GOOGLE HANGOUT WITH ANNIE BAKER, PLAYWRIGHT

1/25/16, 2:33 PM
Genevieve Yue

Pulitzer Prizewinning play The Flick, the

young employees of a single-screen New England movie
house play a game while sweeping popcorn and candy wrappers from the theater floor. It is a variant on the Six Degrees
of Kevin Bacon game: one person names two actors, and the
other tries to connect them in as few moves as possible. It is
also a fitting metaphor for the plays meandering structure.
The characters have not yet made up their minds about who
they are, and as the play unfolds, many of their dreams
slowly give way to disappointment, as communicated verbally in stutters, stumbles, and the many awkward silences
that fill the spaces between whatever, uh, and broken-off
bits of dialogue.
With The Flicks restaging at New Yorks Barrow Street
Theater in 201516, Baker took the opportunity to make a
few edits. She added an exchange in which Sam, the older
but no more mature theater employee, asks film-savant Avery to connect Macaulay Culkin to Michael Caine. Avery is
at first quiet, then answers in quick succession. He pauses.
Theres a faster way through Daniel Stern but I like this
one better.
The declaration is tantamount to an aesthetic credo, an
insistence on the integrity of process for its own sake. The
long way is also, for Baker, a literal one. The Flick runs a little over three hours, and its unconventional length (though,
as Baker notes, this is only unusual for plays written by
female playwrights) led to several walk-outs at its initial
2013 run at the Off-Broadway venue Playwrights Horizon.
Yet what makes Baker one of the most critically lauded playwrights to emerge on the New York theater scene in the past
ten years is, in part, her uncompromising commitment to
experimentation and disruption. Baker intrinsically understands that arriving at something meaningful means taking
a new, if unwieldy, way.

Accordingly, Baker did not want to conduct a traditional

interview for Film Quarterly. Instead of sitting down with an
audio recorder, she suggested a few alternative ideas, some of
which worked, others that did not. After running into each
other at a New York Film Festival screening of Chantal
Akermans No Home Movie (2015)both overwhelmed by
the filmwe agreed to begin this conversation by choosing
a film neither of us had seen before, and watching it together.
The selection process itself led to a long discussion. At a
nearby Le Pain Quotidien, we pulled up the AFI list of Top
100 films on my phone and scanned through it, noting what
wed missed, what wed meant to see but never got around
to, what films the other absolutely had to see. (Baker was especially enthusiastic about Tootsie [Syndney Pollack, 1982].)
Eventually we settled on Charlie Chaplins City Lights (1931).
A few weeks later I went to her Brooklyn Heights apartment, watched her partner fiddle with a French DVD that
wasnt agreeing with their televisions aspect ratio, and, once
it was working, shared a small bowl of Terra chips with the
two of them. Some time later Baker and I began to talk, first
through email, and eventually on Google Chat. This interview is a result of that session, edited and supplemented
through later email exchanges.
***
ANNIE BAKER, 2:33 PM: Genevieve??

Film Quarterly, Vol. 69, Number 4, pp. 5764, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.

YUE, 2:36 PM: Theres something about sitting in front

of a computer to talk to someone thats sad. But
when youre holding something to your ear, thats
somehow different.

In Annie Bakers

2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Presss Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2016.69.4.57.

GENEVIEVE YUE, 2:33 PM: Hi Annie!

BAKER, 2:34 PM: Wow. Im still impressed that things like this
can happen. The other day I Skyped with someone and it
blew my mind.
YUE, 2:35 PM: Im glad its working too!

BAKER, 2:35 PM: Skype always makes me sad, though, more

sad than a phone call.

F ILM QU A RTE RL Y

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Portrait of Annie Baker.

Brigitte Lacombe: www.brigittelacombe.com

YUE, 2:46 PM: I also find it interesting how people

come away with different experiences from the same
film. This is how I understand cinephilianot that you
love all movies or even a single movie, but that your
love is uneven and highly specific. That you
experience certain scenes or moments so vividly, as
if they were made just for you. And when you
recount them to someone else, even someone you
watched the movie with, that experience isnt always
there for them.

