![]() That kind of specificity is what grounds the audience. As a Houston suburbanite, I really appreciated how it presented an intimate anthropology of Texan vernacular culture, down to the use of local images like Donut Hole, Big Red cola, and Luby’s cafeteria. Like in many of your other films, Red Rocket has a strong attachment to a particular setting and landscape-in this case, the industrial suburbs of Texas City, Texas. It’s hard to articulate, but it’s always on my mind while making these films-the attitude toward homelessness by those who are very close or living in it. ![]() For her, it’s not only an insult, but it’s her way of saying that he has gotten himself into this life-and-death situation. Lexi doesn’t just call “a suitcase pimp.” She calls him a “homeless suitcase pimp.” That was very important for me to add that bit on there. People have asked me about the meaning of the last line in Red Rocket. Having housing and losing housing is the difference between life and death. I think what I have noticed in spending time with people in that situation is that housing, shelter in general, is something I have seen most of us take for granted, whereas for those who live on the edge of not having housing, it means everything in the world. I do work a lot with people on the verge of homelessness. Can we talk about how you view home in the context of your work? Most of your films deal with this recurring motif of home. Saber is determined to use all of his skills as a suitcase pimp to groom Strawberry for porn stardom and then flee Texas before his debts to the other women around him come due. In a moment of serendipity, Saber encounters an underage nymphet with the luscious nickname Strawberry ( Suzanna Son) who works at the local doughnut shop but dreams of a life in a faraway place. Homeless and short on cash, the rakish Saber uses his talent for loquacity to insinuate himself into the life (and house) of estranged wife Lexi ( Bree Elrod) and mother-in-law Lil (Brenda Deiss) while resuming his old job as a low-rent pot dealer for neighborhood kingpin Leondria (Judy Hill). Within this world of sulfuric sunsets and tumbledown ranch houses, Red Rocket follows Mikey Saber ( Simon Rex), a middle-aged Texan whose 20-year career as a Los Angeles porn star has ground to an ignominious halt. In his new film, Red Rocket, out today, Baker’s abiding fascination with landscape drew him to the petrochemical refineries of Texas City, Texas, a blighted Gulf Coast suburb that lies near the mouth of the massive Port of Houston. ![]() Since their releases, Tangerine has enjoyed a growing cult status within queer cinema, while The Florida Project gained plaudits at Cannes, the Golden Globes, and the Academy Awards. ( Tangerine was famously filmed in its entirety using an iPhone 5s, as were certain scenes in The Florida Project.) His singular aesthetic has earned near-universal acclaim from both audiences and critics. This whimsical play between domestic fantasy and economic poverty echoes the poetic realism of classic auteurs like Jean Vigo, François Truffaut, and Claude Miller yet Baker’s films eschew any fetish for nostalgia, preferring to embrace the social and technological present. Home-and the specter of homelessness-often serves as the thematic crux of Baker’s work: His protagonists struggle to survive evictions, negotiate their home turfs, or attempt to create a storybook home away from home amid a world of strangers. ![]() His films Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), and The Florida Project (2017) also explore the black-market economies that entangle these young women in drug addiction and sex work-though Baker much prefers to eulogize the quotidian pleasures and even comical moments that can arise from a life of precarity. Part journeyman anthropologist and part mondo filmmaker, Baker trains his camera on (mostly distaff) worlds that often lie beneath the threshold of public consciousness, from Hollywood’s black trans community to the single mothers and children who languish in extended-stay motels along suburban Orlando’s infamous Route 192. The films of Sean Baker celebrate lumpen characters and communities that subsist within the cracks of America’s neoliberal landscape. ![]()
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