Cory Stillman
Sean Baker‘s Anora (reviewed here by our editor Joey Magidson) is chock full of striking sounds, including such iconic needle drops as Blondie’s “Dreaming” and Take That’s “Greatest Day.” Like all of Baker’s films, Anora lacks a traditional score, and so sound designers John Warrin and Andy Hay faced a unique challenge in creating “score moments” with these licensed tunes and various other elements of the soundscape.
“We just follow Sean’s lead with that,” explains Hay. “Whatever he feels is the right thing for that moment, we find a way to jam it in there and to present it in a manner that is, most of the time, acting in that sense of realism, so blended into the scene to be a part of the environment.”
That emphasis on realism is crucial to the entirety of Baker’s filmography, but particularly Anora, where even as Ani’s circumstances grow more and more absurd, the authentic soundscape of the film grounds it all in a gritty, docudrama style of filmmaking. This was reflected in how Baker shot the film, setting up actual parties and other scenarios, and simply allowing his actors to play, capturing all the footage that he could along the way.
Warrin notes that the scene in Tatiana’s Restaurant was a real party, and so the music playing in the space had to become the music that we hear in the film.
“It’s not a ‘quiet on the set,'” Warrin says. “It’s lots of stuff going on in the scenes, and I think it adds to the realism. It makes it fun. It adds a bit to the chaos.”
This improvisational approach to filmmaking is one of the many reasons that Mikey Madison’s dynamic performance has made her the frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Actress, but it is just as impressive to consider how that approach fueled the innovation of every member of the Anora creative team. And while there are countless examples of the aforementioned “score moments” that attest to Hay and Warrin’s innovation all throughout Anora, no scene demonstrates this better than the film’s finale, where the subtle sound of snowfall and windshield wipers combine to create one of the most touching and rhythmic endings to a film in recent memory.
“As we were going through the scene, listening to the production, we both took note of the dynamic of this windshield wiper and how it was changing tonality over time, going from intensity in terms of sonic signature, to effectively a sort of calm by the time it reached its endpoint,” Hay says.
By identifying this miniature narrative arc for just the windshield wipers alone, Hay and Warrin managed to create the film’s most iconic “score moment” — a quiet and immersive bit of sonic brilliance that fully captures Ani’s complex and fragile emotional state. Complemented by terrific work from Madison and co-star Yura Borisov as Igor, the scene remains one of the year’s very best.
Listen to our full conversation with Hay and Warrin below. We begin by discussing that final scene in great detail, before working through some of the other exciting challenges the project presented to the sound editing duo.
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