Aaron Clifton Moten, Matthew Maher, and Louisa Krause

in the Playwrights Horizons production of The Flick.
Photo by Joan Marcus

BAKER, 2:37 PM: Yes exactly. Its very cozy to press the person
up against your ear.
YUE, 2:38 PM: I thought we could start by talking about
City Lights. I noticed, when we were watching the
film, you wrote down three things in your notebook.
Do you remember what those were?

BAKER, 2:40 PM: Now I cant find that notebook, but I remember two of them. One was that he (Chaplin) composed
the music. And then I wrote down just for myself, for thinking about a play Im writing, the device where the days of
the calendar peel away and fly away to signify how much
time has passed. And I was wondering what was the last
movie that ever used that convention (before it was used,
probably ironically, in a Coen brothers movie or something).
And then I dont remember the third thing. What did you
write down? Im so interested in what different people remember after watching the same movie at the same time.
YUE, 2:41 PM: I wrote down Tomorrow the birds will
sing, which is what Chaplin tells the millionaire to
prevent him from committing suicide. I remember
the way Chaplin clasped his hands together while
saying it. What has lingered for you?

BAKER, 2:43 PM: Hmmm. Trying to see what pops into my

head. All the scenes between the flower girl and her grandmother. That little set for the apartment and how its always
that one shot. And all the lyinghes lying to her; shes lying
to the grandmother about the eviction notice. And how she
tells the grandmother about her new love interest and how
vulnerable she seems in that scene and how worried I felt
for her.

BAKER, 2:51 PM: Im very interested in what people sound

like when theyre recounting the plot or details from a movie
they love. One of the first things that I wrote for The Flick
was an incredibly long summary of Apocalypse Now [Francis
Ford Coppola, 1979] by the young man in the play . . . And
when my best friend and I were traveling in Sicily when we
were 18 and sitting for hours in hot train stations, we would
tell each other the plots, beat by beat, or as beat by beat as
we could manage, of movies one had seen that the other one
hadnt.
And Im weirdly obsessed with The Hunger Games franchise because the trailers uncannily resemble childhood nightmares of mine but Im too scared to watch the movies. So one
Thanksgiving when we were driving back from Washington,
DC my brother and his now-wife recounted the entire first
The Hunger Games [Gary Ross, 2012] movie to me, together,
and they each remembered shots, moments the other one
hadnt, and it took almost an hour, and I was rapt.
YUE, 2:51 PM: Have you ever confused a nightmare, or
dream, with a movie?

BAKER, 2:55 PM: I had that with this black and white movie I
was sure I had imagined or dreamt as a child . . . about a little
white girl with a black doll and the little white girl tells everyone the black doll is alive and no one believes her and at
the end the little white girl turns into a white doll and the
black doll turns into a little black girl. I was absolutely sure
this was an extended hallucination or dream. And yet I remembered things from it so vividly.
And then I told my partner about it and he madly
googled it and it turns out it was an episode of The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour. It was hard to google though. It took a
while. Its called Where the Woodbine Twineth [1965].
And then I watched it online and nearly fainted. Also because there were all these things in it that I didnt consciously
remember but had written into my newest play, which was
about dolls.
YUE, 3:00 PM: I want to ask about the way you
conceive of movies and moviegoing in The Flick. The
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are more personal. Even when the TV shows are made by

the people who make movies.
YUE, 3:10 PM: The Flick gets at this deeply personal
aspect of movies. It seems to me that movies, for
your characters, are a way of making sense of their
lives. How much of this comes from your own
interest in film?

Eileen Baral (left) and Lila Perry (right) in Where the

Woodbine Twineth.

main character, Avery, dreams about movies, but in

a different way than what youve been describing.
Hes someone who wants to see everything, commit
it all to memory. Even if this more unconscious
movie-dream-life is also a big part of what shaped
him as a person. When he recounts a dream he had,
in which he had to pick a movie that epitomized his
life, hes so disappointed that its Honeymoon in
Vegas [Andrew Bergman, 1992].

