Brighton Beach Memoirs: Sean Baker and Mikey Madison on Anora

With films like Tangerine and Red Rocket, Sean Baker has become known as the bard of sex workers. So while his new film, Anora, centers on a lap dancer, it also goes back to his earliest roots – as a chronicler of migrant communities.

The director’s second film, Take Out, centered on an undocumented Chinese immigrant trying to survive in New York – a theme he revisited in his follow-up, Prince of Broadway, about a Ghanaian street vendor in Manhattan. Anora (in cinemas now from Neon) takes a trip down the Upper Bay to the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach, and stars Mikey Madison as Anora – or Ani to her friends and clients. An Armenian-American woman who is caught up in a whirlwind romance with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of Russian oligarchs who are less than happy about their boy getting caught up with a hooker.

The seaside setting came from Karren Karagulian, Baker’s friend and longtime collaborator (the two having worked together regularly since Baker’s 2000 feature debut, Four Letter Words). A native of Armenia, he moved to America in 1990 and, like so many Eastern European natives, found himself in Brighton Beach. Baker recalled, “He was selling caviar that he brought over from Armenia on the corner of Brighton Beach Boulevard, and he just had a lot of memories, a lot of great stories of that time.” After working together on Baker’s third film, 2008’s Prince of Broadway, “we were really trying to figure out what kind of story we could tell in that community, and it really just took 15 years to figure it out.”

One spark that helped reignite the project came in 2021, when Baker was hired to make a film for fashion label Khaite. Inspired by Walter Hills’ cross-town sprint in The Warriors, he found himself among the dunes and rides of Coney Island, a place he's always loved and that becomes a hangout for Ani, Ivan, and their friends. “That amusement park area, Astroland, is stuck in time. The Cyclone (roller coaster) is over 100 years old. Everything looks vintage, and I just wanted to take advantage of it and shoot it.”

Yet this was never just about cool scenery and Coney Island icons. Baker explained that Anora is about the whole community, as shown in some candid-camera-style scenes “where the actors would go into the restaurant with wireless mics and we’d be on the sidewalk shooting telephoto through the front window.” That technique may reach its zenith when Karagulian’s character, Toros, is going from restaurant to bar to billiard hall, looking for Ivan and interacting with the genuine diners, drinkers, and players of Brighton Beach “and we’re hearing the real reactions to that.”

After all, Baker’s films are deep dives into communities, whether transgender sex workers in Tangerine or Orlando residents living in the shadow of Disney World in The Florida Project, and there’s no shortcut to making that feel authentic. The filmmaker said, “It’s really about time and networking and getting to know people, and conversing with people, and hearing stories, and then when we’re actually shooting it’s all about shooting on location, shooting in the real establishments, involving the real people.”

Moreover, Brighton Beach is not monolithically Russian, but home to microcommunities with their roots across the Caucuses and the former Soviet Union, and so that was reflected in Baker’s cast and crew. “We had Ukrainians and Russians and Armenians,” he said, and everyone gave their input and opened up about their life experiences.

To ground the film in his chosen location, Baker actually moved his entire team out to Brighton Beach two months before filming began, and Baker himself lived in an apartment on Brightwater Avenue, the same location that mob heavy Igor (Yura Borisov) lives. “At night I would sit in bed, just thinking, ‘This is Igor’s apartment. He lives here with his grandmother.'”

Madison was the last to join the team on the ground, moving to Brighton Beach a month before filming started. For her, that immersion was a pivotal part of understanding Ani. “I needed to immerse myself in everything that is her – in her physicality, in her job, the environment, the accent, the Russian. I needed to jump into all of that in a more committed way than I ever have before. Because she’s someone who felt so different from who I am, I had to understand her on a very deep level.”

And the use of language is central to Ani and the story. The only reason that she meets Ivan is because she’s the only dancer at her bar who speaks Russian: however, Madison was one of the few cast members who didn’t, and so she launched into learning Russian as fast and in as much depth as possible. “I didn’t just want to repeat if phonetically. I wanted to understand what I was saying, I wanted to know what the other actors were saying in that scene, what the words meant, the punctuation, so it was an actual conversation.”

If anything, Madison wanted to be more fluent than Ani, whose Russian is supposed to be halting and unpracticed. However, after her first two-hour session, Madison was drained and on the verge of tears, “but I think that lit a fire under me to dedicate even more time to learning Russian. … I would fall asleep listening to YouTube videos, 10 hours of Russians speaking, and I had Duolingo which I was constantly working on.” It all paid off towards the end of filming, the last two days. “I was able to listen to conversations that the guys were having in Russian, and pretty much fully understand what they’re saying. It was shocking to them because they were like, ‘You speak Russian now?’”

She laughs, lightly. “Duolingo is still harassing me. It will not leave me alone. It’s like, ‘It’s been a hundred and something days since you opened me.’ Yes, I know!”

But language wasn’t just an issue for Madison but for Baker, too. He wrote the script originally in English, then had it translated into Russian and Armenian. He’d been through a similar process with his 2004 film Take Out, co-written and co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, which was about 70% Mandarin. In both films, he relied on the native speakers to guide him on subtle meanings and implications. For example, on the set of Anora “there was often some real debate about proper slang, and what a person from this generation would be saying as opposed to what a person from that generation would be saying.”

However, because he was so eager to be immersed in this world, the language barriers opened up new possibilities, and there are even scenes that give an extra twist for people who understand English, Russian, and Armenian. “There are moments in the film where the Armenians are deliberately speaking Armenian so the Russian-speakers in the back of the car can’t understand what they’re saying. … There’s a lot of layering, and I think that it is because of the fact that all of my actors wanted this to play right in their home countries.”

Anora is in theatres now. Visit our listings pages for our review and showtimes.