The ‘Anora’ Ensemble Didn’t Know What Kind of Movie They Were Making Until They Got to Brighton Beach

Sean Baker‘s sex-worker odyssey “Anora” is steady as they go in the awards race heading into 2025, with a total box office over $15 million and nearly 200 nominations from the Golden Globes, key guilds, and critics’ groups. And that Palme d’Or win back at Cannes in May 2024 sealed the deal, too, marking Neon’s fifth consecutive claim of the festival’s top prize.

The 25-year-old Mikey Madison gives the performance of her career as Ani, a New York exotic dancer swept off her feet and into a sham marriage to wily party animal Vanya (Russian rising star Mark Eydelshteyn, in his first major screen role). She’s joined by Russian star Yura Borisov and Armenian actors Vache Tovmasyan and Karren Karagulian, the latter a stalwart collaborator of Baker’s dating back to the filmmaker’s feature debut, “Four Letter Words” from 2000. With Karagulian as Vanya’s scene-stealing godfather Toros, Borisov and Tovmasyan play henchmen dispatched to New York by Vanya’s parents to stop the marriage and bring him back to his home country. Borisov is a standout this season for his poignant turn as Igor, the eyes and ears of the movie and the real potential love interest (or at least a kind of savior) for Ani.

Back in December, the ensemble of five sat down with IndieWire at Neon’s offices in Manhattan for a rare in-person interview bringing them all together to discuss “Anora.” Eydelshteyn and Tovmasyan were both due for flights back to Russia right after the Gotham Awards, and while any Q&A surrounding “Anora” at this point begs the question of “what’s left to say?,” the fivesome bantered about the early days of the production in Brooklyn in early 2023. Baker and his producing team of Alex Coco and Samantha Quan (also Baker’s real-life partner) had the actors live and embed themselves in Brighton Beach, where much of the film takes place as the henchmen chase a now-on-the-lam Vanya, running for his life and away from his parents, with Ani in their capture.

Eydelshteyn, who at the time of our conversation was cast to lead the next season of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” at Amazon, said, “It was my first day. I was alone there without a phone and without money. It was, I dunno, my third hour in America, and I went to the streets to walk around and explore Brighton Beach. I thought, oh, I want to eat. There was a Russian shop, and some woman gave me cheese to try, you know? I was really hungry, and then I called our producers, and they gave me some money, and it was crazy. I realized there were some very kind people there.”

Karren Karagulian, Mark Eydelshteyn, Mikey Madison and Yuriy Borisov attend a SAG-AFTRA Foundation conversation for ‘Anora’Getty Images

Madison said she’d never been to Brighton Beach, prior to filming starting at the top of 2023, “which is why I wanted to spend as much time as possible. I had spent so many months doing all the other preparation for the character. I was like, ‘If I don’t understand what it’s like to live here, it’s not going to feel real or like something that I recognize.’ I moved there and lived next to the subway station, and I loved it. It’s an amazing community, and it was very interesting. I went and bought a couple pieces of my characters’ costumes as well, and I’d go to my favorite coffee shop, and listen to people. It was part of grounding myself in the character, the environment. It was nice to leave Los Angeles and be in that environment. You can do all of that work, but you’re still living in your own home in L.A., and it [didn’t] feel real to what I was about to do.”

Karagulian said, “Brighton Beach is an area I’ve been fascinated with for many years, and I’ve been talking with Sean about making a Brighton Beach film since 2009. I’ve been to Tatiana’s [a key restaurant in the film and a local staple] very many times. I’m very familiar with the area, the entire neighborhood.”

Shooting a scene where Toros, Garnick (Tovmasyan), and Igor take Ani into Tatiana’s restaurant looking for a drunken and drugged-out, on-the-loose Vanya employed the guerrilla style of filming they’d already taken to the streets of Brighton Beach.

