Director Sean Baker on ‘Red Rocket,’ driving taxis in N.J. and why Simon Rex deserved his moment – NJ.com

Porn stars. Families living in motels. Immigrants delivering takeout. Sex workers. Street vendors hawking designer knockoffs.

To society, they are on the margins.

To Sean Baker, they are the shining center of his films.

His latest movie, the dark comedy “Red Rocket,” stars Simon Rex in an energetic, career-jolting performance as Mikey Saber, a has-been Los Angeles porn star who comes crawling back to his Texas hometown, with hilarious and terrible results.

This rip-roaring profile of a particularly brazen hustler is at various points whimsical, outrageous and just plain funny.

Baker’s work is often praised for its realism and humor — the very name “Red Rocket” is a euphemism for a part of a male dog’s anatomy. His films are also known for their striking beauty, heart and compassion — for meeting characters where they live.

The director (”The Florida Project”), who grew up in Essex and Somerset counties, has been writing and directing indie film gems for more than 20 years.

Where did Baker cultivate an eye for life on the fringes?

New Jersey, of course.

“I actually haven’t thought about this in years, but I was a taxi driver in Somerville,” Baker, 50, tells NJ Advance Media.

“That was the best learning experience for somebody like me who’s trying to do character studies and focus on human behavior.”

The director, who was 19 and living with his family in Branchburg, started the job at Sky View Taxi the summer he returned to New Jersey after his first year at college. His experience interacting with hundreds of riders each week — what he calls a daily “sociological” practice — stayed with him.

His acclaimed 2015 film “Tangerine,” an intense, amusing and touching movie filmed on three iPhones, follows two transgender sex workers, Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), on a mission during Christmas Eve in Los Angeles. Karren Karagulian, who is in all of Baker’s films, plays Razmik, an Armenian taxi driver.

“All the taxi stuff from that film essentially comes from my time as a taxi driver in New Jersey,” the director says from Los Angeles, laughing. “Maybe except for the more sexual stuff.”

Though he’s made seven films, Baker, and the humanity in his work, has drawn more appreciation in recent years.

Willem Dafoe was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for the director’s celebrated 2017 film “The Florida Project.” At its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in July, “Red Rocket,” nominated for the Palme d’Or, received a five-minute standing ovation.

“People think I just started with ‘Tangerine’ or maybe even with ‘Florida Project,’” Baker says. “I’ve worked in this independent film realm for forever. So breaking out has taken a while.”

Mikey Saber is an unapologetic scoundrel.

But in Baker’s “Red Rocket” — which opened Dec. 10 in New York and arrives in New Jersey theaters this Christmas — Mikey’s charm offensive is so formidable, he’s able to extract second, third and fourth chances from those he’s mistreated.

Simon Rex’s faded porn actor has no shame, and that is part of his appeal.

Rex, 47, has been accruing Oscar buzz for his performance and is nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best male lead, with good reason — Mikey’s appeal owes much to the actor’s frenetic finesse and spot-on comic timing.

Baker says the starring role was long overdue for Rex, an actor who has been many other things over his own 25-year career.

“What really impressed me was that he just kept coming back, even though the industry never gave him the meaty, dramatic roles I think he deserved, and hopefully that’s majorly changed now,” he says.

A generation of ‘80s babies will remember Rex as an MTV VJ who interviewed the likes of Tupac Shakur in the mid-’90s before moving on to acting roles in TV and film, including the “Scary Movie” film parody franchise.

In the 2000s, Rex offered his own brand of hip-hop by performing in music videos as the rapper Dirt Nasty (name self-explanatory), later forming a comedy rap supergroup called Three Loco with fellow MTV alums Andy Milonakis and Riff Raff.

Baker had followed Rex’s career, keeping tabs on his social media activity (his music videos and other Dirt Nasty-era dispatches have millions of views).

“He always showed me that there was talent there,” he says. “Even if it was a six-second Vine video, the guy made me laugh. He entertained me.”

Then Baker saw Rex play battle rap promoter Donnie Narco in the 2017 Eminem-produced movie “Bodied.”

