Sean Baker’s new film, Anoricould have starred Tom Hardy and Ryan Gosling. Early in the development of the project, a producer interested in Baker’s script wanted to bring in the actors. Inside a West Hollywood coffee shop a few weeks ago, the director recalled the man’s enthusiasm. “‘Those are your Russians!'” Baker told me the producer said of the characters they’ll play: two tough guys tasked with breaking up an impulsive marriage between their rich Russian and his new wife, a young for 23 years. worker from Brooklyn. “I was like, ‘Oh, I was actually thinking about casting real Russians.’” He laughed. “I like those guys, but that’s not how I make my movies.”

This is how Baker makes his films: with small budgets, no actors, a keen eye for realism and a determined rejection of Hollywood, even as his profile in the industry has risen. Sure, he constantly feels the tension between sticking with his approach and moving away from it; he was “almost seduced,” he said, by the aforementioned producer when he dangled the prospect of a $20 million price tag for Anori. But for now, he’s established himself as something of an oxymoron: mainstream indie director. His work, focused on people who don’t tend to be movie stars—undocumented immigrants, adult movie stars—has brought him critical acclaim and attention at major awards. He has built a dedicated following among moviegoers with his unconventional production process; he even rejects the typical practice of conducting test screenings for public input. “It’s supposed to be my vision, so why would I ask for a bunch of opinions that would tarnish my vision?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. Like, if I give a damn, that’s on me!”

Besides, the strategy worked for him. All his movies, including the cult favorite Mandarin and Oscar nominee The Florida Projectthey feel fully accomplished despite their lack. They are raw, intimate portraits of Americans who are often misrepresented or overlooked in pop culture, especially sex workers. Baker’s love of telling the stories of outsiders isn’t why he chooses to remain one himself. “It’s not about the subject, because there i am those movies made by the Hollywood studio system,” he said. “I just feel like it’s so scary because there are so many movies made by committee.”

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Never has his conviction paid off like it did with Anorihis most accomplished work – and as it continues its theatrical release, the biggest hit at the box office-still. The film stars the titular heroine of an electric Mikey Madison, better known as “Ani”, whose brassy exterior belies a serious desire for an easier life. When she meets Ivan Zakharov aka “Vanya” (played by Mark Eydelshteyn), a client who turns out to be the obscenely rich son of a Russian oligarch, she is drawn into a drug and sex-fueled romance that leads to pair. getting married in Las Vegas. Their union, however, results in an unpleasant collision with reality when Vanya’s family henchmen come to undo it.

Anori is a romantic comedy, a high-stakes thriller, and a moving character study; for Baker, it is also a defining moment in his film. After the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it won the Palme d’Or, its most prestigious award. He reconstructed the scene: he showed where his producers were around him and where Madison had been standing. He proved wide-eyed when he realized – in part because the other top contenders had won other trophies, which meant they were out of the running for the top prize – that he might be announced as the winner. And when his name was indeed called, he said, “it was my dream come true.”

Victory also led to “a bit of an existential crisis,” he told me. “This is the first time I’ve actually had anything serious, like, Which is RIGHT consequence?which is very dangerous. I try to avoid it, but until now I haven’t really had to think about it.”

Early in his decades-long career, Baker found himself drawn to stories about pursuing success and stability in atypical ways. “To me, there’s something fascinating about chasing this American dream, but the people who have to chase it, who aren’t given the normal path, who can’t follow the normal path, because they’re not allowed to,” he said. Its protagonists often glimpse an ideal version of their lives that is just out of reach: In Mandarintwo trans sex workers spend Christmas Eve battling rumors that threaten their friendship and clientele. In The Florida Projectkids living in a motel create their own magical kingdom just miles away from Disney World, while their guardians do everything they can to protect the happiness of the young children. In Red Rocketa battered porn star meets a teenager he believes could be his ticket back to semi-stardom; in the process of grooming her as his protégé, he takes advantage of the few relationships he has.

