‘I find myself getting in a little too deep’: Sean Baker on his Palme d’Or-winning lapdance film

Sean Baker is fastidious about research, plunging himself into the milieu of whatever he happens to be making a movie about. And yes, he knows how that looks. “People online are like, ‘Oh, Sean is such a horndog! That’s the only reason he makes those films.’” He gives one of his joyful, crinkle-faced grins, his eyes vanishing into creases, his entire face seeming to smile. At 53, he looks as if he fell in the fountain of youth. His boyish ebullience and tousled hair lend him a Richie Cunningham wholesomeness which contrasts amusingly with the subjects of his films, if not with their bubbly, irrepressible tone.

His charming fourth feature, Starlet, was a buddy movie about a young female porn actor and a cranky elderly widow. His fifth – the riotous breakthrough hit Tangerine, shot with three iPhones on a $100,000 budget – was set among transgender sex workers on LA’s Santa Monica Boulevard. Red Rocket concerned another porn star, older and disreputable this time, who tries to coax his teenage girlfriend into the same career.

Baker’s latest film, Anora, is a glorious, high-energy tragi-comedy about a Russian-American lapdancer, played by the Oscar-tipped Mikey Madison, who comes to regret her impetuous marriage to the giggly 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch. The director still looks stunned that Anora scooped the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival this year. “I just thought I’d made a crazy-ass exploitation movie,” he says, his face crinkling again.

If the impression he gives is of a U-rated boy in an X-rated world, that fits with his childhood memories of accompanying his father, who worked as a lawyer in Manhattan, on trips into the city from their home in New Jersey. “It was a ‘Welcome to the jungle’ moment every time,” he gasps. “We’d drive out of the Lincoln Tunnel and that would bring you right down 42nd Street. This was the heyday, when it was full of grindhouses and porn theatres. It would be ‘Marilyn Chambers XXX’ everywhere.” He mimics his younger self, eyes on stalks as he gazes from the passenger window: “‘Whoa! What’s going on?’ That stuff really stayed with me.”

Maybe the people crying “horndog” have a point. “There was a certain amount of hands-on research for Anora,” says Baker, aware that this is not merely a figure of speech. In preparation for writing the film, he frequented the clubs where Anora (or Ani, as she prefers to be called) might work. This was no solo mission: he was accompanied by Madison, whom he had cast before even writing the script, having seen her playing one of the Manson family in the gory climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Also in attendance at the clubs were Samantha Quan, Baker’s wife and producer, and one or two other crew members. But still.

“We participated in lapdances,” he says sheepishly. “We had to. It was the most embarrassing thing, real Curb Your Enthusiasm stuff. I’m trying to do an interview while also having a lapdance, which is so ridiculous. Halfway through the dance, I would be like, ‘OK, so what does a guy normally do at this moment?’ I’d totally kill the vibe. The dancers were cracking up.”

Some of them had had experiences that were not so different from what they envisaged Ani going through in the film. “There was a sad, sobering moment where one woman said, ‘This happened to me.’ I don’t know if it was an oligarch, but she married into a rich family and they rejected her. She got teary-eyed about it.”

The film alludes to the generally sanitised Hollywood view of sex work by showing Ani’s young husband-to-be sliding across the floor of his mansion in his socks, just like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, the 1983 comedy about a teenager who turns his house into a brothel for the night. But Baker found that the Pretty Woman paradigm still endures: “We heard it from many dancers, ‘Once I marry that rich businessman, I won’t have to do this any more.’” It’s not so different from playing the lottery, is it? “Sure. You get it in all lines of work, all areas of life. ‘One day I’ll …’” Win the Palme d’Or? “Exactly!”

How can a woman like Ani find fulfilment? “Getting the respect she deserves from somebody who actually sees and hears her would be a step,” Baker reflects. “Part of the reason I made the film is because I realised our Cinderella stories have changed in the last 10 years. It’s about wealth and fame now. When I was growing up, the American dream was a house in the suburbs and, hopefully, you’d make enough for your kids to go to college. That was pretty much it. That’s changed, and this is maybe what the film is commenting on.”

