Note: This interview was originally conducted before the Academy Awards. We’re reposting it to celebrate Anora‘s Oscar wins.
It’s been an incredible few days for the team behind Anora, the scrappy, widely beloved indie film that could. Last weekend, the movie won the top prizes at the Directors’ Guild Awards, the Producers’ Guild Awards, and the Critics’ Choice Awards, with the first two in particular giving it a tremendous amount of momentum during a chaotic Oscar season that has often been difficult to predict.
The PGA prize was awarded to producers Sean Baker, Samantha Quan, and Alex Coco, with Coco describing the trio as “like a family” during his speech at the ceremony. It’s not difficult to believe: Baker and Quan are married in real life, and Coco has been working with them for almost all of his professional career. Their collaboration first started when Coco got a job as Baker’s assistant while still in film school, quickly progressing to a jack-of-all-trades on the set of The Florida Project and then a full-fledged producer on Red Rocket and Anora. “Sean was the one who gave me my opportunity,” Coco says. “I’m just so grateful to him.”
It’s an opportunity, but it’s also hard work. Coco emphasizes that when you want to make a great-looking movie on a $6-million budget, it requires a mentality where everyone has to pitch in. “We need people who are willing to get their hands dirty; there’s nobody on set who isn’t willing to do any job that’s needed,” he explains. “That starts with the producers and Sean, and we hope that that trickles all the way down to the PAs.”
Nobody can say that hard work hasn’t paid off: Anora has the sort of believably lived-in, real-world texture and visual polish that make it look as good as films made for ten times its budget — a fact that speaks volumes about the wisdom and hard work of Coco and the rest of the producing team.
Coco spoke to Awards Focus about the benefits of shooting on 35-millimeter film, the big wins this past weekend, and what it’s been like to witness Sean Baker’s journey — and what’s next.
Awards Focus: First of all, congratulations on the recent wins Anora had at the DGA and the PGA and the Critics’ Choice Awards.
Alex Coco: Yeah, thank you so much. It was a wild weekend.
AF: Can you talk about the evolution of your relationship with Sean Baker, and how that collaboration first came about?
Coco: Yeah, so I met Sean when I was in film school. I went to a screening of Tangerine and saw the film, and then he did a Q&A after. He talked about how he made the movie: shooting on iPhones, shooting on the street with first-time actors, and not always getting permits — sometimes somebody would walk in the background, just walking down the street, and then they’d chase them down and get their release.
Just the guerrilla, independent nature of his approach to making these films was something that I was really inspired by and wanted to do. So yeah, I just walked up to him after, told him how much I loved the film and how I’d love to be a part of his filmmaking in any sort of way because it was the type of filmmaking I was looking for myself.
He hired me as his assistant pretty soon after that, and I started working for him while I was still in film school, about halfway through my last year. Then we did a short film for the fashion brand Khaite, and a couple of things early on. And as soon as I graduated, like two days later or something, I drove to Florida to work on The Florida Project. And that was really the beginning of the collaboration.
AF: What was your official position on The Florida Project?
Coco: I had so many roles. If you look at IMDb, I was doing so many things. I mean, I was Sean’s assistant, technically, but also I was doing the behind-the-scenes documentary.
And I was in charge of playback, so whenever we had a commercial on the television, I was in charge of finding and clearing the rights for those. And then I was also in charge of setting up a DVD player and playing it on the screen for the scene and picking the commercial.
And then our assistant director on the project had to leave the production, because he just didn’t think it was feasible based on how Sean wanted to do it and how many scenes he wanted and how many days. He bowed out of the project the day of the production meeting.
So we brought in an AD and it was going to be difficult for him to be able to do the schedule and run the set because he was just being introduced to the movie. Basically, he flew in over the weekend and on Monday we started shooting. So a lot of the scheduling work fell to me, because I knew the script really well and the project really well. And I’d done some ADing while in film school and Sean just trusted me.
So I was working with Sean to set the days. And there was a lot of reshuffling of days as we were going, given the nature of Sean’s filmmaking style. You know, you have a plan, you blow it up and then you put all the pieces back together. So you need somebody who’s able to put those pieces back together and that was sort of the role that I took on with that film amongst everything else — I can’t even remember the other credits I got, but I think I have seven or something on that film.
AF: Do you delve into these projects with Sean at the script stage, or do your gears start turning when you’ve read a draft he’s already given you?
Coco: It starts with early conversations, and even right now we’re talking about the next film and it’s really just Sean having ideas and images and ideas for characters and having actors in mind — it’s just sort of like collecting of all this material and then eventually putting it to paper.
With The Florida Project I came in a little bit later, but with Red Rocket, or this film we almost shot in Vancouver that we ended up not being able to make because of COVID, and Anora, all of those projects I’m involved in them from the ideation phase, I guess you could call it.
AF: I’m really struck by the fact that Anora had a budget of $6 million, but it looks fantastic.
Coco: Thank you.
AF: With those kinds of constraints, what are the things you really fought for in the budget and how did you get creative to stretch your funds a little further?
Coco: Yeah, we’re constantly looking for ways, but we’re using hybrid tactics, you know? I mean, Sean wanted film to shoot on 35 millimeter. He wanted to shoot for a lot of days. I think he was initially asking for about 35 days, we ended up shooting about 40.
So time and film were some of the bigger things that he was really requesting. So those are the the first things that went into the budget. A lot of people will say, oh, how can you afford to shoot on film on a small budget? But it’s like, just put it in the budget first, and then you’ll figure out how to make the rest of the movie with the money that’s remaining.
