Sean Baker’s new film, Anora, could have starred Tom Hardy and Ryan Gosling. Early in the project’s development, a producer interested in Baker’s script had wanted to woo the actors. Inside a coffee shop in West Hollywood a few weeks ago, the director recalled the man’s enthusiasm. “‘Those are your Russians!’” Baker told me the producer said of the characters they would play: two heavies who are tasked with breaking up an impulsive marriage between their wealthy Russian charge and his new wife, a 23-year-old sex worker from Brooklyn. “I was like, ‘Oh, I was actually thinking of casting real Russians.’” He laughed. “I like those guys, but that’s not the way I make my movies.”

Here’s the way Baker makes his movies: with small budgets, nonactors, a keen eye toward realism, and a determined rejection of Hollywood, even as his profile in the industry has risen. Sure, he constantly feels the tension between staying with his approach and straying from it; he was “almost seduced,” he said, by the aforementioned producer when he dangled the prospect of a $20 million price tag for Anora. But for now, he’s established himself as something of an oxymoron instead: the mainstream indie filmmaker. His work, focused on people who don’t tend to be movie protagonists—undocumented immigrants, adult-film stars—has landed him critical acclaim and major-awards attention. He’s built a dedicated following among cinephiles with his unconventional production process; he even rejects the typical practice of conducting test screenings for audience input. “It’s supposed to be my vision, so why would I ask for a bunch of opinions that would taint my vision?” he said. “It makes no sense. Like, if I fuck up, that’s on me!”

Besides, the strategy has been working for him. All of his films, including the cult favorite Tangerine and the Oscar-nominated The Florida Project, feel fully realized despite their scrappiness. They’re raw, intimate portraits of Americans who are often misrepresented or overlooked in pop culture, particularly sex workers. Baker’s love of telling outsiders’ stories isn’t why he chooses to remain one himself, however. “It’s not about the subject matter, because there are those movies made by the Hollywood studio system,” he said. “I just feel it’s so scary, because there’s just so many films made by committee.”

[Read: Red Rocket is a terrifyingly honest look at a shameless man]

Never has his conviction paid off like it has with Anora, his most accomplished work—and, as it continues its theatrical rollout, biggest box-office success—yet. The film stars an electric Mikey Madison as the titular heroine, better known as “Ani,” whose brassy exterior belies an earnest yearning for an easier life. When she meets Ivan Zakharov, a.k.a. “Vanya” (played by Mark Eydelshteyn), a client who turns out to be the obscenely rich son of a Russian oligarch, she’s whisked away into a drug- and sex-fueled romance that leads to the pair getting married in Las Vegas. Their union, however, results in an unpleasant collision with reality when Vanya’s family’s henchmen come to annul it.

Anora is a screwball romantic comedy, a high-octane thriller, and a poignant character study; for Baker, it’s also a watershed moment in his filmmaking. After premiering the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in May, he won the Palme d’Or, its most prestigious award. He reenacted the scene: He pointed to where his producers had been around him, and where Madison had sat. He demonstrated his eyes widening as he realized—in part because the other top contenders scored other trophies, which meant they were out of the running for the top prize—that he could be announced as the winner. And when his name was indeed called, he said, “it was my dream come true.”

The win has also led to “a somewhat existential crisis,” he told me. “This is the first time, actually, that I’m seriously having that, like, What’s the proper follow-up?, which is very dangerous. I try to avoid that, but up to this point, I haven’t had to really think about that.”

Since the beginning of his decades-long career, Baker has found himself drawn to stories about chasing success and stability in atypical ways. “There is something fascinating about, for me, the pursuit of this American dream, but people who have to pursue it who aren’t given the normal route, who can’t follow the normal route, because they’re not allowed to,” he said. His protagonists often glimpse an ideal version of their life just out of reach: In Tangerine, two trans sex workers spend Christmas Eve fighting off rumors that threaten their friendship and their clientele. In The Florida Project, the children living inside a motel create their own magic kingdom just miles away from Disney World, while their guardians do what they can to protect the kids’ youthful bliss. In Red Rocket, a washed-up porn star meets a teenager he believes could be his ticket back to semi-stardom; in the process of grooming her as his protégée, he takes advantage of the few relationships he has.

