Joe Skinner (Narration): Back in 2014, my circle of friends were passing around a well-worn copy of a script for a play called The Flick, written by Annie Baker. It had just won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The story centers on three underpaid employees at a rundown movie theater in small-town Massachusetts. They bond over movies and their unspoken dreams. Perfect fodder for a group of recently graduated film school students. I loved it; and devoured her other earlier plays: Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, and Body Awareness. But it was always hard to find interviews with Annie Baker to better understand her work. So having the chance to finally talk with the elusive playwright… Well, it was a real gift.
Joe Skinner: Hey can you hear me?
Annie Baker: Yes! Hi.
Joe Skinner: I don’t know if, uh, you prefer camera off, camera on, whatever you’re more comfortable with, really.
Annie Baker: I’ll probably be distracted by my own face. So this is great, this is great. I’m going to settle into this. Yeah, it’s really nice to meet you, podcast-meet you.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Doing press interviews, talkbacks, reflecting on her work generally, doesn’t seem to be much a part of Annie Baker’s creative process. She seems to prefer to put a ton of labor into the research, prep, and execution of her work rather than spend too much time revisiting it.
Annie Baker: Yeah, it is hard for me, but, I don’t know (laughs). I do feel like you kind of learn interesting things about yourself through doing things like this. But no, it’s not, it is not something I think I would elect to do… But, but I, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, I’m getting through it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Baker’s dialogue has always been so alluring to me because of the way it captures the pauses, the filler words, the rhythm of an everyday interaction, the subtext of conversation, and really the impossibilities of communication. I mean, when she received the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2017, the Foundation described her work as “mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language.” So, basically, I should have known better. I mean, I do know better! I know that language can be a limited tool in understanding any work of art. That’s really the ongoing challenge of this show. But it’s worth the effort.
Annie Baker: It’s funny because I do really like… I myself love listening to people talk and interview. You know, like, I see what a wonderful thing it can be. But yeah, I always sort of prefer to not talk about the work.
Joe Skinner: Right. That makes sense. Uh, well, unfortunately we’re going to talk about the work just a little bit here.
Annie Baker: Okay, I’m ready. (laughs) Girding my loins.
Joe Skinner (Narration): I’m Joe Skinner and this is “American Masters: Creative Spark.” In each episode we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. This week, I talk with Annie Baker about her newest work – her filmmaking debut. It’s called Janet Planet.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Janet Planet has been getting critically praised. Reverse Shot called it a “sad and well-observed portrait of a mother and child,” NPR says it “perfectly captures the feeling of a long, hot summer,” and in a really interesting review from the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, he describes some of her dialogue as “quietly ferocious, fiercely expressive.” And I’m not going to name names, but some reviewers have been quick to use words like “naturalism” or “realism” to describe the film and to describe Baker’s work generally; these are terms she’s often bristled against. At its core, Janet Planet is the story of 11-year-old Lacy, and her single mom, Janet, told impressionistically on beautiful 16mm over the course of a long hot summer in western Massachusetts. Here’s a short clip from the trailer for the film.
Scene from Janet Planet plays.
Lacy: Can I hold your hand?
Janet: It’s kind of hard for me to fall asleep when we’re holding hands.
Lacy: How about for a minute?
Joe Skinner (Narration): What you’re hearing is Janet and Lacy laying in bed.
Lacy: You know what’s funny?
Janet: What?
Lacy: Every moment of my life is hell.
Janet: You actually seem very happy to me a lot of the time.
Lacy: it’s hell. I don’t think it’ll last though.
Janet: I’m actually pretty unhappy too.
Joe Skinner (Narration): It can be hard not to try and categorize art, and I’m guilty as charged. What comes to mind for me for Janet Planet is “slow cinema,” a genre of contemplative filmmaking characterized by minimalism and long takes. I hold the genre close to my heart because at its best, its films express some of the most profound revelations I’ve seen put on screen. Of course, Annie Baker doesn’t necessarily take to this genre suggestion either, which is totally fair.
Annie Baker: I don’t kind of zoom out ever and think ambitiously in terms of having a kind of aesthetic. I would never classify myself as like someone who makes slow cinema, even if someone else might classify me that way. And same with theater, I never like have an agenda going in for timing or pace, or really anything else. And it is an intuitive process for me.
