Janet Planetis in theaters June 21.
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There were, like, bears wandering around.
Baker has a mop of Pre-Raphaelite bangs and an open smile.
She and Hsu placed recording equipment in the trees at the locations where they planned to film.
ButJanet Planetis a movie that could only be a movie.
From the beginning, the whole thing was suffused with filmness, Baker tells me.
For one, she was intent on trying to capture the unique qualities of the Massachusetts countryside.
The way memory works and how time moves is so interesting to me, she says.
Janet Planetis set in 1991, around the time Baker was growing up in the area.
Each one makes Lacy (Zoe Ziegler, an incredible newcomer) possessive in an inchoate way.
Janet tends to be obliging to a fault, even when men give her reason to distrust them.
She speaks in the same roundabout cadence her characters often do.
Those two plays shared an Obie Award in 2010.
Whats true of Bakers work onstage remains in film like that shaggy-exact ear for sentences.
On film, her actors take their time.
It was never too slow for her, Nicholson tells me.
This is not Bakers first brush with Hollywood.
Bakers work has never gone to Broadway.
At this point, she supports herself primarily by teaching her craft.
The idea of a cliffhanger is of no particular interest, she says.
projector with a digital one as a moral failure.
She possesses what Nicholson calls a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Criterion Collection.
She got to work on it seriously only in the spring of 2020.
At that time, the premiere ofInfinite Lifehad been interrupted by the pandemic.
Lacy, Bakers main character, is a recognizably confident but nerdy girl.
She hasnt yet been hit with teenage self-consciousness.
Im sure theres an awesome 10-year-old who could be inMatilda, as Baker puts it.
But she wouldnt be right for the movie.
What made her right was all her non-people-pleaser qualities.
When she walked into the room, she didnt care about making us happy, Baker says.
She was uncomfortable in a crowded room and had a powerful, private dialogue with herself at all times.
She embodied a kind of maternal feminine mystery that was exactly what I was looking for, she says.
And like Baker, Nicholson spent much of her adolescence in Western Massachusetts.
Their conversations involved a lot of reminiscing about their own experiences.
Growing up in Amherst in the 90s, questions of counterculture were very big, Baker remembers.
Nicholsons mother is an herbalist, Bakers is a psychologist, and Janet is an acupuncturist.
The gesture frustrates Lacy, who is at that moment left out.
I used to watch my mom get those long hugs from so many people, Nicholson says.
And it made me sick!
At that time, the work was getting a mans interest for validation, she says.
But the film does not moralize.
I didnt have any kind of judgment on whether she was a good or bad mother.
Thats totally uninteresting to me, Baker says.
The way a woman born in 1945 might relate to a woman born in 1981 is super-interesting to me.
Is it a question of how their outlooks have been shaped by different iterations of feminism, I ask?
Theres all of that, all of the politics, Baker says.
But also something harder to explain that I could only capture through mysterious characters.
Baker conducted some of her interviews and auditions with her eventual collaborators in Prospect Park.
We wander there after finishing our coffees and sandwiches.
She points to the edge of a pond where she taped Ziegler with her iPhone.
Near the Boathouse, she asks if I know the tree that looks like a house.
Inside, its quiet, cool, and eerie, brown surrounded by a shield of green.
I hear each dry leaf crunch under my feet.
If I were a kid and maybe even now I would be sure it was a place of magic.
I have memories from childhood where it felt like the miraculous was part of life, Baker says.
Thats what its like being 10.
You live in an animistic universe wherein magical acts are not fanciful.
InJanet Planet,Lacy creates little diorama-like scenes with doll-like objects.
Some were Bakers own constructions, which she dug out of storage with her moms help.
I made lots of tiny things, she says.
Like Lacy, she would arrange them into dioramas.
Yet in their blankness, they are also unknowable.
In addition to those little constructs Lacy plays with, young Annie Baker had a family of Troll dolls.
She fabricated even smaller objects for them to consume.
She would roll out the dough for a mini blueberry pie with blueberries the size of a pencil dot.
Could she make them breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the proper appointed hours?
Bakers mother promised to do it, but as a child, Baker didnt quite believe she had listened.
I asked her recently, You didnt really feed my Trolls three times a day, did you?
She actually did it.
It makes me want to cry.
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