Baker feels a kinship with such characters, even if he points out that he, raised comfortably in suburban New Jersey, has never needed to rely on a criminalized and stigmatized livelihood himself. What resonates with him, he told me, is “that just-not-giving-up attitude, and the frustration, the feeling that sometimes it’s just never going to work out.” For much of his career, he pursued side gigs to make ends meet, spending years making money by editing wedding videos and actors’ demo reels; even today, the bulk of his income comes from outside his filmmaking. “I feel like there’s more than a little bit of hustler in me,” he said.

Mark Eydelshteyn as Vanya (left) and Mikey Madison as Ani in Anora. (Neon)

Still, the type of storytelling he’s interested in can easily read as exploitative rather than empathetic in the wrong hands. “You really do have to get the approval and the thumbs-up,” Baker said, “the signing-off of people who have had that experience … I don’t want a sex worker to see this film and just be like, ‘Who wrote this? This is not us.’” With Anora, as with his previous films, he was careful not to leer at the hardship. “That’s the first thing for me. I care about that audience more than any other.” So when he settles on a world to explore, he consults with members of the subcultures inhabiting it, and moves to the locations he plans to feature. He recruits nonactors, locals, and real-life sex workers to forge an authentic feel. On set, he encourages his cast to change any dialogue that sounds wrong, and to improvise so he’ll have plenty of tonal options to consider. He liberally edits what he’s shot; for the final cut of The Florida Project, for example, he ordered it differently from the script. He bathes his films in saturated colors, pushing back against Hollywood’s tendency to paint poverty in drab hues, and instead prioritizing the characters’ interiority—their humor, their pride, their wonder.

But if Baker previously assuaged his fears of inauthenticity by focusing on realism and meticulously incorporating his research, making a film as deliberately comedic as Anora required a different approach. Many of its set pieces are over-the-top to the point of absurdity—he referred to a late scene in which Ani, a hungover Vanya, and their exasperated minders disturb the peace inside a courtroom as “almost sitcom-level”—and he wanted his actors to push the humor as far as possible. A carefully choreographed home-invasion sequence, during which Ani fights tooth and nail to defend herself against the Zakharov family’s cronies, runs for nearly half an hour, filled with physical gags and F-bombs. Baker seemed thrilled by the ludicrousness, Samantha Quan, Baker’s wife and a producer on several of his films, told me: “You always know if a shot’s good, because you can hear him giggling.”

[Read: A meaningful chat with a flock of birds in The Florida Project]

Baker was bending his own rules, in other words: He ran the risk of the story feeling unreal, a tad too fantastical. And yet, he told me, even if the scenes became screamier and screamier, as long as he built toward its sober ending, he figured it would come together. The director sees Anora as an “overt comedy,” but it contains as much sadness as it does joy. Throughout the film, he trains his lens on Ani as the grounding force, even for the anxiety-stricken henchmen trying to break up her marriage, underlining the unusual, visceral bond they begin to build in the face of Vanya’s demanding family. Madison shows the light slowly fading from Ani’s eyes, worn down from constantly defending her self-worth and what she thought was a loving relationship. Baker’s other films produce such emotional sleights of hand too, but in less gradual ways, abruptly blurring reality and fantasy in their final moments: In The Florida Project, the children can reach the happiest place on Earth only in a dream. In Red Rocket, the protagonist sheds a tear as he lets his imagination run wild.

Perhaps that’s the key to why the director’s work feels specific yet universal, exuberant yet affecting. His films are balancing acts that reveal the so-called American dream to be a moving target—a seductive tease. Ani has bought into acquiring status and material wealth as an ideal; from the moment Vanya gives her a diamond ring, she starts fighting off fears that her Cinderella story might come to an end. When I observed that scrutinizing the American dream seems to be his films’ most consistent theme, Baker smiled. “Maybe,” he said. He considers his work inherently political, but if there are statements he’s trying to make, he told me, “they’re going to be disguised.”

Baker, too, has hovered just outside Hollywood’s spotlight. But because his films have started gaining more mainstream attention—especially with that Palme d’Or win—he knows he’s become a recognizable name among his peers. By remaining on the industry’s fringes, however, he’s built a precise filmography, right down to the same typeface he uses for every title—which is Aguafina, for the record. “I feel sometimes I’m stuck between two worlds, because I’m preaching about being independent and what that can mean, and having your vision untainted,” he told me. “But at the same time …” He shrugged. “I do love Hollywood.”