Joe Skinner: Well there’s just such a confidence to the pacing and the rhythm of it.
Annie Baker: It’s funny, I don’t feel confident, but I get a lot of feedback that the work seems confident, which I find interesting. And I guess maybe it feels confident to some people because I am just working off my intuition, and the intuition of the people I’m really close with who I’m working next to, like my D.P. or my editor or my actors. So maybe that seems like confidence. Maybe intuition seems like confidence. But I actually think being overly confident can be a problem because you’re like operating from the world of ideas instead of, you know, reacting in the moment to what’s in front of you.
Joe Skinner: so I feel like you then don’t really consciously think about genre or, or even what naturalism means or anything like that…
Annie Baker: No. Never. Never. No. I would never, ever. I’m never, ever striving for something to seem real or not real. Yeah. Or in any particular genre at all. In my theater work or my film work.
Joe Skinner: So then what, what are you striving for?
Annie Baker: That’s a great question. I’m striving for something I like. I’m striving to like the thing that’s in front of me.
Joe Skinner: So what first sparked the idea for the film?
Annie Baker: I now wrote this screenplay four years ago and like there’s a couple of like, prefabricated answers I could give you, but you know if like one were to actually search for the truthful one now in 2024 you know the truth is, I don’t really like come from a place of ideas so much. I do think there’s a lot of philosophical inquiry that goes into my work and the thinking behind my work. I don’t mean that I don’t live in the world of ideas because I do, but the thing itself and the impetus to make the thing doesn’t usually come from like a story or a character. It’s much more image based or sensation based. And, as someone who has worked and keeps working in black box theaters, I knew, like, the pleasure of shooting nature was going to be a big part of this movie. And I really wanted to shoot, the kind of nature that I’ve spent the most time in, which is like the flora and fauna of western Massachusetts.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Janet Planet really lets you soak in the feeling of growing up in western Massachusetts in the ’90s. The dark, low-lit rural nighttime interiors. The windy ride in the back of a compact sedan with no air conditioning. The sweaty hike into the backwoods of a forest to watch an outdoor community theater performance. The film is dripping with the humid heat of summer. And all the sounds that come with that.
Annie Baker: Sound was something I was thinking about really early on, and I had a really great sound designer, and we did all these field recordings in western Massachusetts because usually I think when you sound design a movie you have the sound that was on set the day you filmed it, and then you have, the sound designer has like a comprehensive library of sounds so you can like look up “tree frog” or something and and he’s got like, you know 17 different like recordings of tree frogs from all around the world and you can like plug one into the movie, but the house that I found for us to shoot in was in the middle of the woods and the sounds around the house were so distinctive. It was incredibly vivid and there were frogs and crickets and katydids and creatures we didn’t even recognize and a million birds, and Paul Hsu, my sound designer, recorded with this little microphone in the woods sound for 24 hours a day for two weeks. And that is the soundtrack to the movie, we don’t have a traditional score and I knew that going in.
Joe Skinner (Narration): It leads to a very impressionistic soundscape throughout the film, like a persistent drone of naturescapes that immerse me into the memory and mind of an 11-year-old girl in 1991. In conventional filmmaking, an orchestrated score might obviously help communicate a mood, like the screeching violins to convey absolute horror or the gentle piano melodies to communicate romance in a melodrama. In Janet Planet, though, it’s the many-minutes-long-buzzing of a lawnmower passing back and forth that mesmerizes me deeper into the rhythm of the movie.
Lawn more sound from Janet Planet.
Annie Baker: In the sound mix I would be like, Paul, can you find a Tuesday at 4pm at the house we shot at and he could find it and play exactly what it sounded like to say at 4pm. And sometimes that wasn’t right and I was like, we’ll go to 5pm. Or go to Wednesday, you know, we weren’t overly literal about it, but it’s just that thing where nature is always weirder and more interesting than anything you can come up with. We had some, like, very, very trippy, for lack of a better word, recordings from that forest, and from that house, and that is, like, the bulk of our sound design.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Here’s the trippiest sound I could find from the movie.
Nature sounds from Janet Planet.
