Mikey Madison and Hoyeon Stage a Wild Doughnut Heist in “Sprinklelina,” From the Mind of Sean Baker

At the Donut Hut, a retro walk-up counter on a corner in Burbank, California, Sean Baker, the writer/director of Anora, which is nominated for six Oscars, was setting up an establishing shot with Mikey Madison, his film’s star. A burnt orange 1970s Ford Pinto with ripped leather seats and a pair of fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror was parked haphazardly on the curb. An unsuspecting doughnut shop owner, played by Randall Park, wiped red picnic tables under the space-age red and yellow shop awning. Madison, wearing a JW Anderson blue satin minidress and red heels, squinted against the sun blazing overhead and slammed the passenger side door of her getaway car. “Okay, you’re on a mission,” Baker told her. “You’re going to take this place down! You’re going to eat as many doughnuts as possible!”

Baker was giddy watching Madison on the monitor. By his side was his wife and producer, Samantha Quan, holding their Chihuahua mix, Bunsen. “It’s about these crazy doughnut bandits who raid this shop daily,” he said of the concept behind his W shoot. “And the poor shop owner has to deal with these models who come out of nowhere.” Baker nicknamed Madison’s character Sprinklelina. For her accomplices, he cast Squid Game’s Hoyeon and Conor Sherry, a promising young actor he’d just seen in the 2024 indie Snack Shack. Baker’s direction to everyone was simple: spaghetti western meets The Walking Dead. “But instead of human flesh, they need doughnuts,” he said. “I’m starting to lean more into comedy with my films, so why not go fully there?”

The doughnut shop is a recurring theme in the Baker cinematic universe. It is where trans sex workers gather in Tangerine—his 2015 film that was shot on an iPhone and became the talk of that year’s Sundance Film Festival—and where a washed-up porn star, played by Simon Rex, finds a 17-year-old cashier named Strawberry working behind the counter in 2021’s Red Rocket. Nonetheless, Baker said he has no special connection to doughnut shops. “I don’t even eat doughnuts!” he insisted. (“He totally does,” Quan told me.) But he wanted the W spread to look like stills from one of his films, which is why he asked Alexis Zabé, the cinematographer who’d brought cotton candy hues to Baker’s 2017 film, The Florida Project, to shoot it. The goal, he explained, is for someone to say, “Oh, I didn’t know Sean had made a new film.”

Though Baker’s tousled hair and boyish features often get him lumped in with a younger generation of directors, at 53, he is already eight films into his career. He wanted to shoot a movie in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn’s Russian immigrant enclave, known for its rumbling subway tracks and sea of fur coats, long before he had the idea for Anora, a story about a stripper (she goes by Ani) who marries Ivan, a Russian oligarch’s disobedient son. Baker was still a student at New York University in the 1990s when he met Karren Karagulian, an Armenian who had immigrated to Brighton Beach and sold caviar on the neighborhood’s street corners. Baker originally wrote a Russian gangster buddy comedy. It wasn’t until years later, after he met some “Ani types,” that he rewrote the film as an off-the-rails Pretty Woman. (Karagulian, whom Baker has cast in all of his films, plays Toros, the Armenian henchman who takes Ani captive.)

As Madison, Hoyeon, and Sherry descended on the shop—Madison pounding on the glass, Hoyeon snarling, Sherry clawing and zombie-walking—Baker was inside, directing the shots from behind the trays of crullers and pink-glazed, chocolate, and rainbow-sprinkle doughnuts. “Can someone tell Hoyeon that what she’s doing with her arms is wonderful?” he said, poking his head out of the order window. To make Madison, who is five feet three, seem more menacing in the frame, Baker asked for a booster box. “Are you calling me short?” she joked.

When Baker approached Madison about playing Ani, she didn’t believe him. “No one had ever written a script for me,” she told me in her trailer, where she changed into a pink leather Miu Miu skirt. Madison had never been offered a job without having to audition. She asked her agent to make sure it was real. “I’ve had my heart broken before,” she said.

At the time, Madison was perhaps best known as the eldest daughter in the show Better Things and the Manson girl Leonardo DiCaprio sets on fire in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. But Baker rarely chases A-listers for his films, preferring instead to cast newcomers alongside nonactors he has found on Instagram, in a Florida Target, or on the streets of the Texas Gulf Coast, where he cast a woman in Red Rocket after jump-starting her car. “I refuse to do the whole ‘Who can we get for this film?’ ” said Baker. “Like, ‘Let’s put Jennifer Lawrence and DiCaprio together’—that is the opposite of the way I think.”

Madison, who is nominated for a best actress Oscar for her role, learned to pole dance and speak Russian. Her Ani is scrappy, vulnerable, tough, and funny. A line in the script read, “Ani shows off her dancer’s flexibility,” which Madison took as an opportunity to choreograph a whole dance routine. When she debuted it for Baker and Quan, they were so impressed that Baker made it a set piece in the film, a memorable scene in which Ani performs a striptease for Ivan, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, in his mansion as the afternoon light filters in. Baker shot it like a music video to Brooke Candy’s “Drip,” Madison’s chosen song. “That song is so dirty,” said Baker, laughing, “It’s perfect for one of my movies.”

