Shooting on KODAK 35mm film, DP Drew Daniels summoned a spirit of the '70s for Sean Baker's Cannes-winning tragi-comedy 'Anora'
Captured on KODAK 35mm film in 4-perf widescreen Anamorphic by DP Drew Daniels, Sean Baker's award-winning Anora takes the audience on a wild and unpredictable ride.
Ani, a lap dancer at a Manhattan strip joint, gets the chance of her own Cinderella story when she meets and then marries Vanya, the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch, after a whirlwind romance at his luxury mansion and a hedonistic trip to Las Vegas.
But when the news of their betrothal reaches his parents in Russia via social media, Ani's fairytale is threatened. They put pressure on Vanya's New York handler, Toros, and his local henchmen, Igor and Garnick, to get the marriage swiftly annulled, leading to a series of unexpected events.
Written, directed and edited by Sean Baker, the film stars Mikey Madison in the title role, alongside Mark Eidelstein as Vanya, Karren Karagulian as Toros, plus Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan respectively as Igor and Garnick.
The film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and won the prestigious Palme d'Or. It also received widespread critical acclaim, with major praise for Madison's electrifying performance, Baker's tragi-comic take on the power of sex, beauty and wealth, plus the tonal shifts in Daniels' cinematography as the drama unfolds.
Anora is also likely to feature prominently during the 2025 awards season and is Daniels' second film with Baker, following their collaboration on the 16mm film-originated Red Rocket (2021), itself a Cannes Festival nominee.
"Sean and I found it very easy to work together on Red Rocket," Daniels reveals. "We really don't do traditional prep, such as sitting around in the office and breaking down the script scene-by-scene into shot lists. He would rather go on a scout together, take in the environment and talk through ideas in general, especially the blocking at a location. It's only when we start shooting that the movie really comes together. Although it is always riskier and can be agonizing, I enjoy that kind of filmmaking and feel it delivers authentic results."
Recounting his reaction to Baker's screenplay, Daniels remarks, "From my first reading of the script it felt that we were dealing with two different films within an overall story of different ups-and-downs. Initially everything is going just-right for Anora, and then all-of-a-sudden the carpet is ripped from under her feet, and the story changes completely.
"We decided that the first part of this journey needed to convey a certain heightened reality, of youthful exuberance and vitality, via freedom of the camera and through color and warmth in the image, almost like a romantic comedy. For the second part, we determined to punctuate the dramatic change in the story by shooting with quite a different visual language, more like a gangster film and by shifting into a colder and more austere color palette."
Daniels reveals that he and Baker reached a consensus as to how the emotional storytelling would be visualized. As he explains, "Sean is a more of an objective filmmaker, while I prefer shooting in a subjective manner, from a character's point-of-view. While Anora is a hustler, who gets down and dirty, she also becomes more intrigued by Vanya and his world, and I thought the film needed to show her curiosity by sometimes viewing things from her gaze.
"Consequently, a lot of our discussion was about balancing those two things in the visual language – on the one hand Sean's desire to observe Anora and the ensemble, and on the other my eagerness for experiential cinematography that would see the world from her perspective and connect the audience with her personality, attitude and emotional path. Sean is open to suggestion, and very collaborative in that way, and took my ideas on board."
When it came to visual references, Daniels says he and Baker channelled a spirit of the 1970s into their creative thinking, especially crime dramas set in New York, such as The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974, dir. Joseph Sargent, DP Owen Roizman ASC) and The French Connection (1971, dir. William Friedkin, DP Owen Roizman ASC).
"We loved the way those movies looked and how they captured the gritty reality of New York's run-down urban landscape – the Anamorphic framing and the dirty, beaten up quality of the 35mm film, which they achieved through flashing, shooting wide-open or pushing the film negative to get an exposure. We loved the blooming highlights of the fluorescents, and the noticeable bumps in the dolly moves. We wanted to include all of those kinds of imperfections into our production to really make it feel alive."
Daniels says he also further absorbed the widescreen framing of the body as a landscape in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963, DP Raoul Coutard) for the movie's more intimate moments.
Principal photography on Anora took place over the course of 40 shooting days from the beginning of February 2023, taking in locations around the New York City borough of Brooklyn, including the seaside resorts of Coney Island and Brighton Beach, plus a plush gated community in Sheepshead Bay. Production also took place in Las Vegas at the Palms Hotel, along Fremont Street in the city's downtown area, and inside one of the city's many wedding chapels.
With support from the teams at ARRI Rental in Burbank during testing, and ARRI Rental New York when production commenced, Daniels selected an ARRICAM LT 35mm film camera for the shoot, framing in widescreen 2.40:1, 4-perf Anamorphic, using vintage Lomo prime and zoom lenses for the mainstay of production. The lens package was supplemented with Atlas Orion optics for low-light situations, such as the night-time car interior shots.
"Apart from the obvious connection of Soviet-era glass and the Russian DNA in our film, the Lomo lenses bring softness and a kind of timeless character to the image," says Daniels. "They are very distorted on the edges in Anamorphic, and in certain situations, which you can see in the film, they flare with a circular cascade of color, rather than the harsh blue flares you get with some modern-day Anamorphic lenses. To our eyes they kind of embodied the attitude of Anora herself and helped to bring a heightened sense of reality to the visual storytelling."
