Sean Baker, the director of the dark side of the American dream: ‘I think I show an America that you would otherwise never see on the big screen’ With ‘Anora,’ winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the director premieres his fifth feature film. ‘If being indie means that you have complete control over your work, I will always be indie’ Sean Baker is scared of the figure of Eloy de la Iglesia. That a cursed director of the Spanish Transition — the man who portrayed the wave of destruction that heroin caused in the sewers of the vaunted Movida Madrileña — scares the most recent winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, an indie filmmaker with a New York soul, is a sign of the shadows Baker hides.
“At New York University, we didn’t get that Spanish cinema. I discovered it about five years ago and I feel more aligned with it than with Fellini,” he says. “His personality reminds me of Pasolini, and I’ve been told that his drug addiction originated from his interaction with actors.
That scares me because I was hooked. I had problems with drugs, I was addicted to heroin at the end of the 1990s, when I was in my twenties. Sometimes I get scared when I realize that I’m getting too close to those worlds again.
In one film I had a person shooting up next to me. Ugh.” For a filmmaker who doesn’t enjoy interviews, the confession came out in torrents.
The recently released Anora is the fifth film in which the 53-year-old New Yorker studies characters related to p.
