Tangerine Is A Dream
TANGERINE, OPENING JULY 24 IN Denver, is director/co-writer Sean Baker’s funky little comedy. Shot entirely on an iPhone, this film is full of dram-ah as motor-mouthed transgender prostitute Sin-dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) finds out from her BFF Alexandra (Mya Taylor) that her boyfriend Chester (James Ransome) has been cheating on her while she’s been in jail. As Sin-dee wanders around Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, trying to find Chester, Alexandra wants to focus on her performance that night. Meanwhile Razmik (Karren Karagulian), a cab driver, seeks out both ladies for per- sonal reasons. The film thrives on its characters’ manic energy, but it is ingratiating because Sin-dee and Alexandra have tremendous heart.
Baker spoke with Out Front via Skype about making Tangerine.
You tend to make films about marginalized, struggling, and/or disenfranchised characters. Why do these kinds of stories appeal to you?
I try to stay away from being too self-analytical. In all four of my films, I dealt with subject matter I didn’t know about. I think those were small cultures I was interested in exploring. Each project began a different way and lead to what it became. With Tangerine, it was a street corner in LA that was infamous as a chaotic, red-light district. I had just explored sex work in my previous film, Starlet. I think I’m doing a trilogy. It was pure curiosity that led me there. The collaboration of befriending and getting the trust of the people from that world is how the stories were developed.
What can you say about the portrayal of the transgender prostitute characters?
Mya told us something early in the process that made us make a comedy. She was enthusiastic about the film, but asked me to promise to show what the transgender women of color who do sex work go through out here with brutal honesty, even if it’s un-PC. And she wanted it to be funny, and “made for the girls,” not [portray it] as a National Geographic-style film. She said, “Humor is how we get through this.” I said it was going to be a balancing act. These women are images we’ve all seen before in cinema or TV, but for me, they were always caricatures, or used as butts of jokes, never developed, or fleshed out. I wanted to humanize these women and give them a story that, while it might play out only in that world, the themes of friendship and infidelity are universal and viewers can identify with.
The character of Dinah finds some of what Sin-dee and Alexandra admit to doing as being sad. How do you see the characters and their situations?
I can’t concern myself with audience members who are closed-minded and have no empathy or sympathy for those characters. I’m not trying to teach or preach, I’m making films for people of similar sensibility. I can’t concern myself with those who look down on these characters. I would have to play to the lowest common denominator.
You shot the film entirely on an iPhone. What can you say about that decision and that process? It certainly adds an immediacy to the film.
It began as a budgetary constraint, and it became more than that. At first it was because we didn’t have the money to shoot with other equipment. We said we’re going to embrace this and exploit the benefits from shooting on the phone, and suddenly the benefits revealed themselves to us. I knew we could be more clandestine, but I was much more mobile; the camera moves became more fluid. The most important thing was that these first-time actors had their inhibitions stripped away. Mya and Kiki were never intimidated by the “camera.”
There’s a fantastic scene in a car wash. Can you discuss your concept for the film?
I wanted to shoot a long take in the car wash. I didn’t know what I would do and when Mya told me that women take their clients into the car wash for a quickie, that’s what led us to write that scene.
The language in the film — the use of terms like “b*tch” and “fish” — is very precise. How much of the film was improvised?
For the girls’ dialogue, improvisation was encouraged. Chris [Bergoch, the co-writer] and I recorded every interview we did. We used the interviews as a guide for the dialogue. I gave the characters the script and told them, if you don’t like it, put it into your words, and that’s what they did. They sometimes said the script, or came to the table with their own wording. The only time we couldn’t deviate from the script was during the Armenian dialogue because I don’t know Armenian.
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