The Florida Project

EN

“There is a narrative, but it’s a little disguised or covered up. When I look at my own past work, I’m critical of it for having been too narrative heavy. For some reason, Hollywood – American cinema in general – finds it necessary to follow the three-act form, and if you don’t do that it means something’s wrong with your film. They say you need a clear three-act structure and heavy arcs for every character, and the audience needs to know what’s going on in the first 30 seconds. This is so closed-minded and not progressive. For this film I wanted the audience to feel like they’ve spent the summer with these characters. And when has your summer ever been plot-driven? No, you’re just meandering through your summer. I felt it had to be just a series of events, not bound to a plot.”

Sean Baker1

Scott Macaulay: When did 35mm enter the equation for this film?

Sean Baker: Oh, from the very beginning. I wanted to do something very different from Tangerine. I didn’t want to become “the iPhone guy.” The iPhone was appropriate for Tangerine, but it’s not appropriate for every project. With this film you had nostalgia, the beautiful colors of Florida, children in nature. I was trying to capture a very particular beauty that I felt like I just could not find digitally. And then, of course, there’s the preservation aspect. There’s a major problem we’re going to be facing as an industry when it comes to preservation. We’re going to have issues with digital films, at least the ones that haven’t been film out-ed. With Tangerine, Starlet and Prince of Broadway, I’m still dealing with those issues, and I didn’t want to have to deal with them on this film.

What issues are you dealing with?

Well, there’s no studio for any of those films, and I’m basically the person who’s solely responsible for their long lives. It seems like it’s an endless thing, but I’m constantly spinning drives. I’m making sure all of my masters are backed up properly, and that there’s redundancy everywhere on two different coasts. I have [them backed up on] LTOs, and still I feel it’s not enough. I just lost a mezzanine file of Starlet the other day – a top-quality, uncompressed QuickTime of the film with all of the properly broken-down 5.1 audio tracks. That drive stopped spinning. So, now I have to go back to my LTOs. I just want to get these films all transferred to 35mm and give them to the Library of Congress and be like, “That’s it.” So, this is something I didn’t want to deal with again with Florida.

Scott Macaulay in conversation with Sean Baker2

• 1Sean Baker, cited in Amy Taubin, “Interview: Sean Baker,” Film Comment, 4 September 2017.

   

  Christopher Heron: One thing I thought back to after the film ended was that you open with [Kool & the Gang’s] ‘Celebration.’ After you watch the film, you realise those magical moments from Moonee’s perspective, these celebrations her mom orchestrates for her or Jancey. Was celebration a theme you were thinking about in the writing of the film?

  Sean Baker: It was definitely something I was conscious of, but I don’t remember when I chose that song. It was close to production, but it was definitely in the screenplay, because I knew I would have the title sequence play that song on the purple wall. There are so many contradictions and juxtapositions in that world, I wanted to be setting the audience up to a certain degree. That whole city and the county is all there because of the parks, it’s all about celebration – there’s literally a town called Celebration next door. When you think of being on the main street of Disney World, you think of a celebration. It’s all about that, but right in the shadows of it, there are things that are far from celebratory. At the same time, in a kid’s life, summers are celebratory. I’m just playing with the contradiction, the irony, but not for cynical reasons, I don’t think. It’s to make a point: you’re down there, spending maybe thousands of dollars on your family vacation celebrating, but not aware – not even an ignorance, because they’re not ignoring – of this hidden population that exists. But those people are very aware that this is happening, that this is a place of great happiness for the tourists that pass through their lives every day. I’m a bit inarticulate right now, but it’s coming back to me because you’re the first one asking about that stuff. Even when we were there, it was very strange to be spending more than a weekend or a week there. To spend three months there, we started to see that the artifice is right in your face. You feel even when you’re at a motel that you’re on a set, one that’s set up to serve the tourism. It’s all tourism, you feel that your lives are just serving tourists.

  Christopher Heron in conversation with Sean BakerChristopher Heron, “Sean Baker Interview,” The Seventh Art, 13 October 2017.

• 2Scott Macaulay, “It’s a Small World: Sean Baker on The Florida Project, Shooting 35mm and Going Union,” Filmmaker Magazine, 14 September 2017.