Annie Baker Goes to Hollywood

Before starting filming on Janet Planet, Annie Baker and her sound designer, Paul Hsu, recorded two weeks of the ambient noises of the Western Massachusetts countryside. For the coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old girl, Lacy, and her mother, Janet, Baker had found the home where she wanted to set much of the movie: an angular but cozy wood cabin with large windows huddled in the forest, a droplet of civilization in the midst of the woods.

“The sound of nature around this house was so incredible,” Baker tells me over coffee and a sandwich at a café just south of Prospect Park, where she had arrived in a ’70s-ish brown jacket, toting a well-used orange backpack. “There were, like, bears wandering around.” Baker has a mop of Pre-Raphaelite bangs and an open smile. She’s best known as one of the foremost playwrights of her generation — a precise observer of tragicomic human behavior. Janet Planet is her first movie, but her enthusiasm for and knowledge of the nitty-gritty processes of filmmaking are apparent. She and Hsu placed recording equipment in the trees at the locations where they planned to film. The recordings were sensitive enough to pick up the sound of a bumblebee tumbling around a microphone (“It sounds like a plane,” Baker tells me excitedly) as well as the other fauna roaming through the area. Those recordings are the basis of the film’s soundtrack, as Baker had decided to forgo a typical musical score. She and Hsu combed through the reams of audio together, assembling those buzzes, chirps, the rippling of a stream, and whatever else into a soundscape that approximates how summer in New England feels.

When a playwright moves to a different medium, there’s a risk their work may not translate or that they may not even try to adapt to the new language. The history of film is littered with inert play adaptations that leave you wishing the characters would walk into another room. But Janet Planet is 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. There were philosophical questions about how to depict the passage of time in childhood, for which Baker felt film was a particularly good medium. “The way memory works and how time moves is so interesting to me,” she says. “It’s hard to articulate, and I think that’s why I felt like I could only explore it on film.”

Janet Planet is set in 1991, around the time Baker was growing up in the area. It unfolds across three chapters separated by relationships that Janet (Julianne Nicholson), an overaccommodating single mother, has with the other adults in her life: her boyfriend (Will Patton), a friend and outdoor-theater performer (Sophie Okonedo), and a Rilke-quoting director (Elias Koteas). Each one makes Lacy (Zoe Ziegler, an incredible newcomer) possessive in an inchoate way. Lacy is introverted but forceful — the film opens with her calling Janet to say she’ll kill herself unless her mom picks her up from summer camp early. Janet tends to be obliging to a fault, even when men give her reason to distrust them. Lacy tries to push away the people who come into Janet’s life, seeming to struggle to understand why her mother might need anyone but her own daughter.

In person, Baker is chatty and inquisitive; she notices, mid-conversation, the movements of people and nature around us, registering both when a woman at a nearby table shifts inside to get away from the sound of our interview and the red flash of a cardinal flying into a tree overhead. She speaks in the same roundabout cadence her characters often do. Her early work was set in the fictional town of Shirley, Vermont — a place not unlike Amherst, Massachusetts — and includes Circle Mirror Transformation, about an acting class, and The Aliens, set among conversations between guys in an alley behind a coffee shop. Those two plays shared an Obie Award in 2010. Baker won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for The Flick, a three-hour epic about movie-theater employees, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. Her most recent work, Infinite Life, in which a group of women try to relieve their ailments with liquid diets at a medical clinic, was written before the pandemic but premiered in New York in late 2023. Sara Holdren called it “prismlike and expansive”; Helen Shaw, in The New Yorker, referred to it as a “dry-eyed drama” that captures the unbearable.

What’s true of Baker’s work onstage remains in film — like that shaggy-exact ear for sentences. Baker is also known for her pauses, for making the audience listen to the space between the words, which adds an awareness of one’s own presence amid the spectators at a theater. On film, her actors take their time. “It was never too slow for her,” Nicholson tells me. The movie often takes the perspective of a child, and one has the frequent sensation of listening through a keyhole, alongside Lacy, to the inexplicable dialect of grown-ups.

This is not Baker’s first brush with Hollywood. Unless you, say, write the book of a hit musical, playwriting doesn’t tend to be a financially sustainable profession. Baker’s work has never gone to Broadway. At this point, she supports herself primarily by teaching her craft. She has dabbled in television, developing a pilot for HBO in 2011, which didn’t go anywhere, about a B-school graduate returning home to a Northern California commune, and she worked in the writers’ room for I Love Dick. However, she found TV incompatible with how she conceives of a story. “The idea of a cliffhanger is of no particular interest,” she says. Her dark comedy The Antipodes imagines a writers’ room as an extractive inquisition with men demanding everyone spin their most personal confessions into content while munching on takeout and sipping LaCroix.

But she had always loved film — perhaps unsurprising considering The Flick, in which a character treats the replacement of a 35-mm. projector with a digital one as a moral failure. She possesses what Nicholson calls a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Criterion Collection. Her influences on Janet Planet include Maurice Pialat’s 1968 L’Enfance Nue, which takes an unflinching approach to the story of a troubled child, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2010 film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Weerasethakul’s dreamlike pacing, in which reality and something mystical commingle when characters reveal shocking things offhandedly, shares much with Baker’s style.

