Anora

Today, on Art of the Cut, we speak with director, writer, and editor Sean Baker, who is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing for his film, Anora. He is BAFTA-nominated for Best Film, Best Editing, Best Casting, Best Screenplay, and Best Director. He won AFI’s Movie of the Year and is nominated for an ACE Eddie.

Sean’s other feature films include Red Rocket, Tangerine, and The Florida Project.

Sean, welcome to Art of the Cut. Nice to speak with you, and congratulations on all the awards and all the buzz this movie has gotten. 

Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. 

As a director who edits for himself, you’re in some elite company. David Lean, James Cameron, the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderbergh. Those are some of the directors who are also editors. So, I have to ask, what are some of the pros and cons you run through when deciding not to have another editor in the cutting room with you? And I’m a guy, by the way, who has shared multiple editing credits with my directors. 

The biggest con is that you’re essentially spending another year on the film that you probably would have been able to take some time off and maybe start a new project, you are locked to this film for another year after production.

So that’s probably the con, but the pro is that it’s completely my vision. It’s important for me as an individual to be able to rework my film and sometimes even rewrite my film in post. And determine the ultimate flow of the movie and pace.

And I feel like I’m the only one who can do that with what I’ve written and the footage that I’ve shot.

Multi-Oscar-nominee, Sean Baker

I never start my interviews with this kind of question, but what editing software did you use and why did you choose it?

I’m on Premiere Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro. Set to the old Final Cut 7 settings. It’s mostly because when I did Florida Project, it was the go-to for projects that were shot on film.

I loved some of the jump cuts. There are jump cuts as the girls go out and have a smoke break at the beginning of the film. Can you talk to me about the value of jump cuts and why you use them? 

They definitely convey to the audience a sense of reality in the way of documentary footage. The audience buys into the fact that, “Oh, there’s extra stuff here that was captured, but the editor or the director decided to just show you this, but so much more exists.”

And the audience can start to fill that in. I think that’s why. I think jump cuts primarily work in docu-style sections of movies. And in this film, I’m jumping all over the place in terms of style. Sometimes extremely controlled and classic, and then other times very docu.

I was able to lean into the jump cuts during that docu stuff. I think it sets the tone of realism for an audience.

Do you think that the division of the docu stuff and the rest of the movie is where Toros shows up?

I think it’s a little bit before that. It’s in that first 45 minutes in which we are spending time with Ani - getting to know Ivan and getting her into his life and lifestyle. There are scenes within that section in which it becomes a little more stylized, it stays more controlled.

You have locked down camera. You have dolly moves. Some Steadicam moves. That’s no longer in that docu world. It even leans into music video at some point when we do the whole marital bliss montage after Vegas.

I see that as more of tropes of classic Hollywood romantic comedies. So I think there are certain sections in the film - such as the opening - when we’re establishing a night in the life of Ani at the club, and the mechanics of that club - very docu.

Later on, when they’re looking for Ivan - we call it “The Crawl” - it’s what happens after the tow truck incident, but before they find Ivan at the club. That’s very docu and it was shot very docu, but I think everything else in the film is quite controlled.

It was intentional for me to be jumping through these different styles as I was also tackling a balance of tone and genre. There was also a balance of different styles. 

You wrote the film. There were a couple of leaps in times. They’re in the club together on the first night. Ani asked Vanya/Ivan to give her his phone, and all of a sudden, boom - she doesn’t leave the club. They don’t finish their conversation - you cut to the train, you cut to her home, you cut to Vanya’s house. Talk to me about those leaps, and were those written, or were those things that you discovered in context as you were cutting?

No, those were written. We got all the information out that we had to get out. We set up the club. We had her meeting Ivan. The contact was made, then by the exchange of the numbers, that’s telling the audience: mission accomplished.

That’s all that we needed from that scene. We knew it was always going to be a smash cut to her in a very different state - which was her in a hoodie looking very different than in the first seven minutes of the film - on a New York City subway car, at dawn by herself.

That was an intentional cut. There are intentional cuts written into the screenplay: usually to do with smash cuts. Stuff that I knew were going to be impactful cuts. I think another biggie is where she has the scarf in her mouth.

She’s gagged during the home invasion. Everything leading up to that was essentially a real time set piece. It runs for 28 minutes. I knew eventually that would have to come to an end.

