The opening frame of “The Florida Project,” a “Little Rascals” in modern times sort of film from Sean Baker, finds two young children in front of a vibrant violet backdrop. The children run and the shot widens. The violet is revealed to be the exterior of an Orlando area motel. But initially it’s abstract; it could be anything, anywhere. Only, it couldn’t. Not really. The colors, the thickness of the air, the sweat, the children’s faces, it all feels distinctly of Florida. Sure, the film’s title is a tipoff. But at the very least, it’s immediately clear that this isn’t a constructed set in Los Angeles or Toronto, a street in New York or a small anywhere American town.
Light on plot, “The Florida Project” instead is an immersive ride, more delightful than horrifying. The viewer follows these kids — one, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), in particular — around the motel, where they live with their parents or grandparents. The motel, called The Magic Castle, is off Route 192, not far from Disney World. It and its surroundings — an Orange World supermarket, a gift shop in the shape of a wizard, a Twistee Treat ice cream shop and a cow pasture — are a kind of Disney for the imaginative mind (There’s a parallel for many of the theme parks — The Animal Kingdom Kilimanjaro Safaris attraction being the cow pasture, and so forth).
Mostly through crisp, geometrically precise 35mm steady shots from cinematographer Alexis Zabe, Baker presents a real contemporary locale with a touch of the fantastic. The default setting on Zabe’s steady cam was low, so the viewer experiences the world at the same altitude as the children. But that only partially explains the sense of the spectacular that Baker infuses into this place. It also just is spectacular — the colors, the architecture, the way kids rule the land. Each year, the Oscars honor best production design, but the academy has no award for best setting. “The Florida Project” deserves one, though.
So, how did Baker find this exceptional world?
The story begins on a sunny day in the spring of 2011. There were puddles on the ground from the previous day’s rain and screenwriter Chris Bergoch was driving on Route 192 to his mother’s house in Kissimmee, Fla. Out the window of his car, he noticed something that struck him as slightly odd. There were kids playing whiffle ball in a motel parking lot, at the edge of the busy highway. The kids, who weren’t wearing any Disney-themed T-shirts or playing with any Disney-themed toys, didn’t look like tourists. Bergoch didn’t think too much of it at the time but then the scene recurred and his curiosity mounted.
When Bergoch asked his mother about it, his mother explained that families live in the motels. He started Googling and he found that it wasn’t just there; across America, families, like the ones he saw, were residing in cheap motels.
Bergoch is a Disney enthusiast. “What tugged at my heartstrings was that this was happening in the shadow of Cinderella Castle and the most magical place on Earth,” he said. “But it also struck a chord with me that these kids were having just as much fun as I had growing up [in New Jersey], playing manhunt and whiffle ball and hide-and-seek.”
With a vague notion that there might be a story to tell from those kids’ perspective, Bergoch emailed his frequent collaborator and former NYU classmate Sean Baker. At the time, they were working on “Starlet,” an indie film about an unlikely friendship between a porn star and an elderly woman. “I don't know if Sean set out to have a career consciously trying to do this, but it's turned out that he seems to have a penchant for stories that take place on the fringes of certain things. So it seemed to lend itself well to what he likes to do,” Bergoch said.
Baker was interested. But this was before he and Bergoch made “Tangerine,” the iPhone-filmed movie about transgender sex workers in Santa Monica that would put Baker on the map as a hot youngish (he was 44) director. They wrote a treatment about a mother and daughter, which they hoped would get them financing and enable them to do more extensive research.
But by the time Baker and Bergoch began pitching production companies, “Beast of the Southern Wild,” another mother-daughter story set in the South, was coming out. “Even though our style was going to be very different, it was very hard to pitch something like that,” Baker said. “One time, I didn't even get through half the pitch — like literally I got through three sentences — and this woman was like, ‘It's OK, we're not looking for that.’”
Baker and Bergoch put the project on pause. And with help from Mark Duplass, they made “Tangerine” on a microbudget. The film’s success made funding a Sean Baker movie a more attractive proposition for independent studios. June Pictures offered Baker final cut plus a budget of a few million dollars, which was more than the budgets of all his other films combined.
With that budget and a research grant from Cinereach, Baker and Bergoch began taking trips to Florida. They would scout locations (Bergoch had a list of about 20 that he thought could work) and talk to the people they found, much like they did when making “Tangerine.” “We started meeting all these people — not only residents but motel managers,” Baker said. “There was this one guy who just opened up his world to us. He became the inspiration for the Bobby character in many ways.”
Early on, they fell in love with Magic Castle. “We were going to shoot at either the Magic Castle or there was this other motel that had a castle motif; we knew Moonee was living in her own castle,” Baker said. “But I couldn't see us not shooting at the Magic Castle. The purple was already there; it looks that way. When I found it, it was a little grungier. It had been through harsher times.”
“Harsher times,” as in the recession. For Baker, that was part of the appeal of capturing the area; as in Orange County, outside of Disneyland, Route 192 in Orlando was a formerly bustling area on the edge of a theme park that had been transformed by hard times. That environment mirrored the Great Depression backdrop of “The Little Rascals.”
But the physical space of the Magic Castle also worked in their favor practically. “There's a lot of ground that these kids could cover. You have this beautiful little stream right next to it and a playground. From the very beginning, we were setting up shots,” Baker said.
The other locations presented in the movie were in actuality quite close to the Magic Castle. The ice cream shop was within a mile. And Baker and Bergoch noticed that kids living in the Magic Castle would run over to Futureland (in reality, the Paradise) to play with their friends, like Moonee does in the film.
And one morning, when Baker was walking his dog, he found an uprooted tree that wound up in the movie. “I brought my producer, Shih-Ching Tsou, who I co-directed ‘Take Out’ with, and who played the perfume girl, and she said, 'I love this tree because it's special: it's uprooted but it's still growing.’ I was like, That's like the tagline of the movie: ‘It's uprooted, but it's still growing.’ We have to get Moonee to say that in her words."
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