For more than a decade, Baker had been toying with the idea of a project about a mother and daughter. She got to work on it seriously only in the spring of 2020. At that time, the premiere of Infinite Life had been interrupted by the pandemic. Baker had just given birth to a daughter with her husband, the academic Nico Baumbach (brother of the director Noah; Baker has a small role in his film While We’re Young). She suddenly found herself with a lot of time on her hands and wasn’t sure when the theater, as a form, would return.

She also felt she could depict a kind of adolescent experience in film that would be difficult to perform onstage. Lacy, Baker’s main character, is a recognizably confident but nerdy girl. She hasn’t yet been hit with teenage self-consciousness. The type of girl who had the wherewithal and self-assurance to do eight performances a week probably wouldn’t have worked for the part. “I’m sure there’s an awesome 10-year-old who could be in Matilda,” as Baker puts it. “But she wouldn’t be right for the movie.” Baker spent months looking for her Lacy, approaching parents and daughters on the street with offers to audition, before finding Ziegler, a “little wizard” from Delaware who heard about the part through a scouting email. What made her right was all her non-people-pleaser qualities. “When she walked into the room, she didn’t 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.”

Nicholson, a stage and screen actress who most recently won acclaim as Kate Winslet’s best friend in Mare of Easttown, was Baker’s first and only choice for the role of Janet. “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. Both of them bought their first bras at the JCPenney in the Hampshire Mall in Hadley, a place Lacy and Janet visit in the film. Unfolding over the course of a single summer, the movie captures the region’s caramelized glow as well as its lost-in-time qualities and political history. “Growing up in Amherst in the ’90s, questions of counterculture were very big,” Baker remembers. It was important for her to have the characters discuss a man who set himself on fire in the town square to protest the first Gulf War.

Nicholson’s mother is an herbalist, Baker’s is a psychologist, and Janet is an acupuncturist. “I’m not playing my mom, and Annie didn’t write Janet as her mom, but the world she creates is very particular and real,” Nicholson says. She remembers instinctively the kind of hug shared by herself and Okonedo’s character, the theater performer — an extended moment of solace between the two old friends who are reconnecting after a long period apart. 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!”

In Janet and Lacy’s relationship, Baker was intrigued by the question of the mother as an object of possessive, almost romantic, cross-generational love. Janet and Lacy are close in a way that may border on the unhealthy: Janet lacks discernment about the men she brings into her life, while Lacy tries to force out anyone close to her mother. The movie contains a late-night confession in which Janet says she believes she can make any man fall in love with her if she really tries. “Can you stop?” Lacy asks. “I found it so sad,” Nicholson says, both in the ways mothers and children always have to negotiate their own boundaries and in how the scene spoke to the perspective of a woman in that period of history. “At that time, the work was getting a man’s interest for validation,” she says.

But the film does not moralize. “I didn’t have any kind of judgment on whether she was a good or bad mother. That’s 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? “There’s 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. It turns out to be a weeping beech with little doorlike gaps between its leaves, gaps I had never noticed despite years of running in the park. “Here,” she says, encouraging me to walk into the house tree as we approach, “I’ll let you go experience it.” Inside, it’s 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.

A tenet of Baker’s work may be that, if you zoom close enough to reality, it’s possible to discern the supernatural in its warp and weft. The effect isn’t quite magical realism, where a big enough emotion makes things burst into the extraordinary, but something more analytical: Think hard enough about what we experience (and how we experience it) and the evidence says something more is afoot. Her plays have always touched the mysterious through the means of the mundane, and her more recent work has tilted further toward the uncanny: In 2015’s John, a millennial couple visit a Gettysburg inn teeming with an unnatural number of dolls; in The Antipodes, there’s the cursed endless gloom state of the writers’ room; in Infinite Life, the ethereal un-time of wellness. Janet Planet appears to hew more closely to realism, but Baker allows in moments that are unexplainable. From the movie’s child’s-eye view, in an almost George Berkeley subjective-idealist sense, the universe may as well contain magic. “I have memories from childhood where it felt like the miraculous was part of life,” Baker says. “That’s what it’s like being 10. You live in an animistic universe wherein magical acts are not fanciful.”

In Janet Planet, Lacy creates little diorama-like scenes with doll-like objects. Some were Baker’s own constructions, which she dug out of storage with her mom’s help. “I made lots of tiny things,” she says. Like Lacy, she would arrange them into dioramas. That impulse to impute something more behind the blank mien of a doll has come to fascinate her on a philosophical level. Dolls are a slate onto which we project so much imagination, the beginning of so many inquiries into religion and art. They can be a means through which a child exerts control over her universe and expresses herself, orchestrating scenes like a young theater director. Yet in their blankness, they are also unknowable. A doll’s silence is of considerable importance “in a world where destiny and indeed God himself have become famous mainly by not speaking to us,” as Rilke put it, which Baker forwards to me over email.

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. “I would feed them three meals a day and then leave the room for them to eat,” she remembers. Her parents were separated, and when she went to stay with her father in New York, she would ask her mother to feed them for her. Could she make them breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the proper appointed hours? Baker’s mother promised to do it, but as a child, Baker didn’t quite believe she had listened. “I asked her recently, ‘You didn’t really feed my Trolls three times a day, did you?’” Baker says. “She actually did it. It makes me want to cry.”