BAKER, 3:06 PM: Yes, I think as a theater artist Im fascinated

with the way stuff that looms larger in American cultural
life than theater (like movies, TV, video games) becomes a
kind of theater when people get together and talk about it.
But yes I think the character of Avery is less interested in everyday theater than I am. I think hes a person who sees
movies three times, five times in a row. Im so interested in
how people talk about TV now, now that people arent
ashamed to watch TV because its the Golden Age blah blah
blah. . . . Because I watch very little TV I feel like Im missing out on major conversations . . . people always ask: have
you seen the third season of blah blah blah yet?? And then
when I say no they seem very disappointed. So then I
started observing what those people who want to talk
about a TV show actually say when they finally get to talk
to other people who also want to talk about the same TV
show. But its actually very different from how people talk
about movies . . . I havent quite figured it out yet. Its
more of a game, like oh just wait until you get to episode
5 . . . no no . . . Ive seen episode 5 and that was crazy but
wait until episode 8 . . .
And when people talk about movies, its very different.
Its more like you had the same dream and youre trying to
remember it together . . . Somehow, our memories of movies
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BAKER, 3:14 PM: A lot, I guess. Movies were my way of making sense of my life when I was a kid and teenager. And I
was very into repeated viewings and memorization. I saw
Pulp Fiction [Quentin Tarantino, 1994] four times in the theater when I was 14 and then bought the screenplay and
memorized the entire thing and then when I would walk
my dog at night I would recite it to myself like a crazy person. I was also into facts and dates. I liked knowing about
movies Id never seen, I liked pretending Id seen movies I
hadnt. I remember talking a lot about Kurosawa having
never seen a Kurosawa movie.
YUE, 3:16 PM: When you were young, what was your
habit of watching movies? Where did you watch
them, and who did you watch them with? Were you a
completist, or were you more idiosyncratic in the
way you selected movies?

BAKER, 3:20 PM: I watched movies obsessively, often in secret.

The video store in my hometown was pretty close to my high
school, so I would stop there on my walk home from school,
rent two movies, watch them before my mom got home from
work at around 9 pm, and then return them the next day on
my way to school. I watched a lot of R [rated] movies that way.
I also loved the French New Wave, like many artsy fartsy
teenagers, and so I made sure to rent all of those movies. But
I also liked sexy thrillers that my parents would have refused
to rent. My father lived in New York City and so when my
brother and I visited him we would go to Film Forum and see
whatever was playing there in repertory. I was always up for
watching a movie back then. There was nothing I would have
rather been doing. Now I have to be in the right mood.
YUE, 3:21 PM: What compels you to go a movie these
days?

BAKER, 3:25 PM: I usually go because I like the director. I definitely dont go because something got a good review, and I
definitely dont avoid things that get bad reviews. I think most
of the movies I go to are revivals. Im going to be spending
a lot of time at the new Metrograph. I kind of want to see
everything theyre showing. In terms of new movies, there
arent that many new ones that Im truly excited to see
(although there are big exceptionslike Im dying, really

Louisa Krause in a scene from The Flick (2015), directed by Sam Gold, at the Barrow Street Theater.

Photo Joan Marcus, courtesy

of Philip Rinaldi Publicity

dying to see the next movie by Maren Ade or Apichatpong

Weerasethakul). With newer Hollywood movies, its usually
because Im attracted to or fascinated by how women are
portrayedlike I had to see Trainwreck [Judd Apatow,
2015], and I had to see the new Star Wars [Episode VII: The
Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams, 2015], and I had to see The Witch
[Robert Eggers, 2015], and then I had to grapple with my various responses to those movies and the feminine archetypes in
them.
YUE, 3:26 PM: Did you ever work in a movie theater?

BAKER, 3:30 PM: I was an ushers/concessions-stand person at

Merkin Concert Hall in college, but that was very different
from working in a movie theater. I did a lot of research for

The Flick and shadowed ushers a lot and asked a lot of

questions.
YUE, 3:32 PM: What kinds of things did you learn from
movie theater workers? This was researched at the
Angelika, right?

BAKER, 3:36 PM: The Angelika was one of a few places I

visited. I guess what surprised me was how much everyone
there loved movies and talked about movies all the time . . .
yes, it was very much a job, they had to clean up peoples
vomit, but I asked all of the ushers and projectionists about
their favorite movies and their responses were fascinating and
diverse. They were all very passionate. Less so the ushers I
met in small towns in New England . . . There would often
be one person at those theaters who was a cinephile, and then
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imaginative sense of what movies are, or could be, or

what we hope for them to be.

