionate pursuit of his.

Over the weekend, he got to give some speeches and passionately advocated for a 90-day exclusive theatrical window before his peers. That’s a more extensive level of theatrical exhibition than we’re seeing right now. What did you make of that?

What he was saying this past weekend, he was saying in Cannes: It’s our duty as filmmakers to fight, fight. And when he says fight, he means it for cinema and making movies for the theatrical experience. That is what he believes his mission is. He’s pursued nothing other than that. The 30-year journey of falling in love with movies and falling in love with the Palme d’Or, which represents the birthplace of cinema, France—a really strong representation of the global power of cinema.

You meet Sean, you know exactly who you’re dealing with, what motivates him. The parallels to Anora, the humanity of that, but the heart. The pure unadulterated passion for this art form.

How closely do you follow predictions? I’m not necessarily asking if you thought this film was counted out, but if you thought maybe the love that it had developed within the industry was being underestimated.

Well, there’s three layers. There’s the very public prognosticator layer, and then there is the critical layer, and then box office is always a score. The idea of trying to understand where a movie sits inside of a season that doesn’t report its box office—they’re not part of the scorecard. You could choose to believe whether or not that has any impact. I believe it does.

The most tangible piece, the thing that I focus on, is the interest in seeing your film combined with the things that matter most—so, sold out screenings, turning people away… Having done that throughout the season, you can see other films that aren’t able to generate that kind of excitement or that kind of response. So that’s one. And then the other is, What’s the direct feedback? What are actual voters saying? Sometimes all those things line up and sometimes they don’t.

In the seven years of this company’s history, we’re also recognizing there’s an entirely new set of voters. There’s a younger set of voters that also are more internationally represented that I think are very excited and participate in seeing every single selection across the nominees. That’s really exciting because then it becomes merit-based, right? Nominations, they say, are campaign-based; wins are really merit-based. Having faith in your film in that regard is the most important.

It has been at times a noisy season. I am curious for your take on some stuff—like the AI controversy surrounding The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, and other films, as somebody who’s working in independent film, and likely saw how people reacted to that.

I choose to ignore the noise. What I can learn on my own, what I can decipher from talking directly to other filmmakers—those are the things that matter to me. Oscar season notoriously and traditionally can get quite ugly. Had there been an era where social media was as active in that era as it is today, who knows what it would look like?

Is there anything along those lines that you have learned in navigating how to position your films?

You have to have confidence in what you believe. It doesn’t mean that you’re always right, but in the aggregate, if you truly believe in something and cinema being the thing that we believe in most, that confidence is quite infectious. Many times we have been the underdog, and the idea of convincing others that Bong Joon-ho isn’t just the greatest director from Korea, he’s one of the world’s greatest directors—we’re believing that. You have to believe it in order to convince others. That’s where the whole Parasite campaign starts.

We’re believing that this is a real contender, that Anora is going to sweep audiences and voters off their feet, young and old, all over the world. That’s where it starts. And being intentional about that, in a world where people question the platform release and taking your time—these are all things that we did with Anora because we believe in order to truly be successful across the whole country and the world, we’re operating from that place of confidence.

It’s a broad thematic approach to the block and tackle of what these campaigns are. But it served us well and it served the company well overall. There are other many great examples, like Anatomy of a Fall having experienced what is a somewhat backward system of how these international films are selected. It’s the best system they have constructed, and I think they’re very conscientious about it, the Academy. But having lived through this with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, where France did not select it as their contender—they did select a great film [Les Miserables]—how come there isn’t room for more? The belief, day one, when that happened was—no, that’s not going to stop this film. This will in fact embolden us to go farther. And to state your belief and claim of what [Anatomy] was day one, which we did, and set our sights on exactly those nominations because the film deserved it.

There are films in the race that have grossed more than 20 times what Anora has, and others with relatively massive campaign budgets.

It should be a vote for the film that you love. You shouldn’t overthink it and you should follow your heart. That’s what we’re doing. We’re following our hearts. That’s what Sean’s doing. If [voters] agree, great. But at the end of the day [you’re] following your heart, your passion, what you believe in—and that’s merit based, that’s not campaigning. For that reason, I always think that we have the same chance, because the Academy Award is a celebration of cinema. Always has been and always will be. When it becomes something other than it is no longer the Academy. And that’s what I think is most important. It’s not an Emmy.

Most awards teams are larger than our whole company. We are not daunted. Sometimes we have to be more creative. But I think in the aggregate, people understand what we represent and the films that we support. Hopefully we overcome some of those barriers by virtue of being incredibly consistent.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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