That’s in the screenplay. It said we smash cut after the screaming, we build to a crescendo, and we smash cut to her gagged and silent. So there was stuff like that that’s actually written. Then there were some wild edits that I discovered in post.

As the writer of this film, you clearly know the old trope about getting into a scene as late as possible and getting out as early as possible. And I’ve certainly felt that with the scenes that were in this movie. Can you talk about places where you felt like, “Man! I wrote this, but I could definitely get in later than I wrote it.”?

That’s definitely something that any disciplined editor has to be on the lookout for, where you can trim the fat from the heads or tails of shots or scenes. When they were on the plane to Vegas there was more dialogue that was scripted and shot.

We ended up sticking to what was important. We didn’t want to get sidetracked. We had a little more dialogue between Ani and the character of Igor - played by Yura Borisov - before offering her the vodka.

He is trying to distract her from the unfortunate events that have happened and take her mind off Ivan, who’s in the front of the plane arguing with his parents.

By doing so, it comes across to her as if he’s hitting on her. And she says to him, “Are you macking on me right now? Are you serious?” It’s a funny little scene, but it ultimately wasn’t appropriate. It slowed down the film.

At that point she made the decision to get on that plane, go to Vegas and get the annulment. I feel that the audience needed to get right to it at that point, after being let down by the fact that she wasn’t gonna be able to fight against this very powerful family.

Figuring out in post that that stuff wasn’t needed cause that’s ultimately fat.

It’s a fun little line and you wrote it and now you’ve got to kill your darlings. That’s got to be harder to do without an editor. 

I’m torn when it comes to staying precious to certain things. People say, don’t be precious. I feel you should be precious when it comes to the quality of your film. You want to make sure that every frame you’re putting out there is worthy of putting out there and worthy of somebody’s time.

But at the same time you can’t be precious on certain things because you would have - in my case - a four hour movie. I shot a lot of gold.

And my actors were giving me so much gold! There was a lot left on the cutting room floor. People are used to two-hour movies. I was bringing in a movie at 2:18. I didn’t want to push past that.

Was your first cut four hours? 

No, no, no, no. I’m just saying it could have been if I was undisciplined.

Did you feel like you needed to move up the big twist moment earlier in the movie when you saw it in context, other than the way you had it written?

Actually, no. That was one thing I was really confident about, from the very beginning. Actually, in the screenplay it comes in even later. I think it hits around the 47 or 48 minute mark. But in the screenplay it’s closer to 60 pages. before that church scene, and I like that.

That was part of the appeal to me of writing the screenplay was to have the rug pulled out from you an hour into the film, where usually the audience is coasting at that point - embedded into a story - but I’m totally flipping the story at that point.

I also wanted that first 45 minute to an hour section to be its own movie, in a way. It’s a condensed Hollywood romantic comedy with essentially all three acts in that first 50 minutes.

The last shot of the 50 minutes is a helicopter shot pulling out from a mansion with the cityscape in the background and she is living happily ever after. You could tag your end credits on right there.

I really wanted to have the audience feeling they were in one film for a long time and then suddenly, boom: “Okay, I’m somewhere. Whoa, this is not only a change in the story, but a change in style and everything.” I wanted it to be disorienting.

I loved a bunch of the hard cuts, like at the end of the first time that they have sex: you’re seeing her put her clothes on almost before they finish. Was that the way it was scripted?

It was the way I always envisioned it simply because I didn’t shoot anything in between. It’s a comedic “out” there because he finishes a little fast. I knew that was going to get us to a time jump. That was scripted. 

I recently restored some of my earlier films, because they’re getting Criterion releases. I’m very happy and grateful for that. It gave me the opportunity to go back and see my films again for the first time, because it’s not like I watch my movies on a regular basis.

And what I’ve noticed that I’ve been doing for since my second film is hard cuts in music. I like that jarring quality of having music abruptly end. What it’s saying to the audience is, “Okay, we’re done with the setup. Pay attention now.

Pay attention right now. Boom! On this cut.” And I do that throughout all of my last few films. With this film, I was able to to do that right in the beginning, right after the opening title sequence, as soon as I get the “directed by” credit, it is a hard cut to her working the floor.

So we are going from stylized opening credits into suddenly this Robert Altman-type docu-style coverage. I like this hard, jarring cut out of music here and there.

There is a lot of that quick cutting or hard cutting, but there’s also a lot of not cutting. I love the dialogue scene when they’re talking about their ages: that he’s 21, and she’s 23, and it’s almost a oner. Talk to me about the dynamics of editing. 

