Anora has been the film on every cinema fan's lips ever since its premiere at Cannes Film Festival last year where it won the Palme d'Or and received a 10-minute standing ovation. It was the runaway success at this year's Oscars, scooping five awards including Best Actress for leading lady Mikey Madison and a record-breaking four for Baker himself. The dreamy yet gritty drama film tells the story of Anora ‘Ani' Mikheeva (Madison), a stripper working at Brooklyn's Headquarters club. One night, she crosses paths with high-rolling customer Ivan ‘Vanya' Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a rich Russian oligarch. He invites Ani to his mansion in exchange for sex, with the duo going on to meet frequently until Vanya offers Anora $10,000 to be his girlfriend for a week.

Their whirlwind seven days together culminate with Ani and Vanya tying the knot in Vegas – a union that disgraces his family and forces his parents to send associates of theirs to have the union annulled. Ahead of the film's Criterion 4k and Blu-ray release, FILMHOUNDS sat down with Baker to discuss the film's representation of sex work, Madison's star power, and what fans can expect from its upcoming physical media release.

Anora has been praised for its representation of sex work and sex workers. It's not the first of your films to explore sex work, but of course, the industry is ever-changing. What research went into building this world?

In the last five films, there's been an element of sex work in there, and so each film has required research because it's different aspects of sex work. There's been different consultants and different avenues I've had to take with this film. Anora was about dancing and escorting, and one of our chief consultants was Andrea Werhun. She wrote a memoir called Modern Whore which is about her experience in her 20s as a dancer and escort. She came on board, read our screenplay, and she gave us feedback. I'm always looking for little details that you can only get if you work within that world. Little things like the fact that Ani is eating from Tupperware in the dressing room, and that line from Diamond (Lindsey Normington) when she says, ‘You caught your whale.' We're not going to tell the audience what that is. If the audience can figure it out, that's great. Or if they're so interested, to go ahead and Google after they leave the movie theatre. It presents a real air of authenticity and Andrea was wonderful with that.

There were also the dancers that Mikey was able to shadow at that club. She became very immersed in that world and also had one-to-one Zoom sessions with Andrea. Two of our supporting actors – Luna Sofía Miranda, who plays Lulu in the film, and Lindsey Normington, who plays Diamond – are both strippers/actors, so they were bringing their lived experience to it too. That was a form of consulting because we would be talking about a scene, and we would ask, ‘What would be the perfect music for this scene?' and they'd say, ‘Oh, the girls at the club would appreciate it if you had this Slayyyter song.

Mikey Madison has been receiving her flowers for her role as Anora. Was there a particular scene when you were making Anora that you thought ‘Wow, she is a star'?

It was in the first week. We were just shooting some Brighton Beach stuff leading up to the mansion, we were there for three weeks, but it was in that first week. It was just me seeing her in character on Brighton Beach Boulevard with that fur coat and the red scarf, her accent, and delivering the New York attitude that I was looking for in this character. At the end of the first week of filming, I knew we had something really special. It made me up my game because I suddenly felt more responsible as a director, knowing that my actors were giving such incredible performances. I was like, ‘I better not screw up. I want them to benefit as much as they possibly can from this movie.'

Anora switches from highly-stylised and almost fantastical sequences to almost documentary-like realism throughout. How did you find balancing these two styles to tell the same story?

There's a bunch of styles in the film. It came down to each individual scene, set piece, and where we were in the movie to decide what style to use to get our point, tensions, or the humour across. After the very stylized opening title sequence, I deliberately filmed in a documentary style in telephoto or handheld to ground the audience. I wanted them to think ‘Okay, this might just, this might be the movie that I'm gonna get for the next two hours.' It's based on realism trying to show you the mechanics of her livelihood, and what goes into each night of her life that was up. Once I got that out of the way, we started having fun with the relationship between Annie and Ivan. I was able to lean into a more poppy style with the use of different camera moves and accentuated colours, so it really depended on what I needed the audience to feel at the time. But it was a balancing act that I didn't fully polish that balancing act until post-production.

I love a lot of the chaos of Anora with scenes of characters talking over each other and lots of quick cuts. What were the logistics of these sort of scenes to keep them coherent?

Because I'm my own editor, I'm always keeping my editing hat on. If I were directing this for somebody else, I would probably be a little more careful about isolated lines here and there, so that the audio editing can be smoother. But knowing that I was going to have to do that, I was like, ‘It can be messy. I'll figure it out.' I needed music blasting over the scenes in the club because I knew that would bring an extra level of realism later on in the film. I intended to have all that overlapping dialogue, so I would tell my actors, ‘Don't worry about it. Don't try to isolate each other's dialogue for your sound editor. I want this just thick and real and sloppy.' It was. It would be okay if there were some stutters, uhms and ahs, and just random expletives thrown out. It didn't matter, I just wanted it layered. And so we shot enough coverage where I was able to work with all that crazy, messy dialogue.

If you look at my screenplay and you compare it to the final film, there are moments where there were little windows. I would always tell my actors ‘If you feel there's a breath in there, or any windows, fill it.' So I would encourage improvisation in that way and tell them to feel free to try out a one-liner. I didn't want a second of silence. So I said ‘If you feel that silence coming, throw in an expletive.'

It's set in the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn around Coney Island and Brighton Beach. What did you do to sort of capture the essence of community and multiculturalism in these areas?

New York is a melting pot so obviously I wanted to be very culturally specific, especially with Brighton Beach. When you walk down Brighton Beach Boulevard, you're not hearing that much English. You're hearing a lot of Slavic languages – not just Russian, but everything – so I wanted to represent the neighbourhood and hopefully have the people who live there appreciate the representation. That's always very important for me, no matter what film it is. I'm originally from New York – I grew up in Jersey, and have lived most of my life in Manhattan. So of course, I know New York, and the New York attitude, so that was fun. It's been a while since I made a New York movie, and so it was fun to lean into that. It was easier for me in some ways because of my background I was able to to call out when I felt something might be false. I was able to immediately fix things based on my New York history.

The reception to Anora has been incredible and has resonated with a lot of viewers. What has that been like for you to see people connect with your work in that way?

It's it's been a wild, wild, surreal ride, I can't even tell you. We never had any expectations beyond our desire and hope to play in competition at Cannes, so we certainly never expected to win, and definitely didn't expect the next seven to eight months of what happened. It's hard to be objective, obviously, but I think I made a film that will satisfy both the lovers of movies from the 70s and the 80s as well as the new Hollywood films. So the fact that it's being appreciated on a wide level means everything because it means that there are people who want to see the same films I want to see. This return to films that the studios used to make that were intended for adults and didn't think first and foremost about the commercial value, and that's extremely encouraging.

I'm so happy with what Criterion has done on the release. We were doing this while on the Oscar run – we got bottlenecked in a major way leading up to the Oscars, and suddenly I had to deliver on all the extras for Criterion. We were racing to approve all these extras and the artwork and everything, but Criterion truly put their heart into this. They always made sure that I was able to sign off on everything. Not only are the discs beautiful, but they have all the extras that we could possibly want for this. We had this hour-long behind-the-scenes documentary made for us and everything, but we also have the essay book, which I worked directly with Criterion to make this thing resemble an old-time film magazine called Continental Film Review. We wanted to make it seem like how Continental would have covered Anora if Anora was made in 1978. They nailed it, so I can't wait for you to see the actual hard copy of it.

Anora is available on Criterion Collection 4K UHD and Blu-ray from 5 May

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