Baker feels a kinship with such characters, even as he points out that he, raised comfortably in suburban New Jersey, never needed to rely on a criminalized and stigmatized livelihood. What resonates with him, he told me, is “that attitude of not giving up and the frustration, the feeling that sometimes it’s never going to work.” For much of his career, he pursued side gigs to make ends meet, spending years making money editing wedding videos and actors’ demos; even today, most of his income comes from outside of his film. “I feel like there’s more than a little hustler in me,” he said.

Still, the kind of storytelling he’s interested in can easily be read as exploitative rather than empathetic in the wrong hands. “You have to get buy-in and buy-in,” Baker said, “the buy-in of people who have had that experience… I don’t want a sex worker to see this movie and just say, ‘WHO did he write this This is not us.” With Anorias in his previous films, he was careful not to look heavy. “This is a first for me. i care that audience more than any other.” So when he settles on a world to explore, he consults with members of the subcultures that inhabit it and moves into the locations he plans to feature. He recruits non-actors, locals and real-life sex workers to create an authentic feel. On set, he encourages his cast to change any dialogue that sounds wrong and improvise so they have plenty of tonal options to consider. He liberally edits what he shot; for final cutting a The Florida Projectfor example, he ordered it differently from the script. He bathes his films in saturated colors, pushing back on Hollywood’s tendency to paint poverty in soft hues and instead prioritizing the interiority of the characters — their humor, their pride, their wonder.

But if Baker previously mitigated his fears of inauthenticity by focusing on realism and meticulously incorporating his research, making a film as deliberately comic as Anori requires a different approach. Many of his scenes are exaggerated to the point of absurdity—he referred to a late scene in which Ani, a hungover Vanya, and their exasperated caretakers disturb the peace in a courtroom as “almost sitcom-level”—and he wanted his actors to push the humor as far as possible. A carefully choreographed home invasion sequence, during which Ani fights tooth and nail to defend herself from Zakharov friends, runs for almost half an hour, full of physical gags and F-bombs. Baker seemed to delight in the ridiculousness , Samantha Quan, Baker’s wife and producer on several of his films, told me, “You always know if a shot is good because you hear him chuckle.”

Read: A meaningful talk with a flock of birds The Florida Project

Baker was breaking his own rules, in other words: risking the story feeling unreal, a little too fantastical. And yet, he told me, even as the scenes grew increasingly shrill, as he built toward his sober ending, he figured they would come together. The director sees Anori as an “open comedy” but contains as much sadness as joy. Throughout the film, he turns his lens on Ani as a grounding force, even for the anxiety-ridden henchmen trying to break up her marriage, emphasizing the unusual and visceral bond they begin to build in the face of Vanya’s demanding family. Madison shows the light slowly fading from Ani’s eyes, exhausted from constantly defending her worth and what she thought was a loving relationship. Baker’s other films also produce such poignancy, but in less gradual ways, abruptly blurring reality and fantasy in their final moments: The Florida Projectchildren can only get to the happiest place on Earth in their dreams. In Red Rocketthe protagonist sheds a tear as he lets his imagination run wild.

Perhaps this is the key to the director’s work feeling specific yet universal, exuberant yet poignant. His films are balancing acts that reveal the so-called American dream to be a moving target – a seductive tease. Ani accepted acquiring status and material wealth as an ideal; from the moment Vanya gives her a diamond ring, she begins to fight fears that her Cinderella story may be over. When I noted that the analysis of the American dream seems to be the most consistent theme of his films, Baker smiled. “Maybe,” he said. He sees his work as inherently political, but if there are any statements he’s trying to make, he told me, “they’ll be disguised.”

Baker, too, has hovered just outside the Hollywood spotlight. But as his films began to garner more attention — especially with that Palme d’Or win — he knows he’s become a household name among his peers. However, remaining on the fringes of the industry, he built a precise filmography, up to the same font he uses for every title— which is Aguafina, for the record. “Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck between two worlds because I preach about being independent and what that can mean and having untainted vision,” he told me. “But at the same time…” He shrugged. “I do I love Hollywood.”