Annie Baker: There were all these, especially bird sounds that were so familiar to me from growing up, but I never knew, like, the name of the bird, and now I do, which is really nice. I, like, can recognize the sound of a tufted titmouse or a morning dove.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The plot of Janet Planet is broken up into three acts, each defined by a different person entering into Janet and Lacy’s lives. First, it’s Janet’s irritable boyfriend, Wayne. Second, an at-times overly dependent friend Regina, and third is Avi, the strange cult-like leader of the regional theater company that stages puppet shows. Janet, ever drawn to all sorts of characters, and Lacy, ever-putting-up-with them. It’s exploring that time in our lives when we come to see our parents as real people, not just parents, for better and worse. And Annie Baker knew early on in her writing process that Janet and Lacy would be central throughout.
Annie Baker: Yeah, early on there was this mother and this daughter kind of, floating imagistically in the mix. And this kind of close relationship dynamic and this marriage, for lack of a better word, between this mother and this daughter who live alone together.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Here’s a short scene with Janet and Lacy.
Scene from Janet Planet plays.
Janet: I’ve always had this knowledge, deep inside of me, that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life. I’ve never actually said that out loud before. I guess it sounds kind of silly.
Lacy: Can you stop?
Janet: Stop what?
Lacy: Stop trying.
Annie Baker: I was thinking a lot about my intellectual and spiritual life as a child, or like the intellectual and spiritual life of children I know, and shifts in perception that occur when you’re a child, and I wanted to capture something that it would be sort of hard for me to articulate, uh, right now, which is part of why I wanted to put it on screen.
Joe Skinner (Narration): There are some basic elements of Lacy’s story in Janet Planet that mirror Annie Baker’s own upbringing: She was also raised in western Massachusetts – in Amherst. Her parents divorced when she was six, and afterward she lived with her mom. She wasn’t an only child, but she would’ve been around the same age as Lacy in 1991. But it can be all too easy to overthink such autobiographical elements in storytelling.
Annie Baker: It’s hard as an artist because you… It sounds like you’re being evasive if you’re like, “Oh yeah, no, this has nothing to do with me.” It’s like, of course it’s all me, but it’s no more all me than anything else I do or say or have ever done or said in my life, you know? And it’s definitely no more me than, like, my play The Aliens, which is like a cast of three men, which actually in some ways, like, might be the most, like, linearly connected to an event in my past than, like, any other thing I’ve ever written, but nobody ever asked me about it because it’s about three men, you know? So, it’s just, it’s a funny thing to, yeah, you don’t want to like, be stubbornly evasive about your past, but also to me, it is like, the literal events of my past are completely irrelevant and any kind of cute connection I could come up with would be really false to what like, for me, making art actually looks like. I’m such a believer in the unconscious, I guess I have a very psychoanalytic approach to my life and my work. And so I believe that, like, my childhood, anyone’s childhood, is like functioning all the time. Like it’s functioning right now as I speak to you on an unconscious level. But it’s actually like when I’m making my work that I feel the most liberated from my past. Or when I’m making it well, right? Like when you’re making bad work, which happens to all of us all the time, I feel like that’s when you’re kind of tethered to the literal, or your past, or patterns, or ambition, or, you know, self doubt. But it’s like when I’m in the flow, or the groove, or whatever you want to call it, like that’s when I’m actually free from the past. So it is so weird for me to talk about my work and have people like kind of keep trying to like, draw the line from the present to the past, ‘cause I’m like, oh no, that’s the whole point of making art is to like, not be, shackled to your past.
Joe Skinner (Narration): After a quick break, we’ll have more with Annie Baker, about what she thinks of the word “nostalgia.” We’ll also do some homespun etymological research, and finally, we’ll talk about what’s so interesting about 1991.
Mid-roll Break.
Joe Skinner (Narration): With theater, the sad reality is it’s hard to recommend a play to a friend, unless they happen to live in the major city that’s putting on that play at that exact moment in time. Which is why I’m so glad Annie Baker has finally made her film debut — I can finally tell people to go watch her writing anytime. In fact, Janet Planet is streaming right now on a number of platforms. And like I said at the top of the show, I also first got into Annie Baker’s work by just reading her plays. It wasn’t until 2017’s The Antipodes that I was able to see her work in person. And the problem is, you can’t truly understand her writing until you see it performed. There’s just so much expressed between the words, and you can’t really create when you’re just reading it on the page.
