Rise to Fame
He shot Tangerine on three iPhone 5S devices with a $100,000 budget and cast two first-time transgender actresses he found at the LA LGBT Center. Sundance 2015 took it seriously anyway. The film grossed nearly $1 million against that budget and changed how people thought about what you needed to make a movie that mattered. Baker had been grinding indie films since 2000, but that iPhone gambit is what got anyone to pay attention.
In the Spotlight
Anora won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2024, then took five Oscars including Best Picture. In a single night, Baker won four of those: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. No one had done that before. He's also the first American director to win the Palme d'Or since Terrence Malick in 2011. The guy who made a movie on iPhones for $100,000 a decade ago now has the same Palme d'Or as Francis Ford Coppola.
Side Notes
The overnight success story happened when he was 54. Baker spent more than two decades in the margins of American cinema before Anora, making a string of indie features on micro-budgets and scrapping for opportunities. He grew up in New Jersey, studied at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and stayed in the industry's orbit through TV work like Greg the Bunny because, as he's said, staying near film mattered more than a steady paycheck. Most of his NYU classmates eventually left for real jobs. He didn't.