Daniels selected KODAK VISION3 200T Color Negative Film 5213 and KODAK VISION3 500T Color Negative Film 5219 filmstocks for the shoot. Processing was done at Kodak Film Lab New York, and then scanned to 4K at FotoKem in Los Angeles, before the final grade at the company by colorist Alastor Arnold.
"I appreciate the range of Kodak's Daylight stocks, but felt they would be a little too clean, warm and true-to-the-eye for this production," says Daniels. "I love the way Kodak's Tungsten stocks react to color across the range of day/night, interior/exterior situations, and how they do something a little unpredictable when you start under/over-exposing or push/pulling them.
"I especially love the 500T when it's over-exposed, or when it's used in scenarios where you don't know exactly how a fluorescent tube, a practical in a strip-club or storefront in traveling car shot is going to look. In those kinds of circumstance, the way it accentuated things like that was always a surprise to us in a really good way."
"I knew the 200T and 500T would render the richness of color we wanted for the heightened reality in the first part of the movie, but equally how shooting un-corrected they would also deliver the colder color palette in the second part of the film."
Wanting to keep the strip club and night car interiors suitably dark and brooding but being aware of needing enough exposure on the characters, even when shooting wide-open, Daniels employed an ARRI Varicon filter on the camera.
"Essentially, the Varicon works in a similar way to the old technique of pre-flashing the film negative that Owen Roizman ASC used on The Taking of Pelham 123," Daniels recounts. "At the correct level, the added light from the Varicon only registers in the shadow areas, in the toe of the curve, and does not affect the midrange or highlights. The result is that you get one or two stops of extra detail in the shadow areas, and a slight milkiness in the blacks, which Sean really liked."
Daniels says the movie's 28-minute "home invasion" sequence, in which Anora and Vanya are confronted by Toros, Igor and Garnick, was one of the most challenging scenes he has ever had to shoot.
"That was a big set-piece for us, and we spent a considerable amount of time on blocking the action around the space before we actually started filming. As it was such a long and pivotal moment in the story, it needed to have its own visual arc. And, as it was going to take ten days to shoot, it had to feel consistent from start-to-end too.
"The fact that we were shooting in widescreen, in a room that had a row of tall windows on one side, plus mirrors and reflective marble on the other walls, didn't make the task any easier. Neither did the fact that we were shooting in winter, with only seven hours of usable daylight.
"So we set the action during the middle of an overcast day, which gave us a base to work from in terms of the consistency of the light, and, by shooting uncorrected we got the colder, more naturalistic feeling we wanted to introduce, baked into the negative.
"Of course, when we shot, we had every imaginable type of weather – on-and-off sunshine and torrential downpours – and I had to mitigate that by either suspending 20x20 butterflies to diffuse the sunlight, or by pushing in light from an HMI when it rained, while using a small number of LED softlights to wrap light around the space.
"I was always taking meter-readings and making detailed notes on exposures to make sure we had the right amount and quality of light at any given moment during the shooting day. It became quite a technical exercise in how to maximize the shooting day.
"For example, this involved push-processing the negative by one stop to enable us to shoot at 8am in the morning or 3pm in the afternoon. We filmed takes that looked away from the windows when I had to light from the outside, or lit night-for-day with the HMI. We also used different focal lengths on wides, mid-shots and close-ups so as to avoid getting caught in reflections from the windows, mirrors and marbled surfaces.
"In keeping with the story arc in scene, from chaos to calm, we transitioned from handheld to more stable moves on the dolly, and embraced the bumps as it was manoeuvred without tracks over the marble floors and carpets, whilst graduating from short to longer focal lengths."
As for lighting, Daniels says he and Baker would have loved to have used traditional Tungsten fixtures to echo the ‘70's films they so much admired. But, needing to keep a small footprint to the illumination due to the restricted nature of the locations, along with wanting to remain nimble amid the number of scene changes, whilst also keeping an eye on power consumption, meant necessarily resorting to LEDs.
"We based the lighting very much around the environmental lighting we found at our locations," says Daniels. "For the strip-club, this involved lots of practicals and enhancing the existing red, cyan, magenta and violet colors, using moving lights, Creamsource Vortexes and carefully concealed Astera tubes.
"The nighttime car exterior scenes were lit using the existing streetlights, plus the illumination for random stores and food wagons along the way, as there was no way we could, or even wanted, to illuminate whole streets. We subtly supplemented the car interiors with small, rectangular, homemade light pads, and shot wide-open, with me paying strict attention to the exposure on faces. Even though the levels were four times under on most occasions, the 500T delivered the dark and realistic feeling we wanted."
He also adds, "I really enjoyed lighting the sunset scene, when Anora and Vanya get out of bed following the New Year's Eve party, with the warm orange glow from a Prolight LED EclFresnel, shaping and cutting the light with barndoors. That's one of my favourite-looking scenes in the movie."
Looking back at his experience of shooting Anora, Daniels concludes, "I loved shooting on film, and would love to have that stipulated in my contact. But it was hard being away from my family for three months, and gruelling shooting long days and long nights. Although it was pretty wild in keeping a handle on all the technicalities and logistics, you can see the creative results on-screen. And like Anora herself, it has a lot of heart."