In the back of Annie Baker’s office at home in New York, a spectral presence is just visible in silhouette against the window. It turns out there is not just one, but two cats hidden among the desks and shelves. Baker swivels around a spare chair to reveal Carla, then gestures behind. “This is Bobik,” she says of the one basking in the feline window hammock. “It’s the name of an offstage character in a Chekhov play.”
Baker is a master of the unspoken and unseen. A Chekhov nut, she is one of her generation’s most lauded playwrights, telling eerily intimate stories that alight on overlooked corners of humanity. She won the Pulitzer prize for 2013’s The Flick, set during a cleanup at a cinema. John, from 2015, put a young couple into an eerie B&B in Gettysburg run by a doll-obsessed proprietor. The Antipodes, from 2017, explored the glib exploitation of emotion in writers’ rooms; her latest play, last year’s Infinite Life, observed a group of women discussing their suffering at a pain treatment clinic in California. She also adapted Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 2012.
Baker made her reputation on quietude and conversational dialogue: the New Yorker once said she “wants life onstage to be so vivid, natural and emotionally precise that it bleeds into the audience’s visceral experience of time and space”. She is against didacticism and explanation: today we are discussing Baker’s first feature film, Janet Planet, which she wrote and directed, but you get the sense Baker would prefer to avoid talking about it at all. To read the little press she did around the US release is to witness her wince at comments she made just weeks previously. “Oh, I guess I talked about that,” she sighs when I cite something from the official publicity materials.
Not that Baker is unwilling or unfriendly. She is immensely warm and curious, and keeps a pen in her hand as if an idea could strike at any moment. “I make my work because whatever the thing is about is something I’m not able to say in words,” she says. “So then, saying it in words post-fact feels really perverse!” Her preference, with Janet Planet, would be for “people going to see it having absolutely no idea what it’s about, any expectations. But I know that’s not the way it works.”
There are immutable facts about Janet Planet. It’s set in a hippy corner of Massachusetts in summer 1991. Over the school holidays, 11-year-old Lacy (miraculous first-timer Zoe Ziegler, whose hawk-eyed watchfulness has something of the young Meryl Streep) realises that her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is her own flawed person, as three prickly new figures enter their life.
Janet has retrained as an acupuncturist after some unnamed rupture; they live in a converted silo and attend radical folk-theatre by a community group that may or may not be a cult; the name “Janet Planet” is one that Baker, growing up in a similarly countercultural environment in Massachusetts, knew well: “To me Janet is a very ‘women born in the 40s and 50s’ name,” she says. “Janet Planet feels like a hippy nickname for a woman of a certain generation.”
Much as Lacy clings to Janet like a limpet, Ziegler’s stillness brims with a barely contained horror that the two of them are slipping out of orbit and that Janet is fallible. But less immutable is this potent, earthy film’s capacity for interpretation. Baker has an acute ability to evoke the textures of a childhood summer, rendered in 16mm film: the fuzz of a car’s back seat, the chocolate ice cream stain on an oversized T-shirt. (Part of this may be down to the 36C degree heat they were sometimes filming in.)
Baker thinks of Janet Planet less as a classic mother-daughter story than “a particular kind of marriage”, she says. She had the idea for the film 20 years ago, as a student. By the time she came to write it, “I still hadn’t really seen that on film before – that kind of ambivalent marriage, something that comes with darkness and romance and closeness and alienation.” Lacy isn’t shy about defending her stake in their shared life: “It’s a marriage of equals with a very particular power dynamic,” says Baker. (She wrote it shortly after becoming a mother, but says that’s pure coincidence.)
Janet’s world is one intent on finding alternative ways to feel better, yet she blunders repeatedly with Lacy, exposing her to adult darknesses, which often results in the film’s funniest moments. (“What’s a cult?” Lacy asks, as Janet combs for nits.) “I wouldn’t have thought of that but I really like that,” says Baker when I point out the contradiction between Janet’s intentions and actions. “It was so important for me to have a really complicated, push-pull relationship between these two women. I think this was even more true in 1991, that there weren’t really clear right or wrong ways to parent a kid. You could critique Janet, but that was not interesting to me; nor was it interesting to portray a loving, cuddly, super sweet relationship. Distance was really important to me – distance for me is a lot about individual sadness and struggle.”
Baker grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her own separated mother. As a kid surrounded by bohemian adults, she remembers people talking about “a somatic way of thinking, or this idea of paying attention to the body and what it’s trying to tell you,” she says. “I found that way of talking and thinking kind of silly and frankly repulsive. I was a very cerebral child and young woman. Now – it’s so funny – I’m really interested in talking about the body in a way that I think would have horrified me as a small child.”
That sort of holistic intuition seems pivotal to Baker’s approach. As a first-time film director, she was remarkably hands off, not even telling her 11-year-old lead what she wanted her to think and feel. How did she know the cast understood her material? “One thing I love about directing movies is that you can have a really individual process with each actor leading up to the shoot,” she says. “I really like figuring out what an actor needs.”
She loved learning to direct as she went, shedding her total mastery of the theatrical realm – where she even takes the colour of the room’s seats into consideration for her productions – to be a beginner. When I ask what she thinks Lacy will remember of this summer as she grows up, Baker says she doesn’t think of her characters as real people so much as “aesthetic – they’re like paint brushed on my canvas”. The appeal of film-making is “knowing what exact size and shape the canvas is when I start making it”.
Janet Planet isn’t Baker’s first foray into cinema. In 2015, she received support from the producer Scott Rudin to write a screenplay, and he invited influential people to see her plays. In 2021, dozens of his former employees alleged that he was an aggressive bully. Their potential collaboration ended long before the news broke, says Baker, and her screenplay didn’t reach a second draft. “I choose whether or not to continue working with people not based on what the public is saying about them,” she says. “I choose based on what I see and experience. I think the decisions you make in private in this industry are so important. Being brave enough to make a decision in private about who to work with or not work with any more is everything.” It’s a little gnomic but, she says with a smile, “I think that’s what I want to say.”
Baker has ended up part of a big film-making family: her husband, the academic Nico Baumbach, is the brother of director Noah Baumbach, who is married to Greta Gerwig. (Despite the shared use of dolls in their work, it’s not a theme that’s sparked any conversations between the two of them, Baker says.) She has a second film in the offing, to be made on 35mm in Queens, New York, next year, in colder weather. But they’re not analysing ideas around the dinner table. “My work is something that is so interesting and private for me, I don’t talk about it very much with anybody in my life,” says Baker. “It’s the thing I don’t have to talk about, and that’s what makes it so special for me.” Never mind explanation: for Baker, her work only remains compelling if even she doesn’t know exactly what’s going on in it. “The thing has to be a bit of a mystery for me to be interested in making it.”
• Janet Planet is released in the UK on 19 July