Caution: video contains profanity

“I said to myself, ‘Oh, that’s it, he’s proven himself,’” he says. “’I can see as a director that this guy has range.’”

Baker texted his producer one of Rex’s Vine videos (the short-form video app shut down in 2017).

“If we ever move ahead with ‘Red Rocket,’” he said, “We’re going to use this guy.’”

But after “Florida Project,” that movie took a backseat while Baker worked on a Vancouver-set film about activism around the opioid crisis. (”I know how hard it’s hit New Jersey,” Baker says. “I have family members who have been personally affected by the current epidemic. So hopefully this film is something that sheds light on how the U.S. could better handle this.”)

“COVID brought that to a screeching halt, and then we pivoted to ‘Red Rocket.’ And that’s when Simon’s name came back into the conversation,” Baker says.

After working with a larger crew on “The Florida Project,” Baker relished the “Red Rocket” crew of 10, which was more reminiscent of his time on “Tangerine.” The smaller scale allowed him to return to a “totally guerilla-style way of filmmaking,” which he calls “very liberating and very freeing.”

Rex had almost no time to prepare for the film, which Baker shot in less than a month and under COVID-19 protocols in the fall of 2020 in Texas City (Mikey’s hometown in the story) and Galveston, Texas, a landscape distinguished by oil refineries and the Galveston Bay.

“I think I was like the last person cast,” Rex says. “They had a few people in mind for the lead role, some bigger names than me.”

But Baker could see the actor was ready for his moment. He got Rex’s number through a mutual friend and asked him to audition on his phone.

“I asked him for a self-tape for one scene, one of the early scenes in the film when he comes to the house and tries to work his way back into his ex’s life,” the director says. “Within 20 minutes he sent us back a tape. I said, ‘See, he got it. He understands the character enough.’”

He told the actor that was exactly the energy he needed for Mikey.

“It just happened,” Rex says. “I still don’t understand.”

Baker told him they were renting him a car. He’d need to be in Texas in three days.

The actor arrived with many of Mikey’s monologues already committed to memory. He started rehearsing with Bree Elrod, who plays his long-suffering wife and former porn scene partner, Lexi.

“I knew from that day that I was going to have no problem,” Baker says. “Their instincts were dead on.”

Like Mikey, Rex was in something of a career low. He leaned into it a few years ago by moving out to the desert (Joshua Tree, California). When Baker called, Rex didn’t know what to expect of the director, whose name had become synonymous with a certain prestige in indie films.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, you know, Sean Baker, he’s a big deal,’” Rex says. “And then as soon as I hung out with him, I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s just one of the boys. He doesn’t carry himself like the serious auteur that I envisioned him like. He’s a lot more personable.’”

In Baker, Rex found something of a kindred spirit.

“We spent a few days before we started shooting kind of driving around, and I just got that he was kind of like me in a good way, sort of curious,” he says.

Rex and Elrod, his co-star, had hours, not days, to manufacture a credibly unstable relationship between Mikey and Lexi. While Elrod says he’s “not Mikey at all,” they were able to tap into Rex’s natural charisma and their shared silliness when fleshing out the frayed relationship between the characters.

Rex braced for how people would receive him in the role. For much of his career, he was accustomed to being an “easy target,” he says, someone who knew that being panned was a necessary job hazard.

But after the world premiere of the film last summer at the Cannes Film Festival, there was a wave of positive feedback from critics, bloggers and other actors.

“I was getting all this love and support, and not only just good reviews, but people saying they’re rooting for me,” Rex says. “That feels good because I’m kind of used to it being the other way around.”

Baker’s first film, “Four Letter Words” (2000), had a small release and screened at the South By Southwest Film Festival. He’s excited about its restoration for a “proper” release next year.

The director considers the movie, about a group of 20-something men hanging out with their red plastic cups in the tri-state area, to be a semi-autobiographical story.

“If I could say there was one film that was a New Jersey suburban film, it’s that,” Baker says, though he filmed it on Long Island. “And once I did it, I sort of got that out of my system and said, ‘I’m ready to explore other things.’