“If we were shooting on the street, sometimes people are just going to end up in the film,” said Madison of how Baker integrated the local community into filming. “We would do more guerrilla-style shooting where we would walk into certain establishments, and people who were there graced across our screen. From there, we would get some interesting things and fascinating faces. We went into Tatiana’s, and [the crew] followed Karren into some celebration, maybe it was a birthday party. The first time they went in, Sean was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the most amazing thing ever. Look at all these incredible people.’ Sean sent him in a second time, and everyone knows there’s a camera then.”

Karagulian said diners at Tatiana’s basically wanted to fight him after he kept springing on them unawares, his character Toros demanding Vanya’s whereabouts from a bunch of strangers. “There were some people celebrating a birthday party there. The people dining there didn’t know we were shooting a film,” he said. “The first time I go and said, ‘Have you seen my kid?’ They said no. The second time, they said, ‘I just told you, no.’ The third time I go, they’re like, ‘You’re interrupting our dinner, how many times can I tell you I haven’t seen your child? We paid for this dinner!’ They wanted to fight.”

‘Anora’Courtesy Everett Collection

It’s scenes like these and the slapstick, pivotal fight scene at a Mill Basin glass-walled house — where Ani gets attacked and subdued by the henchmen — that the actors finally understood what they were making might be a comedy.

“Maybe it is my language barrier, but when I first read the script, I tried to understand what genre this movie was,” Eydelshteyn said. “I’m reading the first part, and it’s supposed to be a comedy but there is nothing funny there. It’s a sex worker, and she’s trying to find some better life, and here’s some guy, some asshole, who’s a bad guy, I don’t like him, what is he doing? The next part is some road trip trying to find this guy, and then the end is tragedy. She’s crying, and snow is falling down. Only when we discussed it with Sean and went to the set, I realized, there’s a lot of room to find [comedy] in every scene. Inside the script, it’s just difficult. It’s an amazing screenplay, but it’s difficult to recognize [the genre] immediately.”

“When you read the script, it doesn’t feel like it’s a comedy. But because I know Sean and we’ve known each other for a long time, and he knows I live my life with humor every day. It’s easier to live that way. I also know that he does everything with humor, so he expected me to play the humor, not to be funny, but just read the part. I don’t see the film as a comedy, though moments are funny,” Karagulian added.

“I remember one day when we did a lot of scenes with Mark and Mikey, Anora and I. It was one energy on set. We, step by step, start understanding what the genre [was], what are we doing, and then one day, it was the day when Igor and Garnick enter into [Vanya’s] house, we enter the set and start understanding that everything changes. After this day, we were in our apartment with Mark, where we lived together, we were very confused, what are we doing? It’s a different movie,” Borisov said.

Much has been said about the film’s shattering final scene — including a deep dive with Sean Baker on IndieWire — where Ani and Igor are alone in a car, with Madison’s unexpected tear bringing full circle Baker’s homage to the classic Italian tale of a prostitute, “Nights of Cabiria.”

“It was not easy because it’s very difficult to do scenes like that again and again. It’s very emotional. You believe this piece of life of your characters while trying to find something, and nobody knows what we are trying to find. But it’s OK. Sometimes it goes that way, but the last day, it was 15-20 takes,” Borisov said.

Madison added, “It feels like a bit of a blur as to how many times we shot it. Also for shooting a scene like that, especially where it’s just one take, I couldn’t push for any emotion. Whatever I was feeling in that moment just had to be what it was. The second you start to force something more, it’s immediately when the audience will cut off and feel something is not authentic. We were searching for something that felt honest to what was happening in Ani’s life, me as an actress, and what Sean was looking for for the scene. It was strange because most of the shooting was so immersive. We would be in these real environments, and now we’re sitting in this car, and someone is on top of the car dumping fake snow onto the windshield, and Sean is sitting in the backseat, and all of a sudden, it felt more like a set. I had to walk out of the car a few times and just ground myself a bit.”

As for Ani’s breakdown, Madison said, “I can’t just force a tear and choose which eye it comes out of. You feel an emotion, if you cry, and if tears come, then they come, then I don’t know. Maybe some other actor could do that, but not me.”

“Anora” is now in theaters from Neon.