So that was important to him, and we did that. Working with Sean has just been so incredible because I met him after he just made a movie on two iPhones for $100,000 on the streets of L.A. And we haven’t changed, like in a lot of ways, he is still that guy. He’s still that filmmaker, making Red Rocket with 12 people and where we were wearing a ton of hats. I wore a ton of hats on that movie, too, not only ADing, but I was also the picture car coordinator and the locations manager.
And Sean does the same. We’re the same filmmakers, we’re just kind of scaling it up a little bit. For instance, I thought it was funny when we were like shooting at this private airport with these private planes, because it was just like, how did we get here? It just seems so impossible, with the smaller budgets and the other films we’ve made, but sometimes we’re spending a little bit more money to shoot at a private airport and with a private plane, but then other days we’re using Tangerine tactics and we wrap the crew — or a lot of the crew is just hanging out by the trucks or in the production office — and we send out six people, with the DP and the camera team and the sound person and our locations guy, just to go with Sean and the actors and go down Brighton Beach Avenue, shooting our actors as they walk into these restaurants and ask the patrons if they’ve seen Ivan in that whole sequence.
So we can save on that stuff because of say, Drew Daniels, our DP, he’s able to work at a scale where we’re shutting down an entire strip club, bringing in real dancers, bringing in a ton of male patron extras, doing the lighting, adding to the production design — really big ticket stuff. But then on another day, we’re just five people on the street, so you can save money there, you know? So we’re always trying to approach each scene in a different way. Just trying to save every dollar and then move that dollar to a different line item.
AF: Looping back to what you said earlier, what are your feelings on shooting on 35-millimeter film? Because I feel like there’s this perception now that it’s something grandiose that only big-budget movies can afford. But I don’t believe that, and it doesn’t sound like you do either.
Coco: Look, everybody’s different, but for me and Sean and a lot of people, there’s just aesthetically this quality that you get when you shoot on film. And that’s the thing. Like if we hadn’t shot Red Rocket or Anora on film, it just wouldn’t have felt like the same level of production value. I feel like it really elevates a movie.
So even when you’re working with small budgets, the look of it feels bigger because you’re shooting on film. I think it’s an important thing to really legitimize these small films if you can do it. There’s a lot of thoughts out there about how much this stuff costs, but I don’t know, shooting digitally and buying hard drives, it’s not like that stuff is free.
So maybe film costs a little bit more, but to be honest, I’ve worked on projects where it actually was like a pretty even swap because we needed a bigger lighting package when we were shooting on digital — not for the lighting itself, but really more for the design of shooting digital and trying to make that look good. So you’re kind of doing extra work to make the digital look good by adding specialty lights and things. Then when we shot on film, it was like, let’s get these like old studio lights and do something a little more interesting, but all that stuff is so much cheaper.
AF: What was your relationship like with the crew on Anora?
Coco: Yeah, I mean, all of the crew are people that I’d worked with previously on other films in New York. So they were just people that I knew would work with Sean well, like our production designer, Stephen Phelps. He was in the art department of this movie called The Sweet East that I produced. And I just saw his attitude and how he worked and how he was kind of pulling off miracles and he was always just coming up with ways to do something for an effective cost.
Those are the kind of people that are good for Sean, people who know how to work within their means. They don’t need a huge team behind them, so we can keep our crews small. We need people who are willing to get their hands dirty; there’s nobody on set who isn’t willing to do any job that’s needed. That starts with the producers and Sean, and we hope that that trickles all the way down to the PAs.
AF: What’s been the most memorable experience for you during this whole journey with Anora, including all of the awards screenings and your big wins recently at the DGA and PGA?
Coco: Yeah, the DGA win for me was so emotional actually, just seeing how far Sean’s come. I mean, I’ve also worked on the restorations of all of his previous films, all the way back to his very first film — we’re putting those out on Criterion, which we’re very proud of.
So I know his journey. I know the DIY ways that he’s made these films, just making it happen by any means necessary, shooting Take Out for like $5,000. His journey is really inspiring to me, and I’m just so happy to be a part of that story. So for him to win the DGA and be recognized on that scale and have Christopher Nolan hand him the award, I just couldn’t help it.
Again, Sean was the one who gave me my opportunity. He’s always looking to cast first-time actors or people that maybe we haven’t really seen on the screen that often and really giving people an opportunity. But it’s not just the cast, it’s everybody, and I’m just so grateful to him.
AF: Can you talk at all about what you and Sean are thinking about for the next project?
Coco: I know Sean has mentioned that it could be another film about a sex worker or about sex work, and that’s definitely on the table, but he has a few different projects that we’re exploring. I think the thing for Sean is he’s such a proponent of shooting on location. For Anora, it was so important to us to shoot every single New York scene in New York, you know? And then when we went to Vegas, to go to Vegas. We want to be able to really mop up all that culture, like when we were in Brighton Beach, there’s nothing like it.
So we had to be there. We couldn’t be faking it, you know, shooting interiors in New Jersey or somewhere else, it really had to be in that setting with that backdrop, surrounded by those people, by that community. So ultimately, the first step for Sean’s next film is to go on the road. We will be exploring a few different ideas, most likely. Until we’re there and we’ve spoken to people and explored the community that we’d like to represent in the film, it’s impossible to say that we’re going to be actually making that movie yet.