I’m glad you pointed that out because that is actually a scene that somebody else might have edited the footage that I shot in a completely different way. It could have been cut “shot/reverse shot,” which I hate by the way. I really can’t stand “shot/reverse.” It’s so overdone.

It reminds me of television. It’s so film school 101. We’ve seen it done a million times. Now, sometimes it is necessary. I mean, sometimes you really want to do that: cut to the other side to see somebody’s reaction. For me, the reactions are why you have shot/reverse shots.

But in this case, I knew that I wasn’t going to do that, but I knew I had to cover it. The way I covered it was her medium and close-up, a wide shot, then his medium and close-up.

Then in the edit I decided that the beginning of the scene is about her and her observation of him and how she’s trying to figure out who he is, so it’s really about her. I want to see her face with the wheels turning and trying to gauge him and who he is - read him.

That was important for me. I wanted to hold on that. Then I wanted to cut out to show you, “Here are these two people together. There’s potential here. Read their body languages. How comfortable is she with him? How comfortable is he with her?

Is she amused by him? And vice versa.” Then, when it was time to get to something personal about him - where he starts to talk about his father and you can see there’s a little embarrassment and perhaps shame there - now it’s time to be on him for the rest of the scene.

So the whole scene is three shots: her for about a minute, the wide shot for about 40 seconds, then him for about a minute.

That’s where discipline comes in. That’s the discipline in post production. I could have just started with a wide then gone him, her, him, her, him, her, end with a wide. But no. I had to stay disciplined in order to convey the stuff I wanted to convey.

In that scene, I love being on Vanya for the “Google him” section. He does some beautiful acting in there. He’s thinking in his head what she’s learning.

Thank you. I just wanted to say one more thing about choosing how long to hold on certain characters. Yura Borisov - who plays Igor in the film - is introduced as the henchman, the heavy, an intimidating, threatening guy.

For me, that was one of the challenges in post-production of how much to hold on him before we would be showing our hand to the audience - before the audience would start to figure out where we’re going. Sometimes it came down to “Mississippis.”

If I held on him for “five Mississippis,” it would be okay, but if I hold on him for “seven Mississippis” then you’re telling the audience everything, you know?

So that was stuff that was figured out in post. But Yura’s such an incredible actor. This guy is at the top of the game.

He knows what he’s doing. He gave me this incredibly consistently subtle performance, so that I was able to be the one determining how much we were going to show our audience in post. It was up to me in post to do that.

It must have been weird for him to read the screenplay because there’s so little dialogue in there, so he was looking to me to give him more than was on the page. We had a lot of discussions about it and he brought wonderful ideas.

One of his first observations about the movie was that his Igor character is more in the dark about the situation than the audience. The audience actually is ahead of Igor. Igor is just this guy who suddenly is thrown into this situation.

He has no idea who anybody is and he’s trying to figure out everybody’s relationship. I think that was really fun for me in post-production to cut away to somebody who is actually more confused than the audience.

So the audience was actually watching somebody figure it out in real time. Eventually, I guess, he catches up with the audience. That was the challenge of us trying to figure out how much his presence would tell us that.

One of those reaction shots of Igor that I was thinking about was when Ani meets Ivan’s mother. You would think that would be shot/reverse shot. She introduces herself to the mother so you cut to the mother. But instead you cut to Igor.

I actually also cut to Garnik and to Ivan. It is almost cliché: that multi-cut reaction shot: reaction-reaction-reaction, then back. It’s comical. I was leaning into the comedy there. I have to tell you, I was a little scared of that. It’s slightly more conventional in its cutting and it broke away from what I’ve been doing up to that point.

When I was editing that moment, I have to tell you, I was a little frightened, but I showed it to my wife and producer, Samantha, and she really liked it. She said what you just said: that she really appreciated Yura’s reaction especially, then found Garnik’s and Ivan’s both comic and pathetic, so it worked. But that was something I was very apprehensive about.

Talk to me about the Vegas “fun” montage and then it goes into a much slower marriage proposal, then to another “post-marriage” montage.

I always knew those scenes were eventually going to be montages. I knew that the Vegas fun, then what I call the “marital bliss montage” were going to be quickly paced, so I knew it needed a lot of breath in between those two. It needed a calm moment. It was also based on location.

