Tangerine is the kind of movie that festivals like Sundance ideally should be for. A low-budget production utilizing a cast of unknowns, the film follows two prostitutes, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) as they traverse the streets of Los Angeles in search of Sin-Dee’s cheating boyfriend. There’s almost nothing usual about this film, which was shot on an iPhone 5S and has a cast largely consisting of transgender characters played by transgender actors (which shouldn’t be unusual, but that’s the sad status quo). Tangerine has opened to raves at this year’s Sundance, and seems poised to become one of the indie screen darlings of 2015. 
 
 We spoke to first-time actor Taylor and the film’s director, Sean Baker, about the making of the movie. 
 
 You’ve explored the lives of sex workers before with Starlet. What brought you to Tangerine’s story? 
 
 Sean Baker: I live close to the corner of Santa Monica and Highland, which is a notorious intersection, kind of known as a red light district. I was drawn to it. There’s a lot of drama that takes place on that corner, a lot of chaos, so I thought it would be ripe for a film to take place there. Me and Chris Bergoch, my co-screenwriter, spent about eight months doing research, meeting people, telling them about this project, trying to hear stories. Then one summer morning, I met Mya at the LGBT Center around the corner. 
 
 And Mya, what was your situation at the time? 
 
 Mya Taylor: I had left my parents’ house when I was 18, after I came out to them. I moved to Los Angeles in hopes of pursuing a whole new life, because I’d always wanted to live there. Who doesn’t want to live there? It’s beautiful. Eventually, I started going to therapy to start my transition. We started the movie when I had just begun my transition. I knew Kitana through the Center, because I would go there to get my therapy. That’s what I was doing on the day that I met [Sean]. 
 
 Baker: She was there with some friends in the courtyard. I saw her and immediately wanted to speak with her. She had the kind of physicality that I knew would translate properly to the screen. I approached her, and she was the first person to express interest and enthusiasm. That’s what we were looking for. We exchanged numbers and started meeting on a regular basis. About three or four meetings in, she introduced us to Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, and when I saw the two of them together, I knew they’d make the perfect on-screen duo. 
 
 We started collaborating on finding a story. We fleshed that story into a treatment and passed it by Mya and Kitana, and they approved. It was important to keep it collaborative and be respectful, that we got their approval on everything. We moved it into a scriptment form, and Mark and Jay Duplass came onboard and found the financing for the film. We still didn’t have too much money, so we jumped into production right away. 
 
 So was there anything in the initial scripting that [Mya and Kitana] made revisions on? 
 
 Mya Taylor: I think he did a wonderful job, except for when it came to some of the language. Some of the people in the area, they talk in a certain way, and he wasn’t quite familiar with that. So I had to teach him. He wanted to make it close to the way we actually are in real life, our actual conversations, and I like that. 
 
 Was Mya set for the role of Alexandra soon after you met her? 
 
 Baker: No, we didn’t offer her the role right away. We needed some audition/rehearsal time. We didn’t even have a story yet. We would rent out little audition rooms where we spent time developing scenes, seeing what was funny. We were recording all of it, so some of the dialogue was transcribed, and that’s how we came up with the initial scriptment. 
 
 Was acting a difficult new experience? 
 
 Taylor: No. I guess it’s because I have an entertainment heart. I wanted this to be right, I wanted to do it for myself. I feel like I did a good job at it. I put all of my heart into it. 
 
 Baker: She did. Two days into it, a crew member said to me, “Mya is good,” and I was like, “I know, I know.” I’m still blown away, because some of the best lines in the movie are Mya’s. I encourage my actors to improvise, and they all brought such amazing lines to the film, and delivered them in such classic and funny ways. 
 
 A lot has been made of how this was shot entirely on an iPhone. Did you do it more for the aesthetic or the convenience? 
 