“I am 50 now, so I’ve had life experience and I’ve traveled and I’ve had relationships. So there’s a lot more to say now. But when I was 23 years old making my first film, all I knew was the New Jersey suburbs, and that was what my story was at that time.”

Baker was born in Summit and spent the first part of his childhood in Essex County, in Short Hills. His mother worked as an early education teacher and his father as a trademark lawyer.

As a child, Baker would make films and “remake” movies with his sister, the mononymous “Red Rocket” production designer Stephonik, who has worked on several of his films.

“I think our first film together, I was maybe 4 and he was 8,” she says. “He had a Super 8 camera, and I was the production designer. I made a ship, and we remade ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ I was Mary Ann as well. We were always making things.”

When Baker was a tween, the family moved to Branchburg in Somerset County (where his parents still live), where he took advantage of the added space and greenery, using the woods as a haven for his projects.

“He would get the neighborhood kids involved,” Stephonik says.

Baker’s first paid gig in the movie business arrived when he was 17 and still in high school. He became manager of a one-screen (now defunct) movie theater in Manville, which was part of the former Roberts independent theater chain (which owned the Wellmont in Montclair, among others).

“That theater had art films, and at the same time, I was able to get my hands on real film because I was a projectionist,” Baker says. “It was long before the days of digital. I was actually splicing together 35 mm film in order to project it, so that obviously had a big impact.”

Baker nurtured his love for another part of the film industry in Jersey. He began collecting movie posters at a flea market in Chester.

“I would flip through them for hours, boring my parents,” he says. “They wanted to go home.”

Baker would also buy posters at a comic book shop in downtown Somerville that rented movies that weren’t typically available elsewhere.

“It exposed me to stuff I couldn’t get at the local Blockbuster,” he says.

The writer-director still collects and restores vintage film posters in various languages, including ‘60s sci-fi and scream queen horror fests, some signed by the directors. At the beginning of the pandemic, he started sharing finds from his collection on Instagram. Baker launched the account with one of his top gets — a poster for François Truffaut’s 1962 French New Wave film “Jules and Jim,” starring Jeanne Moreau and measuring more than 46 by 62 inches. He began posing next to the posters with his dogs, Bunsen and Boonee.

It went without saying that the movie poster for “Red Rocket” couldn’t be a run-of-the-mill design. In the playful illustration, a giant pink doughnut with sprinkles strategically covers a naked Simon Rex in what Baker calls a throwback to ‘80s sex comedies and Italian genre films.

The evolution of Mikey Saber, Rex’s ne’er-do-well hustler, can be seen in Baker’s previous work.

His 2012 Los Angeles-set movie “Starlet” features James Ransone (”Tangerine,” “The Wire,” “It Chapter Two”) as a character named Mikey, a kind of precursor to Rex’s Mikey.

In “Starlet,” which won an Independent Spirit Award, young porn actor Jane (Dree Hemingway, daughter of actor Mariel and great-granddaughter of author Ernest) befriends an elderly woman named Sadie (Besedka Johnson). Baker’s Chihuahua Boonee plays the titular dog Starlet, and Ransone’s Mikey is a slimy porn operative in a supporting role. Some of the adult film industry people Rex’s Mikey name-drops in Texas are characters who appear in the previous film.

“We always thought there was so much more to explore with that character,” says Chris Bergoch, the writer-producer from Jersey who co-wrote “Starlet” and “Red Rocket” with Baker, as well as “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project.” This year, the writers were nominated for best screenplay at the Gotham Awards.

Mikey was born from Baker and Bergoch’s research of the porn industry ahead of “Starlet.”

“There was a handful of gentlemen that we met that were like Mikey Saber,” Baker says. “They don’t represent all men in the adult film world … but there is a certain type of guy that even has a slang term applied to them — ‘suitcase pimp.’ We use that in the movie. It’s male talent who live off of female talent in the industry. They’re abusers. They’re hustlers. They’re exploiters. We knew back then, even when making ‘Starlet,’ there was a whole other film here.”

Bergoch (“Ber-gosh”) remembers what it was like to be in the presence of the Mikeys.