We shot in this beautiful penthouse suite at the Palms that had these circular beds, so they were just calling out to us to do a circular dolly. We could start on one side of the bed - seeing one direction - and end up in the other direction where you’re seeing the lights of Vegas, so it was definitely a beauty shot but it also gave us time to really sit with these two and hear a fully fleshed out conversation, and just really sit with it with Ani trying to process what just happened.

I felt like any cutting there would take away from that. For the pre-proposal and post-proposal, I shot more stuff than what’s in the film. Unfortunately a lot of that was left on the cutting room floor, simply because of the timing.

You were talking about shot/reverse and another place I saw where you avoided that was when Garnik and Igor are driving to the house to check on Ivan. You stayed on a camera that’s pointing right down the hood of the car. There’s even a discussion with the guard at the gate, who you never see.

At that point, the audience knows there is definitely something wrong. We saw Toros get that call. I wanted that impending doom to be really sinking in and I felt that it would be way more uncomfortable just holding on these two individuals.

They both look intimidating. It’s telling the audience: “Something is wrong here. The fairy tale that we just saw wrap up in a happily-ever-after moment is being threatened.” I just wanted to sit in that moment. Also, I wanted to establish that car.

That car is where we’re going to end up at the end of the film. I really wanted it to be seen in a wide and for people to know that they’re in this old 1983 diesel Mercedes, and just feel it. On top of that, Drew Daniels’ cinematography was just wonderful.

He used a filter to allow us to see all the reflections on the windshield, and you see that it’s winter by seeing that there are no leaves on the reflections of the trees that are bending around in the reflection of the windshield. I thought it was just a beautiful moment. 

There’s a great reaction shortly after that - once Garik and Igor are in the house and there’s that confrontation of the door -  there’s a reaction of Ani as she kind of understands what’s going on. That seems like a major turning point to me. Did you backwards engineer that?

I don’t do an assemble. I basically start from the beginning of the film and work through it scene -by-scene into a fine cut. I’m going straight to a fine cut. Of course there will be tweaks made once we show it to my distributor or something like that, but it’s pretty polished by the time people are seeing it outside my team.

I’m going from one scene to the next and making sure that the scene is completely polished before moving on to the next scene. That means sound design. So I always feel the film growing and playing out organically.

I had these beautiful low angle shots of Mikey [Ani] standing up off the couch. Normally you use a low angle shot to show power, but in this case, she’s quite vulnerable. I was a little worried at first about using that shot. What is the framing saying?

But I also realized that it’s the perfect angle to see the fear in her eyes and to see Mikey’s physicality. She has these beautiful eyes and showing it from that angle really drove home the threat and the confusion and the fear.

For some reason that shot works and I loved it and I just held on it. So, when I got to that section, I didn’t know exactly how I was going to edit it. I covered my ass off because I knew it was going to have to be real-time with no continuity errors, but I didn’t know exactly how long I would be holding on shots until I got to a shot like that.

There’s no reason to cut away. You can hear the guys at the door. You know what’s going on. I’d rather really study her face in this moment.

Is there any score in this film?

No, there isn’t. To tell you the truth, I haven’t worked with a score yet. It’s weird because it’s not like I’m anti-score. Actually, some of my favorite films have huge scores and lush soundtracks. I’ve used a composer in Florida Project to take “Celebration” and make an orchestrated version of it to get us out of the film, but primarily I’ve been using needle drops throughout my career.

I use these iconic songs and allow them to become the anthems, the scores in a way: Florida Project; “Celebration;” Red Rocket was “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC, and this film has “Greatest Day.” I really lean into that. I bring back. “Greatest Day” in that twist at that marital montage. 

This time around I did use these needle drops in more of a non-diegetic way. I was able to go back and forth. That was really challenging and also really fun to do where I would start the needle-drop as a diegetic track, as if it’s coming from the club or coming from the radio, then I would slowly transition it. We would filter the music so that it would sound mono.

There would be a lot of high end as if it was coming from speakers, then slowly dissolve it into a fully lush, unaffected, stereo version of the song that would suddenly score the movie. I did that a couple of times in this movie, and that was a breakaway from what I normally do.

I think there’s a scene like that where you’re intercutting between Vanya at HQ and Ani at the diner discovering he’s at HQ. The same music that’s diegetic at HQ is scoring them as they drive to get him. 