 Baker: It started off for the convenience. We were taking advantage of all the benefits that thing has—the size, how light it is, how inconspicuous it is. We had to embrace it. And it quickly became an aesthetic choice. The thing is that I and the rest of the whole team are all cinephiles. We care about the look of a film, and we’re even concerned about the death of celluloid, quite honestly. But we couldn’t use that on this film; we didn’t have the means.You have to make the lemonade, and that’s what we tried to do. 
 
 So what did shooting with an iPhone allow you to do visually? 
 
 Baker: The camera movements were mostly improvised. It was the static shots that were planned. We locked the camera down only four times in the film. The rest of the time, they’re improvised. I actually jumped on my bike on the third day (my bicycle, not a motorbike). I was able to get on the sidewalk and go in a 360 around my actors and follow them and be really fluid. 
 
 Fortunately, we had enough time to work with. A lot of independent films try to pull off a 14-day shooting schedule, which I think is ridiculous. No matter how big or small you are, it really kills whatever sort of time you get to allow the actors to find their characters, and to spend time to think about what they’re doing. That’s important to me, so no matter what budget, I’m always going to ask for at least 24 days of shooting, so that there’s time to experiment when we’re on the set. 
 
 Did this come with any production frustrations? 
 
 Baker: We actually shot a couple of inserts with Mya seven months later, after she had gone further through her transition. 
 
 Taylor: Yeah, I saw that in the movie! I could point those shots out. 
 
 So will you keep acting going forward? 
 
 Taylor: Yeah. There’s a lot that I’m trying to work on, but right now, I just want to focus on the movie and just get the movie out of the way and get it rolling. 
 
 Baker: The industry must recognize the talent of this cast. I can’t wait to see what Mya and Kitana will do next. ||||| Tangerine, a breakout hit from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is full of surprises. There’s the subject matter: transgender prostitutes working in a not-so glamorous part of Hollywood. And there are the characters: flinty, funny, nobody’s victim. But the story behind the camera is as surprising as what’s in front of it. Particularly because the camera used to shoot Tangerine was the iPhone 5S. 
 
 "It was surprisingly easy." 
 
 Plenty of amateur films have been shot using iPhones, but by all reports, this is the first movie at the Sundance Film Festival to be shot almost entirely on an Apple device. It was a decision that indie writer and director Sean Baker made to accommodate the film’s small budget. But you’d never guess the camera, to look at it: Tangerine was shot in a widescreen, 2:35:1 aspect ratio, and its camera zooms through the streets of LA with a fluidity you’d never expect from a handheld device. And yet despite his camera of choice, Baker says the iPhone made for a good partner. "It was surprisingly easy," Baker says. "We never lost any footage." 
 
 So how do you make a Sundance movie for iPhone? You need four things. First, of course, the iPhone (Baker and his team used three). Second, an $8 app called Filmic Pro that allowed the filmmakers fine-grained control over the focus, aperture, and color temperature. Third, a Steadicam. "These phones, because they’re so light, and they’re so small, a human hand — no matter how stable you are — it will shake. And it won’t look good," says Baker. "So you needed the Steadicam rig to stabilize it." 
 
 The final ingredient was a set of anamorphic adapter lenses that attach to the iPhone. The lenses were prototypes from Moondog Labs, and Baker said they were essential to making Tangerine look like it belonged on a big screen. "To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have even made the movie without it," Baker says. "It truly elevated it to a cinematic level." 
 
 "Jesus Christ, man, I was on The Wire." 
 
 Like any conventional film, Tangerine underwent post-production. "With a lot of these social realist films, the first thing you do is drain the color," Baker says. "We went the other way. We pumped the colors and put the saturation through the roof. Just because the world there is so colorful, and the women are so colorful. We wanted it to match them." (Orange emerged as the dominant color in the film, inspiring its title.) The final step was to apply a digital grain to the movie, giving it a quality more reminiscent of actual film. 
 
 At first, the cast wasn’t convinced shooting with the iPhone would work. "I had some hesitancy about it, more out of pride," says James Ransone, who plays Chester, the pimp at the center of Tangerine’s love triangle. "I’m like, Jesus Christ, man, I was on The Wire. I’ve ended up in iPhone movies!" But Ransone came to appreciate the flexibility of the device. "There’s a lot that can be done with an iPhone." (One example: Baker shot several scenes while riding his 10-speed bicycle in circles around his actors.) 
 