“They’re making us laugh. They’re telling us these crazy stories. And then on a dime, they took a left turn and they’re telling us this really dark, dark stuff,” he says. “We weren’t sure if we should be laughing or if that’s unsettling. We’re driving home, we’re like, ‘You know, that would be cool to make an audience feel like we felt driving off with these interviews.’”

Bergoch says Rex is effective in making Mikey “likably unlikable.”

“The frequency that you want to hit and Simon can tap into is, how do you make a guy like this fun to watch?” he says.

A crass, R-rated brand of “fun to watch” was kind of Rex’s thing, on display in Dirt Nasty videos on YouTube, starting with his 2007 comedy-suffused debut rap album (“I shine like Morrissey on Hennessy on Christmas Eve,” he says in the throwback tribute “1980,” as Alf does cocaine).

When Rex became an MTV star in the ’90s, nude photos leaked of the VJ. He had posed for the pictures when he was 19 and briefly did solo porn scenes to pay rent and cover costs for his girlfriend at the time, who had a child.

“Sean and I knew that it was definitely a little meta to have him play a role like this,” Bergoch says. “If there are similarities that people find humorous, that’s just a bonus. Like sprinkles on top of the doughnut.”

Like Baker, Bergoch grew up in Jersey, in Glen Rock. As a kid, he saw movies every Friday at the Cineplex Odeon Tenplex on Route 4 in Paramus (which closed in 2007 as an AMC Loews theater) and worked on scripts at The Fireplace restaurant on Route 17, which recently closed after 65 years. (”I am devastated,” Bergosh says. “I’m so happy I went one last time last Christmas and I got a T-shirt, so now it’s one my most prized possessions.”)

Bergoch met his future writing partner when they were students at New York University — Baker studied non-linear editing at The New School and film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. There was always a demand for the school’s film equipment — “He’d be like, ‘When are you wrapping? I need the camera!’”

Following “Four Letter Words,” Baker made two small-budget New York-set films, “Take Out” (2004), co-directed with “Red Rocket” producer Shih-Ching Tsou, about a Chinese immigrant who works as a takeout deliveryman and has a day to pay a smuggling debt (the film saw limited release in 2008); and “Prince of Broadway” (2008), about a street vendor from Ghana who sells knockoff designer merchandise. Both films were nominated for Independent Spirit Awards the same year.

Caution: video contains profanity

After “Starlet,” Bergoch collaborated with Baker on the script for “Tangerine.” While much was made of Baker filming that movie on iPhones, “The Florida Project,” which won him the New York Film Critics Circle award for best director, marked the biggest change, given its larger budget and crew. Baker’s wife, Samantha Quan, served as an acting coach and producer on the film — led by Willem Dafoe, child actor Brooklynn Prince and Bria Vinaite — and returned as a producer for “Red Rocket,” his second film with distributor A24.

“I’m happy that people are responding to this film the way they are, because it did feel like a risk to follow up ‘Florida Project’ with this kind of a story,” Bergoch says. “Obviously, it’s not a movie for everyone. I don’t want my mom to see it.”

One resounding characteristic of Baker’s films is that they are distinctly of a place.

“The Florida Project” — a movie about people living on the periphery, but also about childhood — is based in and around the Magic Castle, a motel the color of Easter candy set in the shadow of Disney World.

“Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped lie,” says one character in “Tangerine,” an often hectic journey fueled by friendship and infidelity that unfolds on the streets of Hollywood and in a doughnut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“The first couple of films, I wasn’t totally aware of place,” says Baker, who edits all of his movies. “And then maybe with my third and fourth film, I started understanding that location should be a character. I mean, I feel it should be, at least for my films. It adds so much. It says so much about your human characters, the real characters in the film. It gives them so much more, because everybody is connected to their environment.”

It undoubtedly helps when that environment is “visually stunning,” he says.

“‘Florida (Project),’ obviously, that film had to take place there, that’s where the issue is based, the issue of hidden homelessness and children living in the shadow of a place that we consider paradise to children,” Baker says. “That area just happened to also be an incredibly colorful place with lots of light, a very Floridian light.”

