Tangerine Is Amazing—But Not Because of How They Shot It

Here's everything you need to know about one of the summer's most fascinating movies.
Tangerine
Magnolia Pictures

The last thing Sean Baker wanted to do was make another low-budget movie. He'd already made four films, including the critical darling Take Out, for the cinematic equivalent of peanuts and he was tired of scraping by. But when he couldn’t get his dream of a big-budget flick off the ground, he decided to piece together one more small film—and those constraints pushed him to make the most compelling film of his career.

Producer/director/actor/writer Mark Duplass had made Baker a standing offer to make a micro-budget film under the Duplass Brothers Productions; as Baker remembers, "I said to him, 'I want to make a film that takes place on the corner of Santa Monica and Highland [in LA] and I don't know exactly what I want do to yet, but it's about two people coming together at Donut Time.'"

The resulting film, Tangerine, hitting theaters Friday, was made with $100,000 from Duplass and plenty of ingenuity. The film got heavy buzz out of Sundance for being shot on the iPhone 5, but that's just the start of the DIY tricks Baker used. His two main actresses—Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, the two who come together at Donut Time—Baker found just by hanging out at the aforementioned intersection and he used their real-life stories to inform his script. He also found some of his cast on Vine and Instagram, and even located part of the movie's electrifying score through SoundCloud. He may have been forced to use the minimal tools available to him, but they ended up being invaluable.

Then there's the movie's storyline, which couldn't feel more au courant. Tangerine focuses on Alexandra (Taylor) and Sin-Dee (Rodriguez), two transgender prostitutes thrown into one wild day in LA when Sin-Dee finds out her boyfriend/pimp Chester (The Wire's James Ransone) had been cheating on her with a "fish" (a cisgender woman) while she was in jail. It's an interesting story to begin with, but factor in the current conversation around trans representations in film and TV and it's a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for Tangerine.

Not that Baker made a movie with trans characters just to be hot-button. "I have friends who are trans advocates and they were upset that Jared Leto played a trans person [in Dallas Buyers Club]," Baker says of his decision to have trans folks play his leads. "I can see both sides, but at the same time I felt like, 'Why not?'"

Here's everything you need to know about one of the summer's most fascinating films.

Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED
Much of Tangerine's Story Comes from Its Leads

Starting out, Baker just knew he wanted to make a movie about two people who meet at the small doughnut shop near his LA home. He knew the area was an informal red-light district frequented by transgender sex workers, but he still didn't really have a story. To get one, he did what he had done on all of his previous films and immersed himself in the culture alongside his co-writer Chris Bergoch. "It's the only way of doing it responsibly and respectfully," he says. "We didn't want to go in knowing the story we wanted to tell." They weren't getting far until one day when he noticed Taylor and her friends hanging out in the courtyard of the nearby LGBT center. He recognized her magnetism right away and introduced himself, only to find that she had friends who had worked the block and was willing to talk. She was also friends with scene-stealer Rodriguez. "All the sudden I saw these two together and I knew that would be our dynamic duo for the film," Baker says. "We just had to figure out a way to make those two the leads and figure out our plot. Then one day Kiki told us this story about one of the girls who found out her boyfriend was cheating on her with a quote-unquote 'fish.'" Just like that, Baker and Bergoch knew they'd found their tale.

Tangerine Has a Cameo from an Instagram Star

One of the more interesting characters that Tangerine’s taxi driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian) picks up might look familiar to Instagram junkies. It's style blogger Francis Lola. "I reached out to her, she lives in LA, and she came and did it," Baker says.

…And a Madam Baker Found on Vine

During Sin-Dee's quest to find the woman who has been sleeping with her boyfriend, she comes across a makeshift brothel run by Madam Jillian. The madam is played by Chelcie Lynn, whom Baker discovered through Vine. "The characters she would play in her Vines were very similar to the character she plays in the movie," Baker says.

Baker Also Found His Movie's Most Insane Song on Vine

One of Tangerine's more memorable moments comes as Sin-Dee is running through the streets to a crazy trap music song by DJ Lightup. He found the track through Viner and YouTuber wolftyla. "I heard six seconds of that and I was like 'I gotta find this!' I started Googling it, and there were message boards like, 'What is that song in wolftyla's Vine?!'" Baker says, noting that once he found the track he had to find the creators to use it in his movie. "It was these 17-year-old kids from Newark, New Jersey. I reached out to them and they were like, 'Whatever. You can have [the song]." Baker went on to scour the web for other trap music to use for _Tangerine'_s soundtrack. "I would reach out to the artists directly through SoundCloud," he says. "It became such a valuable tool for a budget of our size."

Shooting on iPhones Helped More Than Just the Budget

Initially, Baker decided to shoot his movie on iPhones to save money on equipment and crew. But the format proved its worth when it came to Tangerine's big, bright look. He used anamorphic adapter prototypes from Moondog Labs and Filmic Pro to capture the film at a higher compression rate and, along with a Steadicam rig, that was it. "All those things combined elevated it to a cinematic level," Baker says. The iPhone's images also gave him the idea to bring up the colors for saturated images. Audiences these days are used to de-saturation (think Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight films), but Baker opted to go in the other direction, and in the process gave his film its signature look. And, in case you're wondering, shooting on 64-gig iPhones never once resulted in storage problems—or any problems for that matter. "Battery life was more of a concern than storage, but we had tons of Mophies," Baker says. "We didn’t have any issues."

...It Also Helped the First-Time Actors

Being on a movie set with big cameras and tons of crew can be intimidating for any actor, let alone a brand-new one. But when you're shooting a film on something that everyone sees every day—and probably has in their pocket right now—that fear immediately falls away. "I didn't realize this until the second day of shooting, but all of the intimidation that may have happened with our first-time actors with shoving a camera in their face, that was eliminated from Day One," Baker says, adding that it also let them shoot incognito on busy LA streets. "It just looked like we were shooting selfies."