Sean Baker’s new film, Anoracould have starred Tom Hardy and Ryan Gosling. Early in the project’s development, a producer interested in Baker’s script had wanted to court the actors. Inside a cafe in West Hollywood a few weeks ago, the director recalled the man’s enthusiasm. “‘It’s your Russians!'” Baker told me the producer said of the characters they’d play: two toughs tasked with breaking up an impulsive marriage between their wealthy Russian charge and his new wife, a 23-year-old sex worker from Brooklyn. “I thought, ‘Oh, I was actually thinking about throwing real Russians.” He laughed. “I like those guys, but that’s not how I make my movies.”

This is how Baker makes his films: with small budgets, non-actors, a keen eye for realism and a determined rejection of Hollywood, even as his profile in the industry has risen. Certainly, he constantly feels the tension between staying with his approach and deviating from it; he was “almost seduced,” he said, by the aforementioned producer when he dangled the prospect of a $20 million price tag for Anora. But for now, he’s established himself as something of an oxymoron instead: the mainstream indie filmmaker. His work, focused on people who don’t tend to be movie protagonists—undocumented immigrants, adult movie stars—has brought him critical acclaim and attention. He has built a devoted following among cinephiles with his unconventional production process; he even rejects the typical practice of conducting test screenings for audience input. “It’s supposed to be my vision, so why would I ask for a bunch of opinions that would tarnish my vision?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. Like, if I screw up, it’s on me!”

Moreover, the strategy has worked for him. All his movies, including the cult favorite Mandarin and the Oscar nominee The Florida Projectfeels fully realized despite its roughness. They are raw, intimate portraits of Americans often misrepresented or overlooked in pop culture, especially sex workers. However, Baker’s love of telling outsiders’ stories is not why he chooses to remain one himself. “It’s not about the subject, because there is these films made by the Hollywood studio system,” he said. “I just feel like it’s so scary, because there are so many movies made by committee.”

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Never has his conviction paid off as it has Anorahis most accomplished work – and as it continues its theatrical build-up, biggest box office hit-yet. The film stars an electric Mikey Madison as the titular heroine, better known as “Ani,” whose brassy exterior belies an earnest yearning for an easier life. When she meets Ivan Zakharov, aka “Vanya” (played by Mark Eydelshteyn), a client who turns out to be the obscenely rich son of a Russian oligarch, she falls into a drug- and sex-fueled romance that leads to the couple getting married in Las Vegas . However, their union results in an unpleasant collision with reality when Vanya’s family’s henchmen arrive to undo it.

Anora is a romantic comedy, a high-octane thriller and a gripping character study; for Baker, it is also a watershed in his filmmaking. After premiering the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May, he won the Palme d’Or, its most prestigious award. He recreated the scene: He pointed to where his producers had been around him and where Madison had been sitting. He showed his eyes widening when he realized – partly due to the other top contenders taking other trophies, which meant they were out of contention for the top prize – that he could be announced as the winner. And when his name was indeed called, he said, “it was my dream come true.”

The win has also led to “a bit of an existential crisis,” he told me. “This is actually the first time that I’ve seriously, like What is it Right follow up?which is very dangerous. I try to avoid it, but so far I haven’t had to think about it.

Since the beginning of his decades-long career, Baker has been drawn to stories about chasing success and stability in atypical ways. “There’s something fascinating about, to me, the pursuit of this American dream, but people who have to pursue it who don’t get the normal path, who can’t follow the normal path, because they’re not allowed to,” he said. His protagonists often glimpse an ideal version of their life just out of reach: In Mandarintwo transgender workers spend Christmas Eve battling rumors that threaten their friendship and their clientele. IN The Florida ProjectThe kids living in a motel create their own magical kingdom just miles from Disney World, while their guardians do what they can to protect the children’s youthful happiness. IN Red rocketa washed-up porn star meets a teenager he believes could be his ticket back to semi-stardom; in the process of making her his protégé, he takes advantage of the few relationships he has.