In “Red Rocket,” Texas oil refineries billow in the background as Rex’s Mikey excitedly pedals his bicycle to see a teen conquest. Donald Trump looms on the TV in his mother-in-law’s living room.

“It’s more about themes and politics and division,” Baker says of the film. “Using the backdrop of the oil and gas industry was important contextually, so that led to us shooting against refineries, which are instantaneously visual and actually have moving parts to them, elements like steam and flare stacks — it’s eye candy in many ways.”

“Red Rocket” cinematographer Drew Daniels prominently features the structures set against painted skies.

“They represent greed to me … we talked about that sort of juxtaposition,” says Stephonik, who is also a photographer. “Every frame in (Baker’s) film, my goal is to make it look like a beautiful photograph. So I’m really with him looking at the monitor and looking at color.”

“One of my favorite films is ‘Wizard of Oz,’” she says. “When I was creating one of the outside spaces in Galveston, the refineries to me looked like Oz, glowing and beautiful even though it’s not nature, so it’s odd.”

A local resident helped her build a backyard set. Growing up, he told her, that’s exactly what they called the refineries — “Oz.”

Baker and his team of producers are known for finding talent in everyday places.

In what seems like the stuff of dreamy Hollywood cliche, he met Suzanna Son in Los Angeles four years ago outside the Arclight, a (now shuttered) movie theater. She was holding a friend’s cigarette while they took a phone call. Baker told Son, then an aspiring actor, that maybe they could work together someday.

“I don’t know, maybe smoke traveled and caught his attention,” says Son, 26.

In “Red Rocket,” that opportunity finally arrived. Son, who is nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best supporting female, is ebullient as Strawberry, the 17-year-old doughnut shop employee who becomes Mikey’s obsession. Her presence in the film, underscored by bright hues like yellow and orange, illuminates a whole realm of fantasy within his drab reality.

Son got to show off her musical talent on the “Red Rocket” soundtrack by singing an impassioned cover of the movie’s resounding anthem — ‘N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye,” another MTV mainstay, only from the 2000s. She says working with Baker has proved every bit a Hollywood fairytale.

“He’s really an actor’s director,” she says. “It feels weird to even call him director — I don’t know, collaborator? He’s similar to Simon in that way, in that he wants to hear what you have to say, and he’s willing to listen to you. You know, ‘What ideas do you have? Do it. It’s OK if it doesn’t work. Let’s just try it.’”

A good portion of “Red Rocket” came together — including the cast — after Baker arrived in Texas. The director is also known for minting first-time actors. He made “Starlet” actor Besedka Johnson a name when she was 86, after producer Shih-Ching Tsou spotted her at a YMCA. With “Red Rocket,” the director and his producers filled roles during pre-production, while they were location-scouting.

“In this case, everybody but my lead characters were first-timers,” Baker says.

Brenda Deiss, who plays Lexi’s mother Lil, was cast after being spotted in Texas. So were fellow acting newcomers Brittney Rodriguez (June, daughter of Texas City weed dealer Leondria) and Ethan Darbone (Lonnie, the lone neighbor happy about Mikey’s return).

Darbone was working as a chef at a restaurant where “Red Rocket” filming was underway.

“He just happened to really make an impression on me in a couple of seconds,” Baker says. “And when somebody makes an impression on me in a couple of seconds, I want to know more about them. Then we started talking, and he talked about how much he was into film. And actually he had seen my first film, ‘Four Letter Words.’ So I was blown away by that. Then he said he had a tattoo of a Chucky doll on his back, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’re speaking the same language.’”

Judy Hill, another first-time actor, plays Leondria, a maternal figure who gives Mikey a break — against her better judgment. Baker first saw Hill, who hails from New Orleans, in the 2018 Roberto Minervini documentary “What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?”

“I’ve been so blessed because I realized that a lot of the people that I street-cast also are incredibly skilled and are so natural,” he says. “They could parlay this into an acting career if they really wanted to, I think, and if the industry embraces them. They really delivered and I can’t wait for people to see these fresh faces because it’s quite an eclectic and dynamic cast.”

Those actors brought Baker other helpful skills — like realistic dialogue.