Yes. “Little Sally Walker” is the name of that track. It’s supposed to be what Diamond is playing from her little speaker as she’s doing the strip tease for Vanya in the pole room. Then it’s also - when we cut to the car - full stereo, scoring the scene. 

I loved intercutting earlier argument in the masion as Toros is on his way from the church. Igor and Garik and Ani are all yelling, but you’re also cutting to Toros in the car. The whole thing is total chaos. Was the intercutting similar to the way you scripted or did you need to adapt?

I definitely had to adapt there. While we were shooting I realized there were some timing issues. Toros is supposed to be about 10 minutes away at a church, probably in Gravesend, and he has to drive all the way to Sheepshead Bay.

I always take a cue from Martin Scorsese. I heard him say that he stayed geographically accurate in a Taxi Driver. So many people know New York. I want locals to appreciate the fact that we pretty much stayed geographically accurate.

So, it’s about a 10 minute drive. During production - on the third day shooting that home invasion scene - I came in with my laptop and plopped it down on that dining room table, and I said, “Okay guys, I’m reordering all of the dialogue because it’s not timing up with how long it takes Toros to get here.”

I remember looking around and seeing fear on everybody’s face. I said, “It’s okay. We’re going to work it through. We have time on our hands.” We were able to make adjustments while shooting, but in post was where it was all ultimately found.

Even how often I would cut to just the inanimate object of a phone, just to tell the audience, “Okay, Toros is still there, he’s still listening, he’s still on his way, he’s eventually going to get there.” Giving the audience that sense of timing, and making sure that they are aware of like that it’s 10 minutes.

She’s being held hostage for that 10 minutes. It’s a very stressful, intense 10 minutes, and I wanted the audience to feel that.

Then Toros arrives at the house and you’ve got all that overlapping dialogue. Talk to me about the difficulty of cutting overlapping dialogue. 

Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t as difficult as you think. It’s very rare that I don’t allow my actors to overlap on set.

I like that stuff. If it is a little messy it gives the audience that sense that it’s really captured reality. If there’s a real problem, you ADR the scene. You have the luxury of fixing things if you really have to, but I really like overlapping.

During that scene, it’s not like I got my individual coverage where it was just my actor doing the lines who was on camera and everybody else “lipping.” I didn’t do any of that. I had all my actors play out the entire scene. 

After a while, Mikey [Ani] was screaming so much, I think at some point she looked at me and said, “We better start faking this because I’m not going to have voice tomorrow if I keep screaming.” So that was the only time where I told her, “For the next few takes, you just pretend you’re screaming.

Just open your mouth as if you’re screaming.” It wasn’t really that hard to edit. I shot a lot. I could have shot more, but I shot more than I normally shoot. My ratio went through the roof with that home invasion scene, because I knew I had to stick to real time.

I wasn’t going to be able to get back to that mansion. That family was so nice to allow us to shoot at that mansion for three weeks. We would probably not be able to return, so I had to make sure we were well covered.

We did something interesting that I think is usually a no-no when it comes to coverage. In the beginning of the film, when I was setting up the whole club and showing her at the headquarters club, I really wanted to shoot that in a docu-style way. I was actually thinking of [director Robert] Altman. I wanted the club up and running.

I wanted everybody to be having their own conversations. I wanted music to be blasting while I was still trying to capture my dialogue from my main character. So what we did was that we pre-cleared music, then had our DJ blasting music, so you could feel that the whole place was alive.

Everyone was bouncing to the same song. Everybody was projecting their voices. I said, “Full on conversation, guys! Everybody can say what they want. Have your own conversations amongst yourselves and project your voice over the music, because I want to see that. I want to see what it’s like to be in a real club.”

These days if you have a talented sound recordist - like we did - you can still carve out just her audio, and it was really nice to feel that - to feel like you caught her dialogue amongst a cacophony of all these other sounds.

That was something that was a little unorthodox, but something that my sound mixers had no problem with, and I didn’t have a problem editing. It turned out really well.

Also, most of that stuff in the club, it seemed like they were shorter bits of conversations.

Exactly, they’re soundbites.

There’s also lots of overlapping dialogue at the courthouse. 

Yes. The good thing about that is that it was tightly scripted. The actors stuck pretty close to the screenplay. There was a little wiggle room here and there, but mostly if there was a little bit of air, my actors could throw in an expletive here or there, or try a one liner, but for the most part we shot that scene from beginning to end approximately 10 times, maybe 12 times.

