Sean Baker on Mikey Madison's emotional scene

[Editor’s note: The following story contains major spoilers for “Anora.”]

“Anora” ends with a grand gesture and a moment of gratitude that turns into despair and possibly hope. And Sean Baker is here to tell you how it was done.

The writer/director's finale, set in a car as snow falls outside on Brighton Beach and windshield wipers lull the audience into a sort of trance until Baker and his team drop the hammer, is one of the greatest movie endings of all time. It's the kind of harrowing summary that leaves you gripped, an emotional farewell to what has so far been a deceptively crazy comedy about sex worker and exotic dancer Ani (Mikey Madison), whose “biggest day” the film leads to is a complete revelation.

Dispatched Russian henchman Igor (Yura Borisov, the film's breakout heartthrob) has carted Ani back to New York from Vegas, where she had entered into a tempestuous contract marriage with the party-hopping childish son of an oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). Marriage (“a Fraud Wedding?” (she croaks at one point) is over, and Ani is left with nothing after Vanya's (Eydelshteyn) parents strip her of her wedding dress and seriously threaten her if she tries to make a noise about it. But Igor, we seen in the scenes of the film as he slowly falls in love with Ani as he works to capture but ultimately protect her, has saved the greatest gift for Ani: her wedding ring as a symbol of goodwill. And of course Ani can just to thank him with a sexual favor. Then he tries to kiss her, breaking her barriers to intimacy. She stops, pulls away, and then breaks down sobbing in his arms as he holds her.

The inspiration for the ending came from “Anora's” main influence, Federico Fellini's “Nights of Cabiria,” where the prostitute Cabiria (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's own wife) sheds a mascara-stained tear at the end of the film after being exploited by a man again became -Be a lover. Cabiria looks at the camera with a nod as if to say, “It's okay, keep laughing, I'm fine, I'll carry on.” In Baker's film, we don't see Ani's face in the final shot, which makes her future more unclear and may leave audiences hoping for a romance between Ani and Igor long after the credits roll. Maybe, but Baker sees it differently. We know that at least Ani will be okay.

“I always have the beginning, middle and end worked out before I start writing. “That was a sequence that we pretty much came up with in our heads,” Baker said in an interview with IndieWire with his producers Samantha Quan (also his wife) and Alex Coco.

“I re-read the Google Doc that we worked on before you went into the final draft of the script and it's exactly the same from the beginning,” Coco said.

“We knew the snow would slowly build up and literally trap her like a snow cave by the end of the scene,” Baker said. Regardless, he told IndieWire: “For me, the endings have to leave an emotional impact. The ending of my favorite films is the most memorable part of those films…after this long journey, we had to keep that ending.”

“We didn't know it would take three days to shoot,” Coco said, and Quan added that they filmed in two locations in Brighton Beach (where the cast and crew lived before and during production). Coco continued: “The choreography around this scene wasn’t just the performances. It was also the whole crew around the car trying to maintain that intimate space in the car where they were just alone. We had two tracking shots. We had our production designer [Stephen Phelps] with a box full of fake snow on the hood of the car, dumps it at the window and tries to collect it. I'm trying to deal with the police because we're running out of time not to get kicked out… Everyone held their breath and prayed for five minutes like please, let everything be okay.”

Sitting in the back seat of the car with Borisov and Madison, Baker said: “This magical moment happened. I don't know if you remember Nights of Cabiria, but in the last shot she has this single tear. I just remember sitting in the back seat and leaning over to see if tears would come and [Mikey Madison] makes a single tear, and I was like, 'Oh my God, I can't believe we're making this unintentional reference to the film that actually inspired it.'”

I see the final scene of “Anora” as an existential breakdown, where Ani can only show her gratitude in this way with her body. But the emotional and psychological twist of her journey with Vanya leaves her at a dead end, unable to carry on in her usual way as a sex worker – one whose job requires her to avoid any substantive human connections like the ones that… Igor perhaps tried to build up.

“That’s one point of view. I definitely have a different interpretation. “It’s designed to allow for different interpretations,” Baker said. “I see that it's more about her and not really something that she gives him, but something through which she now regains the strength that she completely lost during this journey. We play with different themes and one of them is consent, and then when he tries to kiss her in that moment, that crosses the line for her. It's like, 'No, I'm in control of this moment.'”

Baker said: “Mikey and I talked a lot about the motivation and intent of this scene and the meaning, and we came up with something ourselves. But we also said in these conversations, 'I don't think we'll ever say what we feel ourselves.'”

“Everyone seems to have a strong reaction to it, regardless of what they think is happening,” Quan said.

Baker is used to general disagreement in his films – which are almost always anchored by a sensitive portrait of sex work, including his iPhone-shot, L.A.-set film “Tangerine” or the street vendors of his third feature, “Prince of Broadway.” ” On his previous film, the toxic character study “Red Rocket,” he worried about possible audience reactions to the age difference between the penniless ex-porn star brazenly played by Simon Rex and the Lolita-like teenage counter worker he manipulates courted by Suzanna Son.

“We actually thought that [‘Anora’] would be more [divisive] – So far it hasn’t been as divisive as we thought. It was strange to see that there was such acceptance,” Baker said. “I even have some haters on Twitter saying, 'We still hate Sean, but we like this movie.' They don't give me a break. You still hate me!”

Chris O'Falt contributed reporting.

“Anora” is now playing everywhere on Neon.