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‘I just thought I’d made a crazy-ass exploitation movie’: Sean Baker on his Palme d’Or-winning lapdance film

Anora, his tragi-comedy about a lapdancer who marries a Russian oligarch’s son, is the latest in a line of acclaimed movies about sex work. The Hollywood outsider talks about his anxieties about A-listers and the dangers of partying in his 50s

Baker’s latest film, Anora, is a glorious, high-energy tragi-comedy about a Russian-American lapdancer, played by the Oscar-tipped Mikey Madison, who comes to regret her impetuous marriage to the giggly 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch. The film alludes to the generally sanitised Hollywood view of sex work by showing Ani’s young husband-to-be sliding across the floor of his mansion in his socks, just like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, the 1983 comedy about a teenager who turns his house into a brothel for the night. Aside from Willem Dafoe, who was Oscar-nominated for playing a sweet-natured motel manager in 2017’s The Florida Project, Baker has steered clear of stars, perhaps fearing that they could wreck the loosey-goosey methods that are vital to his work: the extensive improvisations, the last-minute rewrites, the scenes where actors mingle with unsuspecting members of the public.

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