The interior of the shop was a tight 500-square-foot space filled with fly swatters, rolling pins, towers of pink confection boxes, and bins of sugar and buttermilk. Once the bandits made it inside, it was time to go ham. Madison attacked trays of doughnuts, stuffing them into her mouth, while Hoyeon kneeled on a metal counter, tormenting the shop owner. The floor soon turned into a mess of sprinkles and dough. “Yes!” exclaimed Baker as Madison twisted her face into a demonic smile. “That insane look—I love it.” He thought the shop owner should call the police. “Do we have a landline somewhere?” he asked.

Anora has moments of humor, but it’s also stressful. It’s stressful in the way that William Friedkin’s The French Connection is stressful, in the way that even the doughnut shop scene felt stressful, as one wondered what would happen to the poor shop owner. Baker attributes his interest in the street-level anxiety of the ungentrified parts of America to growing up in suburban New Jersey. When he accompanied his father, a patent attorney, to his Midtown Manhattan office, they’d drive through the Lincoln Tunnel and emerge in the late-1970s jungle of 42nd Street, with its porn emporiums and flashing XXX signs. “I don’t think there’s a way of describing how intense that was for a kid under the age of 10,” he said. North Jersey, meanwhile, was Tony Soprano land, where it felt like anything sinister or illicit was lurking just beneath the facade of tree-lined streets.

Most of Baker’s films have been sleeper hits, but this awards season has yielded a new experience for him. “It’s been a whole different level of feeling like people have actually seen the film,” said Baker. And not just seen it but embraced it. After winning the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, Anora was nominated for best picture and best director at the Oscars.

For most filmmakers, a breakout movie can be the doorway to bigger budgets, bigger actors, more projects. But Baker wants none of that. He’s always chosen tiny, thoughtful films over mega-studio productions. If anything, the attention has only left him more determined to make movies exactly the way he has been: one at a time, with maximum control over his work. He’s not especially interested in multitasking, which he admitted has been stressful as he’s been juggling editing a friend’s film with prep for this W shoot. “I can’t really be creative at more than one thing at a time,” he explained.

And yet he approached the shoot with the same fastidious attention to detail as he would his films. After cycling through a number of ideas—an homage to The Vice Squad, Madison undergoing an exorcism—and scouting several locations, he’d spent the day carefully arranging each shot, at one point asking to have an entire city dumpster moved out of a frame. “I feel like we’re shooting a short movie,” an out-of-breath Hoyeon, who had flown in from South Korea the previous day, told me. In the final scene, Madison, Hoyeon, and Sherry were splayed out on the ground in front of the Donut Hut, like kids who’d played too hard and crashed. As the sun began to dip, Madison, wearing striped Prada shorts with a pussy-bow blouse, picked a pink-glazed doughnut off the ground and was about to rest her head on it as if it were a pillow. “That’s a bad idea,” said Baker. “I don’t want you to get too…” “It’s too late, Sean!” said Madison, lying face down on the street, drivers gawking at her as they sped by.

Baker hoped that Anora’s success might make it easier to convince others that he doesn’t need Hollywood’s formulas to make a good movie. In fact, he thought he might do something less commercial for his next project and cast it even more unconventionally. But he wanted to clear something up. “If Jennifer Lawrence is reading this, I don’t want her to think I don’t love her,” said Baker. “I think she’s incredible, actually. But I have to see who speaks to me when I’m thinking about a character.”

Hair for Mikey Madison and Hoyeon by Bryce Scarlett at the Wall Group; makeup for Mikey Madison and Hoyeon by Nina Park at Kalpana; grooming for Randall Park and Conor Sherry by Anna Bernabe for Phytosurgence at Kalpana; manicures by Emi Kudo for Dior Beauty. Production design by Gille Mills at 11th House.

Producer to Sean Baker: Samantha Quan; Cop played by chris o’brien; Produced by Connect The Dots; Executive Producer: Wes Olson; Producer: Zack Higginbottom; Production manager: Nicole Morra; Production coordinators: Dan Morrison, David Cahill; Camera Assistant: Bas Tiele; Lighting Gaffer: Nghia Khuu; BB Grip: Darrin Stuckwich; Digital Imaging Technician: Zack Marchinsky; Retouching: DTouch Creative; Styling assistants: Tyler VanVranken, Laura Jaimes, Lauren Marron, Raea Palmieri, Frankie Benkovic; Hair assistants: Christopher Farmer, Tommy Le; Makeup assistants: Yukari Bush, Olga Pirmatova; Manicure assistants: Sayo Irie, Rico Nashimoto; Production design assistants: George Deacon, Cory James Bailey; Production assistants: Danielle Rouleau, Khari Cousins, Soheyl Hamzavi, Tchad Cousins; Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan at Susie’s Custom Designs, Inc.