“He was excited when the people of the area who he cast would say, ‘Oh, we don’t say it like that, we say this,’” Elrod says.

Even Sophie, the pit bull who appears opposite Rex in “Red Rocket,” was found living in Galveston. When Baker met her, she had heartworm and needed hip surgery. Before long, she was a nominee for the Palm Dog Award, an honor bestowed by critics at Cannes. Now she’s healthy and lives with her adoptive family in Los Angeles.

“She’s, like, rolling around with a German shepherd all day,” Baker says. “They’re best friends.”

“Those things happen when you have these little indies where you’re taking from real life,” he says. “There’s a lot of hybrid filmmaking going on here, half a narrative fiction film and half a documentary, in a way.”

Baker made a lot of decisions on the fly, but one thing he didn’t want was for “Red Rocket,” set in 2016, to feel like a “COVID-produced movie.”

No Zooms, no shooting in only one room.

“That was actually a mandate,” Baker says. “We were like, ‘If in any way, this movie comes across having been shot during COVID, we fail.’”

The small crew was Baker’s preferred working style, but also helpful for managing safety precautions. COVID-19 compliance rules from the Directors Guild of America (the director is a member) required three tests per person each week, so the task was easier to scale than larger productions. People in the film’s intimate COVID “pod” had their temperatures taken and kept distance when they could.

“It all worked out wonderfully,” Baker says — everyone was safe.

Wonderfully except for some especially worrying snags. And the director was not immune.

“Sean tested positive and had to go back to LA and then it was a false positive,” Rex recalls. “There was just a bunch of chaos right before we shot.”

“That was the major monkey wrench,” Baker says. “Realizing that not only every state tackles COVID in a different way, but every lab literally has different sensitivity thresholds and you might be picking up a coronavirus in your system that has nothing to do with COVID. You know, stuff like that is a little crazy.”

Still, they had to err on the side of caution when they were shooting on the Galveston Pier.

“We did have to digitally remove some masks,” Baker says. “That’s a little Easter egg you got there.”

About those Easter eggs — Stephonik says Baker relishes in planning little details — “hiding certain fun messages” — for observant viewers and fans.

One obvious detail that might seem like an intentionally planted Easter egg is how “Red Rocket” producer and longtime Baker collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou, who he met at The New School early in his film career, is back onscreen as a purveyor of doughnuts. She filled the same role at Hollywood’s Donut Time in “Tangerine.” This time she manages the Donut Hole, where Strawberry works.

“That was a COVID choice,” Baker says. “I was like, ‘Shih-Ching, I’m so sorry, but it looks like you’re gonna have to reprise your role as the donut shop owner because we can’t go through that whole process of finding somebody for this role and getting them tested daily and blah, blah, blah.’ So she was perfect.”

Bergoch initially resisted featuring another doughnut business, but Baker loved the space (which is a real shop, enhanced by Stephonik’s wizardry).

“Who knows?” Bergoch says. “Maybe it’ll lead to a doughnut trilogy now.”

Why doughnuts?

“I see our doughnuts as like the new American pie,” Baker says. “I see it as our new comfort food.”

The director, who was used to the domination of Dunkin’ back in Jersey, had long been exposed to independently owned doughnut shops in California.

“I didn’t realize that doughnuts were just as popular, if not more popular, in Texas,” he says. “We just found Donut Hole, which was was perfect on so many levels — right against the refinery, it had the colors we wanted for Strawberry’s story. And then of course there’s the whole sexual connotation.”

With both “Tangerine” and “Red Rocket,” the crews agreed that they wouldn’t partake of any sweet treats during filming. But on the last day, they went to town.

“We’re all pounding doughnuts and pounding bear claws,” Baker says. ”I always go with the classic glazed.”

Doughnuts or not, the director’s work over the next year will depend on how the pandemic plays out.

“I could make another film that’s about the size of ‘Red Rocket’ before tackling my my Vancouver film. And that may happen, actually,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I’m pretty psyched about that.”

“Red Rocket,” rated R, is now playing in New York and will expand to more theaters in the coming weeks.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.