Annie Baker: The page count for Janet Planet was like 70 pages. So when we were talking to people about it, they were like, oh, it seems really short. Is it going to be like only an hour, an hour and ten minutes? And my editor was like, no, no, it’ll be at least 95. And the first assembly was 2:45 and our first cut was 2:30. It sort of was hilariously similar to my plays. Like my play The Aliens is like 71 pages and it’s a two and a half hour play. The traditional wisdom is a minute a page with theater and film and with my work I guess it’s three minutes a page.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Ok I won’t call Janet Planet “slow cinema” anymore, I won’t box it into a genre, but it is still a movie that takes its time. At its most time-taking moment, we sit with Lacy and a microwave, watching a blintz slowly heat up.
Scene of a microwave heating up in Janet Planet.
Joe Skinner (Narration): I clocked it. We’re with that blintz for 33 seconds in a single insert shot of the microwave. It steams up and cooks before our eyes. It’s one of the wild ways that Baker plays with time and duration in the edit of Janet Planet.
Annie Baker: One of, like, the incredible, incredible, incredible things about being able to edit a movie, is, like, being able to compress something or extend its duration. But it’s wild editing a movie and my editor said like, it is always unpredictable. Like, I couldn’t, I honestly couldn’t believe some of the things we cut from this movie. Like if you would. If you had told me before we started shooting it that I would end up cutting those scenes, or even while we were shooting it that I would cut those scenes, I would have fainted. Nothing we cut is what I thought I might cut while I was shooting the movie and, and my editor was like, you know what, that happens every time. Figuring out what the things that need to go are and the things that need to stay are is a really wild process. Once we got past the first cut process and the editing, we would watch whatever we’d done the week before on Monday morning, because you kind of have to have fresh eyes. I was always bowled over. The things that bored me were never what I could have predicted. And the things that excited me were never what I could have predicted. Which is so different from theater, where I kind of see it coming. You’re in the rehearsal room, you watch the scene from beginning to end. You’ve been living with it, you do run-throughs. I just always have a sense, quite early, about what needs to go and what needs to stay and what needs to change. It’s very different in film, and it’s very humbling and, and funny, kind of, where you end up at the end. And it’s very intuitive. You just have to watch the movie and be like, I hate this part, I love this part, wow, that feels awful, wow, that felt weirdly good. You know, it’s very, almost like physical.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The long microwave scene in the movie reminds me so much of growing up in a small town before UberEats and DoorDash and making dinner for myself when my Dad was out working an overnight shift. And I’m glad that we sit with it for so long in the film. It’s a long and hot summer break for Lacy. Her mom is out on a date. Watching her at home alone with the blintz cooking in near real time – it’s funny, and sad, and for me personally, nostalgic.
Joe Skinner: What’s your relationship to the term nostalgia?
Annie Baker: I have no relationship to the word nostalgia. I guess I have a negative reaction to the word nostalgia, but I’m not sure why. I guess for me nostalgia implies a kind of longing for the past. Or positive associations with the past. Maybe I’m making that up. Wait I’m going to look it up while I talk to you because now I’m really curious… I’m really into etymology and I actually wanted to be a lexicographer at one point. I applied for a job at the Oxford English Dictionary when I was 25 and I was a finalist for an assistant editor position and I flew to Oxford and I didn’t get the job, which I’m really happy about. Okay, oh yeah, it comes from nostos – “return home.” It’s Greek, so nostos is return home, and algos is “pain,” and so then it’s like homesickness. The thing you get to do for the Oxford Dictionary, the job I was applying for, is making up new definitions, incorporating new colloquial uses of the word into the dictionary, which I was really excited about. Anyway, okay, nostalgia, yeah, I guess maybe I rarely long for the past and I definitely don’t miss being a kid at all, ever. And my D.P. and I actually talked a lot about dread and a feeling of dread functioning in the movie and in the camera work. And that we did feel like a lot of movies about children had a slightly like nostalgic feeling to them. Neither of us felt that way about this movie or about our own childhoods.
Joe Skinner: That makes sense. So then why do you arrive at the decision to place it in 1991?
