NEW YORK (AP) â The has been hailed as one of the preeminent voices of her generation, but the movies have long lingered in her mind and in her work.
In her play, a trio of workers clean up between showings at a smalltown arthouse theater. In âThe Antipodes,â a writers room brainstorming session grows increasingly abstract but has the conference-room shape and mostly male composition of a Hollywood pitch meeting.
Now, Baker, 43, has made a film. Itâs a first-time feature but, thrillingly, the evident product of a masterful dramatic veteran. For Baker, itâs less a new beginning than the realization of a long deferred dream. When Baker moved to New York to attend college, she did it, she says, âto be as near as many movie theaters as possible.â
She nearly applied to film school but opted instead to study dramatic writing. Her career as a playwright took off. Her first play, âBody Awareness,â won an Obie Award in 2009, as did her follow-up, âThe Aliens." Baker adapted âUncle Vanyaâ in 2012 and, in 2014, won the Pulitzer for âThe Flick.â In 2017, she was .
Occasionally, Baker tried her hand at screenwriting. But being a celebrated American playwright tends to be a full-time gig. Movies faded as a possibility.
âI decided around 38 or 39 that it was never going to happen and I was going to be OK with it,â Baker said in a recent interview over lunch at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. âI remember saying it out loud to someone. I think I said: âIâm just not going to get to direct a movie in this life.ââ
But almost as soon as Baker made that pronouncement, fate intervened. On Friday, A24 will release Baker's debut, about a single mother named Janet (Julianne Nicholson) living in 1990s Western Massachusetts with her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler).
âItâs been a lesson throughout my whole career. You just have to let go of ambition and start working from another place inside of yourself,â Baker says. âI do wonder if saying it out loud enabled me to do it.â
âJanet Planetâ is a cinematic experience as precisely attuned to daily rhythms as Bakerâs stage work is. The filmâs perspective is largely from that of Lacy, whose watchful eyes follow a string of her mother's relationships as they pass through their home. As in Bakerâs plays, little may be appearing to happen but the sense that something profound is transpiring under the surface is palpable. In an unspoken coming of age, Lacy begins to see her mom less as a lofty parental figure and more as a regular person.
âI donât have nostalgia for that time period. I find it aesthetically interesting, but I donât have a romantic take on it,â says Baker. âI feel like the movie has a lot of mild dread in it.â
âJanet Planetâ isnât strictly autobiographical but it draws heavily from Bakerâs own childhood growing up with her divorced mother in Amherst. Bakerâs film, shot in Western Massachusetts, is also authentically woodsy. Just as several of her plays â including the Vermont-set âBody Awarenessâ â have sought to capture quotidian lives and subtle social shifts in smalltown New England, Baker resolved that she would make âJanet Planetâ in rural Massachusetts â or she wouldnât make it, at all.
Drawing such a line, when itâs typically cheaper to shoot closer to New York City, can be risky. But just as Baker writes plays with specific actors in mind, like Matthew Maher for âThe Flick," she figured she would do the same for movie locations.
âItâs scary when youâre making your first movie to be like, âNo,â because the movie might not happen if you say no too much,â says Baker. âNow when you see the movie, you know you couldnât shoot that in Mamaroneck.â
For Nicholson, the location and subject matter of âJanet Planetâ was eerily close to home, too. From the ages of 7 to 11, she lived in nearby Montague. She was a camp counselor in Goshen.
âThe whole summer blew my mind,â says Nicholson. âI canât even go too deep into because Iâll literally burst into tears. It just felt so huge at every turn to be walking these places that were so formative.â
Nicholson, who brings her typically radiant naturalism to the role, found herself thinking less about her mother, a herbalist, than some of the other women in her motherâs life.
âThere were people in that world much more lonely or seeking meaning, connection,â says Nicholson. âI remember even as a kid recognizing people who felt lost. And Janet feels a little bit lost.â
In her plays, Baker is renown for exquisite stillness and artfully timed pauses, a sensibility that's earned her comparisons to Pinter and Chekhov. The script to her play âThe Aliensâ opens with explicit instructions on the length of silences. âAt least a third â if not half â of this play is silence," she wrote.
Part of the excitement of âJanet Planetâ is seeing how Bakerâs keen sense of time and rhythm gets applied in a new medium. Baker holds some shots long. To capture the nature sounds around the house they were filming in, Baker and her sound designer kept a microphone recording nonstop for two straight weeks. Nicholson says that stillness and in-between moments were encouraged, but âthere isnât a word or bit of punctuation in the movie that wasnât in the script.â
âIâm going to make theater for the rest of my life. I love both forms equally and never want to stop making both of them,â says Baker. âOnce you really get your hands in both mediums, you can really feel palpably how different they are. Itâs not an intellectual thing anymore. Directing a movie made me really excited to write my next play.â
Itâs clear speaking to Baker, a passionate cinephile who drew inspiration for âJanet Planetâ from the films of and , that sheâs galvanized from her first hands-on exploration of a new medium, and eager to go further.
Not that there werenât challenges. The relentless demands of directing a movie â from preproduction through editing â was a fresh experience for Baker. Not everything could be controlled. A mistake by a 16mm film processing lab ruined a portion of the movie.
âIt was the hardest thing Iâve done,â says Baker, sounding more energized by filmâs difficulties than lamenting them. âPeople complain about theater tech and itâs like five days of 10-hour days. Iâll never complain about tech again.â
Baker wasnât new to film sets. Her husband, the academic Nico Baumbach, is brother to the director (Baker appears in his 2014 film ). is her sister in law. Whether those affiliations leant anything to her experience making âJanet Planet,â Baker declined to say.
Baker recoils, generally, from drawing direct lines between herself and her work. She picked out a hillside for âJanet Planet," she says, not because she ran down it as a child but for its âwitchyâ quality. To hear Baker discuss it, writing a play or making âJanet Planetâ is more about the evolution she undergoes in transforming memory into something outside of her, into something else.
âI do have some selective amnesia with everything I write where I canât quite remember why I wrote it or who I was when I wrote it," Baker explains. "Thereâs some sort of way I work through things through my work â my own crises and questioning. And when Iâm done, I never think about it again.
âWhatever I wrote the play about is a skin I get to shed,â Baker says just before she departs. âMaybe thatâs why I do it.â
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Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
