By Iain Blair

Since making his first film, Four Letter Words, back in 2000, indie writer/director/editor Sean Baker has created a body of work that is provocative, edgy and heartfelt. His last film, The Florida Project, premiered at Cannes in 2017 and went on to earn an Oscar nomination for co-star Willem Dafoe.

Sean Baker on set, right

His new film, Red Rocket, stars Simon Rex as a hustler and fading porn star who returns home to Texas and tries to reinvent himself. Here, Baker talks about making the awards-buzzy film and his love of post.

Is it true this film came about at the last moment because of COVID?
Yes, I was developing another film that got put on hold, and we had to do something smaller with a tiny crew, so I quickly changed course and set out to make a character study that was achievable given COVID.

You’re such a hands-on filmmaker, including editing your own films. How does that work?
I’m my own editor on all my films, so there’s always a waiting game, and I don’t do assemble cuts. I go right to fine cuts. I know that’s a really ridiculous thing, but that’s my method. I’ve written the film and directed it, so when I get to the edit and post, it’s just about going into a chronological edit. The only difference is that I encourage improvisation on my set, so sometimes there are alternate takes and alternate ways of cutting things that I have to figure out.

For the most part, it’s all in my head, so my fine cut is my assembly, and it’s pretty much polished at that point. On this, we had our AD and FotoKem, our post house, working away behind the scenes and syncing up my dailies and getting them to a place where I could jump into my edit right after the shoot.

You’ve said that you’ll never shoot on a stage and only use real locations. Where was this shot?
Texas City, on the Gulf Coast, and we did a big location scout. It was the perfect place — with all the refineries and pipes and chimneys — to set a story about a washed-up porn star. Even the Donut Hole was a real place just down the road, and you had all the sexual innuendo with that name too. It was all so perfect. We shot with just a four-man crew, and I wanted to shoot film. I’ve shot on my iPhone, but I love the look of film.

DP Drew Daniels and I went for 16mm. It just made sense for the look I wanted and because we were working with such a small crew and a limited budget — we could never have shot 35mm. Drew and I got our hands on these great, vintage 16mm anamorphic Panavision lenses — very rare — that had never been used on a feature film before, just commercials and music videos. So this was a first as far as I know, and we did an actual 2.35:1 capture. Drew is so fast on 16mm. We shot for just 23 days, and it was a real guerilla-style shoot, as we were literally dodging the refinery security the whole time.

Where did you post?
I came back to LA and began editing on my MacBook Pro in my bedroom; I don’t have an office. We had proxies made, obviously, so I was not dealing with 4K files. I was essentially editing on 1K files. We did shoot some digital on a Blackmagic camera for the night-time scenes because we couldn’t light, and that’s the great thing about digital for me — the luminance and dark exposures you can get at night.

We did basic LUTs on there that were supplied to us by FotoKem, where we did all the post, dailies, scanning and DI. Our DI colorist, Al Arnold, came up with a good look for the digital footage that we then applied universally to all the film, and it was looking good enough for my offline. Of course, we tweaked all of that in the final mastering, but I had a pretty good-looking film on my hands just from the LUT itself, and then I went right into a fine cut.

What were the big challenges of editing this one?
I had great coverage in this film — I guess as I get more confident in directing, I’m getting more coverage. And I always keep my editing hat on while I’m directing. This means I’m very aware of the coverage I need to make a scene work in the edit. A big concern for me is pacing and rhythm. I feel a lot of films are cut a mile a minute these days — the Michael Bay approach. That works for his films, but for mine, which are supposed to get deep into the human heart, you have to sell the audience on reality, and I feel that fewer cuts allow audiences to feel they’re watching reality play out in real time.

So even though I get the coverage, I always go into the edit intending to have as few edits as possible. But sometimes with first-time performers, I need to manipulate performance a bit more in the edit, and that’s harder and takes more time. For instance, the “sabotage” scene at the end of the film only has two professional actors in it — Simon and Bree Elrod — and that took nine days to edit. That was by far the hardest one to edit in the whole film, as there’s so much chaos in it, and I wasn’t scoring the film, so I couldn’t rely on score to help me out in any way. Simon’s doing his thing in the scene, so I asked Bree to just give me a constant wall of sound — to talk nonstop and just improvise — and she was amazing. She gave me the whole background track of screaming and swearing and so on.

You were also the sound designer?
Yes, and I share the credit with John Warrin. He and Andy Hay were our supervising sound editors and mixers. So in that fine cut, I pretty much created the soundscape of that world, and then John and Andy swapped out my effects for far better ones and did better Foley work. Then we did the final mix at John’s company, Esho Sound in Burbank.

You create these ultra-realistic documentary-style films, but you also embrace VFX and all the technology, right?
I do, and it’s really interesting you ask me about this, as this film has a lot of VFX — a lot — but it doesn’t look that way. Stiban VFX and The Artery did them, and they’re all invisible.

There’s a lot of sky replacement, and in one scene we had to a build a 3D model. There was also a lot of clean up. When I began in this industry, I wasn’t that interested or involved in any way with VFX, but now I’ve come to absolutely love this part of post, and it’s changed for me so much in the last few years. It’s such a godsend.

On The Florida Project, I realized that working digitally gave us so much control over the image in post and let us do so much. Ten years ago, we’d laugh when people said, “We can fix it in post.” But now you actually can, and it’s amazing. Working on The Florida Project, I learned that I could remove a van or an electric cord or anything I didn’t like that was eating up part of the frame and didn’t look good to me.

Now, I’ve totally embraced VFX to where I’m doing some manipulation in almost every frame of the film. I’m erasing something, changing a sign, touching up a sky — not because they’re mistakes, but because I can improve the shot. And it’s driving my producers crazy! They say, “You make these neorealist films shot in real locations where it’s supposed to be all reality, but now almost every shot in the film is an effects shot. Why?” And my answer is, “They’re still neorealist films — I’m just making them better.” All stabilization and seamless mattes and so on — you can even manipulate performance on one side of the frame to the other side. I can take the timing of one actor’s performance on the right side of the frame and slightly change the timing of the other actor’s performance on the left side of the frame, and no one will ever know – even me.

Sean Baker (Credit: Priscilla Rodriguez)

After watching a film for a year, even I forget what was actually manipulated in post. I wish I’d had this ability and resource 15, 20 years ago. So yes, I really embrace VFX and all the latest digital technology in post. They’re incredible tools that allow you to improve every aspect of your film.

Can you tell us about the DI?
It was mainly me and colorist Al Arnold because our DP, Drew Daniels, is always super-busy and was shooting a series. He could only see links because he was never able to make the sessions, but he trusted me and my vision, and if we were doing anything drastically different, we let him know in advance. Al colored some tests with the DP, so they already had a shorthand and knew each other’s taste as well as mine. So Al leaned into the colors and fluorescents and hues I often work with, and he took the time to really match the digital to the 16mm film, and it’s seamless. We went to town on the DI, and he used every tool he could — halation, grain and even gate-weave and some fake dust. No one will see that dust, but it’s there.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.