Louisa Krause and Aaron Clifton Moten in a scene from The

Flick (2015). Photo Joan Marcus, courtesy of Philip Rinaldi Publicity

all the other ushers would kind of laugh at that person. One of
the ushers at Angelika introduced me to Jafar Panahi. He said
that was his favorite filmmaker. I never would have guessed
that.
YUE, 3:41 PM: I imagine, if youre a youngish person
like Avery, you start a job at a movie theater because
you love film. And then you have to contend with all
these banalities, like sticky floors and garbage, or
other employees who dont care as much as you do.
And that has to be disappointing. Its possible that
the behind-the-scenes look at any creative endeavor
would be exciting, but it can also be filled with a lot
of drudgery. I like how The Flick holds both these
aspects in view: the transformative experiences one
can have watching a movie, and the crap that gets
left behind in the theater.

BAKER, 3:44 PM: Yes and I liked this idea of the transformative magic happening between the scenes, that we dont witness any of that . . . and that the play is just [the actors]
cleaning crap afterwards. After the movie is over and everyone sort of sheepishly shuffles out.
YUE, 3:47 PM: The play hints of movie experiences
without ever showing them directly. Because the set
is arranged as the space of the cinema, the audience
can see the seats and the projection booth at the top.
The audience is positioned where the screen would
be, so they never actually see whats on screen.
Instead the audience gets an array of lights flashing
in the darkness, and the sound of movies as the end
credits roll, and then the house lights come up. This
is a refrain in the play: each scene begins as a movie
ends. And its probably impossible to tell what film is
playingbecause the films that begin each scene
are rarely identified, this helps the play retain the

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BAKER, 3:52 PM: Yes and what we did (except at the top of the
play and when theyre watching The Wild Bunch [Sam Peckinpah, 1969]) was actually just play film credits and then play
the ending credits music from films released in the summer
of 2012, when the play takes place. So the music you hear
are the end credits of Madagascar 3 [Eric Darnell, Tom
McGrath, Conrad Vernon], Ted [Seth MacFarlane], Snow
White and the Huntsman [Rupert Sanders], and The Avengers
[Joss Whedon] (which is the first time they switch to digital
projection). But I dont think anyone knew that . . . all of
that music, we discovered, felt wonderfully generic. Like it
could be the end credit music to any movie.
YUE, 3:53 PM: And hardly anyone stays through to the
end of the credits.

BAKER, 3:55 PM: Yeah. Which is the only reason this play is
even plausible.
YUE, 4:03 PM: Can you say more about why you set
the play in 2012?

BAKER, 4:07 PM: I guess I often write plays because I want attention to be paid to something that is being overlooked, or
not being given any focus . . . and so with The Flick that was
not only the small town one-screen movie theater, the theatricality of trash pickup, and theater itself, but also the transition from film to digital projection. I started writing the play
in 2009 and finished it in late 2011. Then I decided to set it in
2012 since that was a really big year, the year that almost every movie theater transitioned, and by the time we produced
it in 2013 it was already kind of a period piece.
I was very interested in how moviegoing changed forever
during those years, whether people noticed or not. It felt
huge to me, and thats without negative judgment . . . like
a very, very big shift in everyday life that not that many
people were talking about. Almost everyone sees movies,
and now movies looked and felt totally different. And I was
interested in how to talk about that through theater, which is
a very, very old art form that never changes, in a way. Its
always a live body, and if its not, it ceases to be theater.
Its funny, because Im sure it was being talked about a lot
in film/media studies departments, and by film writers, but
as a member of the moviegoing public who at the time knew
no film and media scholars or writers, I felt like I was the
only person who was noticing it.
YUE, 4:15 PM: There is one scene where the three
characters are talking about recent great movies,
and theres a sense that for Avery, great movies are

no longer made. Hes a character that wants so much

for the movies, but worries that theyll disappoint
him, too.

BAKER, 4:17 PM: Yes, as a teenager I felt like people and places were never living up to my expectations, and my expectations were shaped so much by the movies. On the other
hand, I was also conscious in that teenage way of how everything I and everyone else said sounded scripted, like a bad
movie. I felt like life was a really long shitty movie, and I
wanted it to be an awesome movie.
YUE, 4:18 PM: I knew someone in high school who liked
to say, with great ambivalence, that he only knew
how to kiss because of the movies.

