Sean Baker is officially the poster filmmaker for Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places this year. Here’s an abridged version of what I wrote years ago, “I believe there are many great stories waiting to be told outside of L.A. …I hope this blog helps you tell those stories and encourages you, especially if you feel like you live in an unusual place in the middle-of-nowhere.” That could be West Des Moines, West Africa, or even West Hollywood (where Baker calls home these days.)
Baker grew up in New Jersey enjoying big Hollywood movies like Die Hard, RoboCop (1987), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is the twist in the road that’s led him to making six non-big Hollywood feature films over the past 20 years including The Florida Project:
At the tail end of high school and beginning of my four years at NYU, I was gravitating toward independent films — the work of Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater, and Steven Soderbergh. Just being in NYC was a film education on its own. I’d go to MoMA, Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, and all these great New York art theaters that played the best of world cinema and independent film, and I started falling in love with movies that leaned more on human stories than special effects. By the time I graduated NYU, I understood that I couldn’t afford to go out and make an action blockbuster like Die Hard as my first film. And creatively, my love for independent movies was leading me someplace different.”
Writer/director/editor Sean Baker
Wealthsimple
Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater, and Steven Soderbergh have all been covered on this blog over the years. Of those filmmakers the one film that I think has some crossover to The Florida Project is Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, which was shot partially in Florida and entirely in master shots.
Another independent film that comes to mind that has a connection to The Florida Project (and that’s off most people’s radar) is Ulee’s Gold (1997). That film by writer/director Victor Nunez is as the trailer says, “The story of a family on the edge.” It was the first film I recall showing the gritty side of Orlando. And Peter Fonda received an Oscar-nomination for his performance, as I think Willem Dafoe will in The Florida Project.