Writer-director Sean Baker’s brand of neo-neorealism focuses on people, like Tangerine‘s fierce transsexual prostitute or Prince of Broadway‘s immigrant hustler, who’re ordinarily seen only in the background of films and TV shows—if at all. His latest, The Florida Project, offers a non-judgmental, child’s-eye view of life in the Magic Castle, one of the seedy but fabulous motels in the outer orbit of Orlando’s Disney World that function as temporary housing for people one step ahead of homelessness.
While helicopters take off in the background, like emissaries from another planet, six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friends, Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), roam happily through the motel and the surrounding area, exploring their turf like a pack of wild dogs under the indulgent but protective eye of the motel’s manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe). Meanwhile, Moonee’s very young and rebellious mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), while hustling hard to support them, creates an environment risky enough to trigger an investigation by the Department of Children and Families.
Baker called me from a train from New York to Philadelphia, where the film was about to have a gala preview at the Philadelphia Film Festival. We talked about how he works with first-time actors, why it’s hard to make character studies for American audiences, and the many factors that make it hard for people like Moonee and her mother to form stable, long-term relationships.
You like to mix first-time actors with seasoned professionals, and in Tangerine you included things that the non-professional actors had experienced in their own lives. You’ve said you modeled that process after Mike Leigh, who also mixes professional and amateur actors and who does a lot of rehearsal and character development with his cast before shooting his films. Did you do something similar with this one?
There’s a degree of that in what I do, but I’ve never had firsthand experience with Mike Leigh’s process. From what I’ve read, he spends a lot of time developing his scripts through improvisational workshops. That’s not really the case with my films. We have scripts or script treatments when we get to the place where we’re filming. Then we find the actors, who’re sometimes first-time actors. To find out if they can pull it off, we put them in scenarios to see how natural they are in front of the camera. They’ll have a little bit to go on, sometimes our scripted dialogue and sometimes just themes and an arc to follow. I record all of those scenes, and sometimes we hear a line or two that we really like and we make sure that gets into the final script.
But to answer your question, this is a little different from Tangerine because the children had to be approached in a different way. We had an acting coach, Samantha Quan, who basically turned the set into a summer camp for them. Every day when I was shooting something else or focusing on something else, the kids were with her, usually the motel rooms where we were shooting. They would be kept entertained by acting exercises that didn’t feel like work to them, learning about their characters and the scenarios. I would check in every once in a while to see how things were going and give my input.
Bria and Mela [Murder], the two moms—those were the scenes that we applied that Mike Leigh approach to. Bria was 100% green. She’d never acted before in her life. Mela had made a short, and most of that film was improvised. They had to learn how to memorize lines, and they had to get to the place, through these workshops, where they understood these characters and the plot enough that they could actually riff on it. There’s one scene, the one where they’re in the pool together, that was almost entirely improvised, because they’d gotten to the point where they understood their characters and they understood the themes and what they had to hit in terms of bullet points. We ran the camera on them for about 10 minutes and got a perfect little, like, 20 seconds that encapsulated the relationship they were in at that time. They even got in a joke there about Moonee and her love of maple syrup.
As usual in your films, friendship is a big theme here. The rhythm of Moonee and her friends’ summer days is pretty much the whole narrative arc of the movie, and mostly it feels very realistic: The camera seems to just follow along as they run free. How much of what they did when they were playing was just them playing and how much was scripted?
I don’t think there were any scenes that were 100% just watching the kids be kids because there wasn’t time for that. Trust me: I really wanted that. I asked for 60 days and I only got 35 days. I’ll never do that again. But the only time I got the kids to just play was when they were making fart sounds. Valeria [Cotto, who played Jancey] and Brooklynn became very good friends while we shot—and they actually remain best friends. So that was sweet, and that allowed us to shoot them holding each other and looking out to the lake and just being friends. The boys were different. Those boys were eight years old, so you can imagine: They’re not exactly loving hanging out with girls. I’m glad it came across that everybody was friends, but it got a little hairy at times.
After Tangerine, you said you wanted to get away from classic three-act storytelling in your movies and make more loosely structured character studies, and you’ve definitely done that with this one. How did this way of telling a story live up to what you were hoping for? Is this the start of a whole new way of working for you?
Did you see Take Out?
Yeah. I really liked it too.
Thank you! That had a structure to it. I don’t need a structure, but I understand that audiences, especially U.S. audiences, do. I’m reading a lot on Twitter and Facebook that people are actually a little upset at what they consider the lack of a three-act structure—
For this one?
Yeah. And I don’t know what to say about that. I really don’t. And then I talk to Europeans, and they’re telling me I’m still too structured. Read the rest in Slant Magazine
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