It is easy to imagine a nastier version of the movie, in which Ani’s Russians in-laws don’t bother trying to get the marriage annulled, but instead kill her and dump the body in the Hudson. But what’s striking about Baker’s films is that – despite his characters’ poverty, criminality, desperation and drug use – they are largely devoid of menace. Anora may owe much to Jonathan Demme’s 1986 screwball thriller Something Wild, but it has no equivalent to the terrifying sociopath played by Ray Liotta in that movie. Perhaps there is an inherent sweetness in Baker’s outlook that precludes him from engaging with that species of threat? “It’s funny because I watch very extreme films and I’m friends with people like Gaspar Noé,” he says, namechecking the director of the gruelling Irreversible. “But you’re right. I’ve never gone there. I don’t know why.”

Even firearms are conspicuous by their absence: Baker’s 2004 film Take Out, about a Chinese immigrant working as a delivery driver, is the only one of his films to feature a gun. It was 15 years ago that Baker and the actor Karren Karagulian, who has starred in all his movies, started discussing what would eventually become Anora. From the start, they set themselves the challenge of making a gangster story, set in the Russian-American community of Brighton Beach (also known as Little Odessa), without ever showing a gun. “We wondered, ‘Is it even possible?’” Anora proves it is.

Guns and menace aren’t the only elements missing from Baker’s movies. Aside from Willem Dafoe, who was Oscar-nominated for playing a sweet-natured motel manager in 2017’s The Florida Project, Baker has steered clear of stars, perhaps fearing that they could wreck the loosey-goosey methods that are vital to his work: the extensive improvisations, the last-minute rewrites, the scenes where actors mingle with unsuspecting members of the public.

“I have a lot of friends in the industry who have had nightmare experiences working with big Hollywood actors,” he says. “I don’t know how they get through the day. I would throw in the towel. I would love to work with Jennifer Lawrence or Leonardo DiCaprio some time. I hear they’re great! But you never know. It could really derail a movie.”

His immersive process, and its tendency to smudge the line between life and work, is similarly out-of-step with the A-list. But does it take a personal toll on him? “Well, yes,” he says, smile fading for the first time. “There’s a responsibility that one can take on when using real people who are perhaps struggling. I have sometimes adopted a sort of guardian position with my actors. I couldn’t do it any other way. Also, I am drawn to ...” He narrows his eyes. “The word isn’t ‘dark’. But let’s say ‘alternative’ lifestyles. I find myself getting in a little too deep on a personal level. I’ve had addiction problems throughout my life.”

Baker is open about having been hooked on heroin in his 20s. “I will never go back to opiates because that would be suicide,” he says. “But I have found myself in places that I didn’t think I would be, in my 40s and 50s. Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Why am I partying like this?’ It’ll be because I’ve gone into a world that I probably wouldn’t be in were I not interested in covering it in a movie. Or I’m finding it romantic for whatever reason.”

Can he maintain a distance in those moments? “There is distance, yes, because I’m there on more of an observational level. But I am participating.” He has a rethink: “So, I guess there’s not that much distance. That can be scary, and I have to watch myself.”

Although the film industry is a notoriously dangerous place for anyone with those appetites, Baker claims not to have experienced that side of Hollywood. “It seems to be extremely clean these days. But I’m so indie, I’m outside all that. A lot of my peers – and I’m not slamming them here – are pretty straight-edge. There are a lot of comic-book nerds making movies!”

Related: Anora review – stellar turn from Mikey Madison in sex work non-love story

I ask whether he is now clean, and he glances away. The smile is back but it is rueful now rather than carefree. “Um, I’m not,” he says at last. “No, I’m not. I was clean for seven years, and then I realised my drug of choice was opiates, so I started being OK with doing other stuff. It comes and goes. There’s a staple of weed, obviously, which has been more or less normalised in the US. But there’s always the partaking of other, um, party substances. And, uh, that’s where I’ll leave that.”

He says this without a trace of defensiveness, but rather in a sweet and conscientious tone, as if placing a fragile object out of harm’s way, or turning his U-rated face away from the X-rated world.

• Anora is in UK cinemas from 1 November.