Sean Baker and Bhad Bahbie having been on the same email chain is among one of the lessons I learned at an in conversation event with the decorated filmmaker at Vivid Sydney. Part of the festival’s Great Minds series, Baker spent 90 minutes before an adoring crowd who latched onto every one of his teachings and anecdotes on his cinematic process and what he makes of the current cultural landscape. 

At the beginning of the event, moderator Alexei Toliopoulos introduced a reel of Baker’s filmography before the director took the stage. When the director consequently did so, he joked, “whoever made that reel thinks I’m Michael Bay.” Baker wasn’t wrong, the preceding montage of his cinematic ventures was scored with intense, action-film-esque music and featured an inexplicable degree of choppy editing. This disconnect between the nature of the director’s films and Vivid’s understanding of his role in film culture perhaps best exemplifies the event’s targeting of peripheral enjoyers rather than keen fans of Baker’s work.  

Baker spent around half of the event answering questions relevant to his 2025 Oscar darling Anora (2024), and the other half speaking to the rest of his filmography and the state of the film industry at large. On Anora, the director divulged details of his production process, revealing to the audience that stars Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov were signed onto the project before Baker had even begun to pen its screenplay. Baker was first drawn to Mikey Madison from her role in Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2019), but didn’t make contact with her until her psychotic arc in Scream (2022). At an initial meeting with Madison, Baker’s artistic inspirations were cemented, and he told the actress, “I will go and write the screenplay with you in mind.” Madison went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress that year, which the director also noted was the most gratifying of Anora’s six wins—the other five of which were his personal prizes. 

There was a distinct sense of rag-tag guerilla filmmaking described by Baker throughout his time, ranging from anecdotes about shooting on an iPhone due to to Disneyland’s prohibition of filming for the ending of The Florida Project (2017) to stumbling upon the lead of his debut feature Prince of Brooklyn while working security outside a counterfeit goods store. It’s this undeniable grit and determination that makes Baker such an individualistic and notable filmmaker within the American canon, and it was impossible not to respect the unconventional means with which he creates his works. 

A symptom of the talk’s high-budget and accessible nature was that some of the more controversial aspects of Baker’s public image were shielded away from. Crafting a wildly positive and nurturing image for himself, Baker goes to great lengths to emphasise the importance of protecting child actors on sets, whilst avoiding addressing other criticisms that have been levied against him. 

Anora’s infamous lack of an intimacy coordinator, for instance, was not paid time in Baker’s 90 minutes, neither were the perspectives of dissenters who consider the film disempowering and trivialising. The director did broadly comment on whether or not he, as a white male, is the voice to deliver stories on marginalised communities, but Baker emphasised the collaborative nature of his filmmaking process, offering, “the reason I wanted to explore that community is because I hadn’t seen it on the big screen.” Baker didn’t position himself as a director assigning his subjects with importance, but instead made himself a vessel for the depiction of underrepresented stories.

The talk ended on a familiar note—Baker lending time to his ongoing championing of the theatrical experience and the preservation of independent cinemas. The director said that he learned the value of the cinema while working as a projectionist in his teenage years at a single-screen, family-run venue, arguing that in modern cultural conversations that “the advent of streaming and Covid really did change the way audiences see feature films.” Baker called onlookers to action, asking a willing crowd to spend “one night out of your month” watching films at a cinema to keep the medium alive. “I’m not worried about the future of cinema itself … what I am worried about is how we’re seeing them,” Baker concluded.

For a filmmaker concerned with unflinching depictions of hardship and suffering, there was something sanitised about Baker’s 90 minutes of airtime at Sydney Town Hall. Vivid’s prepared questions sought not to challenge Baker or his audience, but provide them with a palatable version of a number of incredibly nuanced and complex subjects, which the director handled with grace and professionalism. Nonetheless, the time spent with Baker hammered home why he finds himself at the centre of the cultural conversation. The director is charting unprecedented territory—navigating the proliferation of cinema as content alongside the waning attentions of contemporary audiences with his indie filmmaking process, prioritising film as an artform above all else.