Annie Baker Goes to Hollywood

The renowned playwright switches mediums with her sneakily expansive debut film about a possessive mother-daughter relationship.

- JACKSON MCHENRY

JANET PLANET is in theaters June 21.

BEFORE STARTING filming on Janet Planet, Annie Baker and her sound designer, Paul Hsu, recorded two weeks of the ambient noises of the Western Massachusetts countryside. For the coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old girl, Lacy, and her mother, Janet, Baker had found the home where she wanted to set much of the movie: an angular but cozy wood cabin with large windows huddled in the forest, a droplet of civilization in the midst of the woods.

"The sound of nature around this house was so incredible," Baker tells me over coffee and a sandwich at a café just south of Prospect Park, where she had arrived in a '70s-ish brown jacket, toting a well-used orange backpack. "There were, like, bears wandering around." Baker has a mop of Pre-Raphaelite bangs and an open smile. She's best known as one of the foremost playwrights of her generationa precise observer of tragicomic human behavior. Janet Planet is her first movie, but her enthusiasm for and knowledge of the nitty-gritty processes of filmmaking are apparent. She and Hsu placed recording equipment in the trees at the locations where they planned to film. The recordings were sensitive enough to pick up the sound of a bumblebee tumbling around a microphone ("It sounds like a plane," Baker tells me excitedly) as well as the other fauna roaming through the area. Those recordings are the basis of the film's soundtrack, as Baker had decided to forgo a typical musical score. She and Hsu combed through the reams of audio together, assembling those buzzes, chirps, the rippling of a stream, and whatever else into a soundscape that approximates how summer in New England feels.