Baker feels a kinship with such characters, although he points out that, raised comfortably in suburban New Jersey, he has never had to rely on a criminalized and stigmatized livelihood himself. What resonates with him, he told me, is “that attitude of just not giving up, and the frustration, the feeling that sometimes it’s just never going to work.” For much of his career, he took on side gigs to make ends meet, spending years making money editing wedding videos and actors’ demo reels; even today, the bulk of his income comes from outside of his filmmaking. “I feel like there’s more than a little bit of hustler in me,” he said.

Yet the kind of storytelling he’s interested in can easily be read as exploitative rather than empathetic in the wrong hands. “You really have to get the endorsement and the thumbs up,” Baker said, “the signature of people who have had that experience … I don’t want a sex worker to see this movie and just be like, ‘WHO wrote this? This is not us.” With Anoraas with his previous films, he was careful not to play down the difficulties. “That’s the first thing for me. I care about to audience more than anyone else.” So when he settles on a world to explore, he consults with members of the subcultures that inhabit it and moves to the locations he plans to present. He recruits non-actors, locals and real-life sex workers to create an authentic feel. On set, he encourages his actors to change any dialogue that sounds wrong and to improvise so that he has plenty of tonal options to consider. He edits what he has shot for the final cut The Florida Projectfor example, he ordered it differently than the script. He bathes his films in saturated colors, pushing back against Hollywood’s tendency to paint poverty in dreary hues, prioritizing instead the interiority of the characters—their humor, their pride, their wonder.

But if Baker previously assuaged his fear of inauthenticity by focusing on realism and carefully incorporating his research, making a film as deliberately comic as Anora required a different approach. Many of its set pieces are exaggerated to the point of absurdity—he referred to a late scene in which Ani, a hungover Vanya, and their distraught carers disturb the peace in a courtroom as “almost sitcom-level”—and he wanted his actors to push the humor as far as possible. A carefully choreographed home invasion sequence, during which Ani fights tooth and nail to defend herself against the Zakharov family cronies, runs for nearly half an hour, filled with physical gags and F-bombs. Baker seemed overjoyed at the ridiculousness, Samantha Quan, Baker’s wife and a producer on several of his films, telling me, “You always know if a shot is good, because you can hear him giggle.”

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Baker bent his own rules, in other words: he risked the story feeling unreal, a little too fantastic. And yet, he told me, even as the scenes got screamier and screamier, as long as he built toward its sober end, he figured it would come together. The director sees Anora as an “open comedy”, but it contains as much sadness as joy. Throughout the film, he trains his lens on Ani as the grounding force, even for the anguished henchmen trying to break up her marriage, underscoring the unusual, visceral bond they begin to build in the face of Vanya’s demanding family. Madison shows the light slowly fading from Ani’s eyes, worn down by constantly defending her self-worth and what she thought was a loving relationship. Baker’s other films also produce such emotional grips, but in less gradual ways, suddenly blurring reality and fantasy in their final moments: In The Florida Projectthe children can only reach the happiest place on earth in a dream. IN Red rocketthe protagonist sheds a tear as he lets his imagination run wild.

Perhaps that’s the key to why the director’s work feels specific yet universal, exuberant yet affecting. His films are balancing acts that reveal that the so-called American dream is a moving target – a seductive tease. Ani has bought into acquiring status and material wealth as an ideal; from the moment Vanya gives her a diamond ring, she begins to fight the fear that her Cinderella story might end. When I observed that the examination of the American Dream seems to be his films’ most consistent theme, Baker smiled. “Maybe,” he said. He considers his work political, but if there are statements he’s trying to make, he told me, “they’re going to be disguised.”

Baker has also hovered just outside the Hollywood spotlight. But as his films have begun to gain more mainstream attention — especially with that Palme d’Or — he knows he’s become a recognizable name among his peers. By remaining on the fringes of the industry, however, he has built a precise filmography, right up until the same font he uses for every title– which is Aguafina, for the record. “I sometimes feel like I’m caught between two worlds, because I preach about being independent and what that can mean, and having your vision intact,” he told me. “But at the same time…” He shrugged. “I do love Hollywood.”