BAKER, 4:19 PM: Yes. And also, sounds during sex. What did
people sound like during sex before they watched movies?
Maybe exactly the same? Or maybe they made crazy sounds
that WE CANT EVEN IMAGINE.
YUE, 4:21 PM: Youve mentioned before that this play,
as deeply invested in the movies as it is, could never
be a movie itself. Could you elaborate on that?

BAKER, 4:24 PM: Yes, well, I think the mystery of what is offstage and beyond the fourth wall must be in part why I love
writing for the theater . . . the crazy restriction of it and also
the game of it, the actors pretending in real live time that
people arent watching them, and pretending in front of you
that you are a fourth wall, or in the case of The Flick, a movie
screen. I got into the game of theater-pretend around a
movie screen . . . that we can see the projector, and the light,
and the dancing-backwards images in the light, but we cant
see what theyre seeing because in fact theyre seeing us.
And so yes, if The Flick was a movie it would just be a
story about people working in a movie theater and stealing
money from their manager. And I wanted it to be a standoff, a confrontation, between film and theater, audience seats
vs. audience seats.
YUE, 4:25 PM: Was there ever a moment when you
considered, instead of pursuing a career in theater,
that you might work in film?

BAKER, 4:27 PM: Yes, although I also never really actively pursued a career in theater. I didnt know it was possible. I just
wrote plays when I could, when I wasnt working, because I
liked writing them, and then my career just sort of happened
before I realized it was happening, or that it really could
happen. I dont fully understand my relationship to theater
or why plays are my favorite thing to write or why people
want to put on my plays. It has all unfolded in this very mysterious way and its one of the great surprises and joys of my

life. But sometimes I see a copy of one of my published plays

and Im absolutely convinced that I didnt write it. I dont remember writing it, I dont remember what I was thinking, I
dont remember when I found the time to write it. Theres a
playfulness therethe whole thing feels like a miraculous
accidentand thats probably helped me a lot.
My relationship with movies was and is much more obsessive and tortured and thought-out, and yes, I did fantasize
about directing movies when I was a kid and still do. Its
more about directing than screenwriting though.
YUE, 4:29 PM: You have been working more recently
on writing screenplays, and you have plans to direct
a feature film. Do you find yourself shifting gears
considerably when writing a screenplay, as opposed
to a play? The way you talk about films is so imagerich, and Im wondering how that works when youre
imagining a film scenario. Also could you say a bit
about screenplays youve already written, or have
tried to write?

BAKER, 4:36 PM: I have not yet written a screenplay that Im

satisfied with. I find with screenplays, like I did with conversations when I was a teenager, that I end up doing exactly
the opposite of what I want to do. I end up writing the kind
of movie I hate. I keep going, though, because I have faith
that I will crack it. There is a movie in my head (maybe just
one) that is beautiful but every time I try to write in that
awful Final Draft software I write something totally inadequate. Even though I am a playwright, not a theater director,
I have much stronger instincts about film directing than I
do about film writing. I approach my plays very visually.
I imagine exactly how it will look and where theyll be
standing on the stage and I imagine the long shot that is
the stage viewed from the seventh row of the theater.
I usually set my plays in one location because I want to get
incredibly specific, composition-wise. And the wild freedom
of screenwriting and of leaping one place to another willynilly, while exciting, also frightens me. Because of that roving freedom, I find myself following characters while they
get into cars and then while they drive and then while they
get out of the car and then in the front door. Like EXT.
HOUSEHe exits the house and gets into his car. INT.
CARHe turns on the engine, then the radio, then pulls
out of his driveway. EXT. ROADHe drives along the
road. EXT. GAS STATIONHe pulls into the gas station.
Its even worse than all those movies that have establishing shots of building exteriors with cheerful music playing.
Because I can follow the characters anywhere, I follow them
everywhereand not in some interesting Dardennes brothers way. Eventually I will figure this out.
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YUE, 4:37 PM: Is this how you watch movies, by

following characters to see where they will go? Or do
you keep in mind a set of expectations for what
might happen to them?

BAKER, 4:39 PM: No, I dont think thats how I watch movies,
and thats why I hate when I do that in my screenwriting . . . its

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just years of watching bad movies and being unable to shake

bad moviemaking conventions while writing a screenplay.
Im still trying to figure out how to write the kind of movie
I want to see, although I feel like Im getting closer and closer
with every try. Im better at writing the kind of plays I want
to see, although of course I still constantly disappoint myself.