 Ransone said that the key to shooting Tangerine was having a team well-versed in traditional filmmaking. "You still need to know how editing works. You still need to know how sound works. You still need to know how a camera works," he says. "You can’t just go out and shoot." iPhone footage hasn’t yet caught up with true 35 millimeter film — a high bar — but Ransone expects it will some day. "Yes, you can make a beautiful-looking film on a shoestring budget," he says. "But you have to know 100 years worth of filmmaking." 
 
 "You can make a beautiful film on a shoestring budget." 
 
 The unusual creative process behind Tangerine doesn’t stop with its camera. Baker made the movie after becoming obsessed with a donut store in his neighborhood, a seedy block on Santa Monica Boulevard with a notorious reputation. "It was a chaotic corner — there was always something going on in Donut Time," he says. "So I said, I wanna make a film about Donut Time." That idea led him and his co-writer, Chris Bergoch, to a nearby LGBT center, where they met Mya Taylor, an aspiring singer and actress, who in turn introduced the filmmakers to her roommate and eventual co-star, Kiki Kitana Rodriguez. 
 
 The two women began sharing some stories from around the block, ("People love to hear drama. Especially filmmakers," Taylor tells me) and happened upon a striking bit of drama from the neighborhood: a trans woman became enraged when she heard her boyfriend had slept with a biological female — "actual fish," as they say in Tangerine. The trans woman decided to hunt the other woman down, and thus Tangerine found its inspiration, with the writers collaborating with their cast on the script. 
 
 The result, at least for me, is the ideal Sundance movie: totally unexpected, set in a world I’ve never visited, with a story the major studios wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot selfie stick. Rodriguez is an effervescent blur as Sin-Dee Rella, an ex-con hunting down her pimp fiancée’s mistress on Christmas Eve. She stomps down Hollywood’s Walk of Fame like it’s a catwalk, spitting fire at anyone dumb enough to cross her, and manages to terrify nearly every man she meets. Taylor, as her best friend and fellow prostitute Alexandra, tries to talk sense into Sin-Dee every step of the way, cleaning up the damage in her wake. Their sisterhood in the face of real danger brings depth to the frequently over-the-top comedy. 
 
 Tangerine isn’t perfect — it slows considerably in its final third, and the big climax at Donut Time feels less convincing than the film that led up to it. But in a festival full of coming-of-age dramas and straightforward documentaries, it’s a minor miracle: a good long look at the margins, captured by a $550 phone.
– Tangerine surprised audiences at the Sundance Film Festival by depicting the gritty life of transgender prostitutes in Hollywood. Another revelation: The acclaimed film was shot almost totally on an iPhone 5S, the Verge reports. Indie writer/director Sean Baker says it was a budgetary choice that came with other advantages. For one thing, the 5S allowed him to make easily improvised camera movements, like circling the actors while filming on his bicycle. They used "all the benefits that thing has—the size, how light it is, how inconspicuous it is," Baker tells Los Angeles Magazine. "We had to embrace it. And it quickly became an aesthetic choice." An iPhone 5S film, aesthetic? Yep, he says, if you know how to use it. What you need: an $8 app called Filmic Pro that offers careful control of color temperature, aperture, and focus; a Steadicam to keep the iPhone from shaking; and anamorphic adapter lenses, like the Moondog Labs prototypes used by Baker's team. Still, the iPhone-film concept was so new that his cast needed reassurance. "I’m like, Jesus Christ, man, I was on The Wire," says James Ransone, who plays a pimp in Tangerine. "I’ve ended up in iPhone movies!" But he came to appreciate the phone's flexibility—like shooting in public areas without permissions or restraints, Slashfilm reports. Small downside: An argument between characters appeared so real that a bus driver called the cops. (For more on iPhones, read about a guy who strapped 94 of them to his body.)