Each time I’d instruct Drew - who was doing camera operation - on who to focus on. But also we wanted that docu thing going on, so sometimes halfway through coverage on Ani he would intentionally pan to one of the other characters just to feel like this was all caught in the moment.

That was really fun. That was the one scene where I allowed my actors to get a little more broad in the comedy. We could get almost go to sitcom-level comedy as long as we eventually brought the audience back to a grounded reality. So I let them go crazy, especially at the end of the take.

I was pretty sure I was going to do a hard cut to them out on the steps, so I just had them give me a different ending with each one. One was Yura throwing the intoxicated Ivan over his shoulder and marching out of the room.

Another one where the where the judge had enough and got up and left. Really sitcom-level stuff. But we were having a lot of fun that day and allowing the camera to roll. 

I love the intercutting between Vanya at the club and the diner and Toros is interrogating the patrons. How scripted was that? 

We knew we were going to be intercutting. Where exactly, though, was determined in post. I shot the entire Vanya scene with Diamond in that pole room, and we shot the entire diner scene, sometimes focused on the table, and sometimes with Toros wandering around the diner, asking people if they’ve seen Ivan.

It was really just about getting enough material that I could eventually intercut. That was the goal there. For me, intercutting is the most fun I have as an editor. I’ve been doing that since my first film. I’ve had sections in my films that require real-time cutting back and forth as if something’s happening at the same time at another location. I find that really to be an entertaining challenge. 

Any specific tricks to doing that?

No, it’s actually just about not overstaying your welcome. It’s about getting the information out and quickly getting back to the other character. That particular thing that you’re talking about, that moment was music as well.

I was able to cut to that Sally Walker track, cut on the beat and make it a little more music video. But there have been other times where I haven’t had music where I’ve had to do that intercutting, and that’s usually about building tension.

Usually it’s about finding some sort of rhythm and letting it play out. I’ve noticed this just because sometimes I’ve looked at my intercutting, especially when I’m cutting an action scene or another tense building up scene and I realized that there is almost a mathematical equation to it. Holding on a shot for 60 frames, I’ve noticed that you get into a rhythm.

Your next shot will also be almost exactly 60 frames, and your next shot will be 60 frames. The audience has to be on that ride. You get them hooked on that ride, and I think that people actually can feel that timing subconsciously. Like, “One, two.

Now I’m on to the next character. One, two. Now I’m on to the next character.” It’s an interesting thing to play around with. I’m not a musician, but that’s the closest I feel to being a musician, when I’m doing that sort of cutting.

I love the match cut from night to morning at the courthouse. Ani’s waiting outside the courthouse to go in to speak to the judge, and it’s night time, then you do a match cut to daytime. I could see that you had other coverage. You could have gone to a wide shot of the car, but you chose specifically to have the shot on her face at night and have the exact same shot of her face during the day.

I guess that’s the probably the best example of a predetermined edit that’s in the screenplay. When we were on location we had to figure out how to do it. We were shooting during the day, going into night, so it was really just about reverse engineering it in post. We shot the day part of it.

We allowed the sun to go down without moving the camera, then we got the night and flipped it in post. That’s probably the best example in the film of a predetermined edit that has to be scripted, figured out how to be shot, then ultimately done in post.

As we talked about, there’s no score. You mentioned about using sound effects and temp sound effects. So as you’re cutting, do you feel the need to add ambient sound and sound effects in your early picture cut? A scene I was thinking about was when Ani moves back to her house. There’s no score as he’s getting the luggage out of the car, but there’s lovely sound effects through there that kind of sustain that.

Thank you. That was actually scripted. I think that’s actually in the screenplay because I know that car. I grew up with that car. My parents had that freaking 1983 diesel Mercedes and I remember every detail of it, including the way that the windshield wipers sounded.

They have a very unique, distinct sound. There’s a rhythm to it, too. So I was actually using that and I always knew that was going to be the way I go out. I actually ripped off my own film there. In Tangerine, I do exactly the same thing.

At the end, after Maya gives her wig to Kiki and we just sit with them and you hear the sound of the dryers in the laundromat without any music, that takes us into the end credits. I basically did the same thing with this film with the window wipers.

That was the real sound by the way. I had my sound recordist record the actual sound of those Mercedes window wipers. 

I really appreciate the conversation and good luck over award season. 

Okay, thanks so much.