Annie Baker: because I have no idea what being 11 would be like now. I would have no idea, even in Amherst, Massachusetts. I guess I would have had to research it for like 10 years to know what being 11 in 2024 is like. God, it must be wild. And so, yeah, I was interested in the place and the feelings that I’ve, like, been inside of or adjacent to…
Joe Skinner (Narration): Lacy is a rather lonely 11-year-old girl, but she has a respite from the solitude and bonds with a new friend her own age at a local shopping mall. The two girls run through the mall and we catch glimpses of the most 1991-looking parts of the entire film, set to a kitschy soundtrack.
Music from scene in Janet Play plays.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Old department stores, a food court, a lavish fountain, and not a cell phone in sight, everyone’s just living in the moment, as they say.
Annie Baker: I really wanted a fountain that felt like, I wanted it to feel like the girls were like running through Rome or something. I really wanted it to be like as lavishly shot and romantic as like, yeah, like people kissing in front of a fountain in Rome or something. I just started, the year before I shot visiting all the malls from my childhood and there were really only a few of them. The Eastfield Mall was the only mall that still had a working fountain, and I love that fountain. And that mall doesn’t exist anymore. And we actually had such a small production design budget that went entirely into the house in the movie, that we didn’t have the time or money to production design a mall, let alone a mall from 1991. It just wasn’t possible and we only had six hours to shoot there and we could only shoot in certain parts of the mall, and we could only shoot at 6am. You know, all of these things you learn about when you make an indie movie and it was demolished, I think, a month or two ago. So that is, it’s so, it’s funny to be sad about a mall being demolished, because I feel like growing up, you know, malls were bad, malls were like the bad, ugly thing that was happening to America, and now malls kind of seem like the sweet relic from the past.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The sequence really does feel lived-in. You can tell it’s a mall that the filmmaker’s been to in 1991.
Annie Baker: I also think 1991 is a really interesting time politically, and historically, and, I got really interested in everything that happened in ‘91, that happened in Amherst, Massachusetts, and nationally and internationally,
Archival News Clip: Both houses voted to give President Bush the authority to give American military might to force Saddam Hussein to withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
Annie Baker: I find that, like, that’s a really interesting time for baby boomers.
Archival News Clip: This is a declaration of war.
Annie Baker: And an 11-year-old girl born in ‘80 or ‘81, and a 45-year-old woman born in ‘45 or ‘46, like, that’s very potent to me, those two generations of women speaking to each other during that time. You know, that fall, the fall of ‘91, were like the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings.
Archival News Clip: X-rated and extraordinary, that’s the way it’s been all day long, with millions glued to their television sets as senators scrutinized the sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The most sensational hearing since Watergate.
Annie Baker: You know, every year of history is like equally interesting in its way. I don’t mean to put like a special weight on ‘91, but it was really fun to like look back at it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): I can’t help but see a lot of parallels to cultural issues happening today. After I finish watching a period piece, like Janet Planet, I can’t help but try to draw these comparisons.
Joe Skinner: Were you thinking about how certain elements, politically and socially, in ‘91 relate to when this film is releasing today or not so much thinking about that kind of thing?
Annie Baker: It’s hard because I don’t know, it sort of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. It’s like I’m always thinking about politics, I’m always thinking about history, I’m always thinking about philosophy, I’m always thinking about religion, but I’m not thinking about them with like a specific agenda or like thing I want to communicate. So it’s like I don’t have a point to make, but I have interests and I have curiosity.
Joe Skinner: I know you gotta run, it’s been great, thank you so much for your time.
Annie Baker: Thank you for your amazing questions. It’s like really, yeah, it’s really fun to talk to you.
Joe Skinner (Narration): That’s our show. Thank you so much to Annie Baker for taking the time to talk. Like I mentioned earlier, you can stream Janet Planet now on Apple TV, Amazon, and YouTube, among other places. It’s also still in select theaters, which is the best way to watch it. And don’t forget, if you like what you heard, please rate and review the show, and tell your friends to listen to American Masters: Creative Spark on the iHeart app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. You can also listen on our site at pbs.org/americanmasters.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner, with additional production support from Diana Chan. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Jon Berman.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Charina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation.
