NEW YORK (AP) – The Annie Baker, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright was hailed as one of the preeminent voices of her generation, but cinema remained on her mind and in her work for a long time.
In his room, “The film” a trio of workers clean between screenings at a small-town arthouse theater. In “The Antipodes,” a brainstorming session in a writers’ room becomes increasingly abstract, but has the shape of a conference room and the mostly male makeup of a Hollywood pitch meeting.
Today, Baker, 43, has directed a film. This is a first feature film but, thrillingly, it is the obvious product of a masterful dramatic veteran. For Baker, it’s less a new beginning than the realization of a long-delayed dream. When Baker moved to New York to attend college, she did so, she says, “to be as close to as many movie theaters as possible.”
She almost applied to film school but chose to study playwriting instead. His career as a playwright took off. His first play, “Body Awareness,” won an Obie Award in 2009, as did its sequel, “The Aliens.” Baker adapted “Uncle Vanya” in 2012 and, in 2014, won the Pulitzer for “The Flick.” In 2017, she was named MacArthur Fellow.
From time to time, Baker tried his hand at screenwriting. But being a famous American playwright tends to be a full-time job. Movies disappeared as a possibility.
“I decided around 38 or 39 that this was never going to happen and that I was going to be OK with it,” Baker said in a recent interview over lunch at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan . “I remember saying it out loud to someone. I think I said, “I just won’t be able to direct a film in this life.” »
But almost as soon as Baker made that statement, fate intervened. On Friday, A24 will release Baker’s debut album, “Planet Janet” about a single mother named Janet (Julianne Nicholson) living in 1990s Western Massachusetts with her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler).
“It’s been a lesson throughout my career. You just have to let go of your ambition and start working from another place within yourself,” says Baker. “I wonder if saying it out loud made me do it.”
“Janet Planet” is a cinematic experience as precisely attuned to everyday rhythms as Baker’s stage work is. The film’s point of view is largely that of Lacy, whose watchful eyes follow a series of her mother’s relationships as they pass through their home. As in Baker’s plays, little seems to be happening, but the sense that something deep is transpiring beneath the surface is palpable. In an unspoken coming-of-age, Lacy begins to see her mother less as an elevated parental figure and more as an ordinary person.
“I have no nostalgia for that time. I find it aesthetically interesting, but I don’t have a romantic view of it,” Baker says. “I feel like the movie has a lot of light terror in it.”
“Janet Planet” is not strictly autobiographical, but it draws heavily on Baker’s childhood, growing up with her divorced mother in Amherst. Baker’s film, shot in western Massachusetts, is also authentically woodsy. Just as several of her pieces — including “Body Awareness” in Vermont — sought to capture daily life and subtle social changes in small New England towns, Baker decided she would make “Janet Planet” in rural Massachusetts – or she wouldn’t. I won’t be able to do it at all.
Drawing such a line, when it’s generally cheaper to film closer to New York, can be risky. But just as Baker writes plays with specific actors in mind, like Matthew Maher for “The Flick,” she thought she would do the same for filming locations.
“It’s scary when you’re making your first movie to say ‘No,’ because the movie might not happen if you say no too much,” Baker says. “Now when you see the movie, you know you couldn’t shoot it in Mamaroneck.”
For Nicholson, the location and subject of “Janet Planet” were also strangely close to home. From the ages of 7 to 11, she lived near Montague. She was a camp counselor in Goshen.
“The whole summer blew me away,” Nicholson says. “I can’t even get into it because I’m literally going to burst into tears. It was so huge at every turn to go through these places that were so formative.
Nicholson, who brings her typically radiant naturalism to the role, found herself thinking less about her mother, an herbalist, than about some of the other women in her mother’s life.
“There were people in this world who were much more alone or searching for meaning, for connection,” Nicholson says. “I remember even when I was a child recognizing people who felt lost. And Janet feels a little lost.
In her plays, Baker is renowned for her exquisite calm and artfully timed pauses, a sensitivity that has earned her comparisons to Pinter and Chekhov. The script for his play “Aliens” opens with explicit instructions on the length of silences. “At least a third – if not half – of this piece is silence,” she wrote.
Part of the excitement about “Janet Planet” is seeing how Baker’s keen sense of time and rhythm is applied to a new medium. Baker holds a few shots for a long time. To capture the sounds of nature around the house they were filming in, Baker and his sound designer kept a microphone recording nonstop for two weeks straight. Nicholson says that quiet and in-between moments were encouraged, but “there’s not a word or piece of punctuation in the film that isn’t in the script.”
“I’m going to do theater for the rest of my life. I love both shapes equally and never want to stop creating them both,” says Baker. “Once you really master both mediums, you can really feel how different they are. It’s no longer an intellectual thing. Directing a film really made me want to write my next play.
That’s clear to Baker, an avid movie buff who took inspiration for “Janet Planet” from the films of Maurice Pialat And Apichatpong Weerasethakulthat she was galvanized from her first practical exploration of a new medium and eager to go further.
Not that there weren’t challenges. The relentless demands of making a film – from pre-production to editing – were a new experience for Baker. Not everything could be controlled. An error made by a 16mm film processing laboratory ruined part of the film.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve done,” Baker says, sounding more motivated by the film’s difficulties than lamenting them. “People complain about theater technology and it’s like five 10-hour days. I will never complain about technology again.
Baker was not new to film sets. Her husband, the academic Nico Baumbach, is the director’s brother Noah Baumbach (Baker appears in his 2014 film “When we were young” ). Greta Gerwig is his sister-in-law. Whether those affiliations have anything to do with his experience making “Janet Planet,” Baker declined to say.
Baker is generally loath to draw direct lines between herself and her work. She chose a hill for “Janet Planet,” she says, not because she hiked it as a child, but for its “witchy” nature. To hear Baker talk about it, writing a play or directing “Janet Planet” is more about the evolution she undergoes in transforming memory into something outside of herself, into something else.
“I suffer from a certain selective amnesia with everything I write and I don’t really remember why I wrote it or who I was when I wrote it,” Baker says. “There’s a kind of way I deal with things through my work – my own crises and my own questions. And when I’m done, I never think about it again.
“Everything I wrote the play about is a skin I can shed,” Baker says just before leaving. “Maybe that’s why I do it.”
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on: http://x.com/jakecoyleAP