Sean Baker explains how Mike Leigh inspired ‘Tangerine’

Posted On August 18, 2024August 18, 2024

In recent years, Sean Baker has established himself as perhaps the best modern filmmaker in American cinema. Known for his explorations of outsider communities in the United States, with the likes of Red Rocket and The Florida Project to his name, Baker has become one of the most admired directors working the film circuit in today’s cinematic age.

At the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the New Jersey-born auteur was granted the Palme d’Or award for his film Anora, but long before that, Baker had already earned praise. Early movies like Four Letter Words, Take Out and Prince of Broadway helped to give Baker a leg-up into the industry, but it was his fifth film, 2015’s Tangerine, which showcased him as a talent to be reckoned with.

Shot on three iPhone 5S cameras, Tangerine, starring Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor and James Ransone, was praised for its innovative production techniques, performances and themes. Narratively, the film focuses on a transgender sex worker who makes her way across Los Angeles in a fury after learning that her boyfriend and pimp has been cheating on her.

Tangerine is a thoroughly unique movie, but the truth is that Baker was deeply inspired by two films by a British directing icon, Mike Leigh. In an interview with Film Comment, he noted, “To be very transparent, I was thinking Mike Leigh all the way: High Hopes, Secrets & Lies. I was just thinking of all the characters in this big confrontation at Donut Time. And that was it.”

High Hopes is Lee’s 1988 comedy drama, which focuses on a working-class family living in King’s Cross in London. Shot in Leigh’s realistic style, the film serves as a cross section of class systems and socioeconomic beliefs, which likely influenced Baker when he came to show the class and wealth disparity of Los Angeles.

In 1996, Leigh released his drama film Secrets & Lies, starring Timothy Spall, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Claire Rushbrook, Phyllis Olgan and Brenda Blethyn. Like with many of Leigh’s films, his 1996 effort focused on a wide range of characters with different kinds of problems, including a middle-class black woman tracing her family history to discover that her birth mother is a working-class white woman with one hell of a problematic family.

Going on to discuss how he set about creating Tangerine whilst having Leigh in mind, Baker explained, “Then we would all just brainstorm and spitball ideas. And through that, I saw how the two of them interacted—that we would then focus on friendship. I saw how they had to rely on each other in the community, because they had no other support from the outside.”

Referring to the main character Sin-Dee Rella and her friend Alexandra, another trans sex worker, Baker understood that the basis of his film should centre around the pair as part of an outcast section of modern society, must in the way that Leigh had often focused on the most marginalised individuals of the United Kingdom.

In addition, there’s also the theme of love and faithfulness, which Leigh had also occasionally tapped into. “So that led to the theme of infidelity,” Baker noted. “And from there I realized I now had these two themes to work with: friendship and infidelity.” Undoubtedly, Tangerine is an utterly unique movie, but with the influence of Mike Leigh, Baker set about creating one of the most memorable films of the 2010s.

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