The Florida Project: Structure Without Structure

This week we are going to be talking about The Florida Project, by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch.
I am so excited to be talking about this film, especially a week after the Oscars, because this is a film that probably should have been competing for Best Picture. Bria Vinaite probably should have been competing for Best Actress, and Sean Baker probably should have been competing for Best Writer and Best Director.
If you haven’t seen The Florida Project yet, I am going to try to avoid spoilers until we get to the end, and I’ll give you some warning first.
What Sean Baker did in this film, like what he did in Tangerine, if you listened to my Tangerine podcast, is really quite inspirational for any writer and quite complex, in its structure and its form. Sean Baker shot Tangerine on about 600 grand. He shot it on an iPhone– a feature film shot on an iPhone! And he shot this movie in a budget somewhere around 2 million dollars.
So these are extremely low budget films. Beautiful, successful, powerful, low budget films. Which is very exciting if you are an emerging screenwriter.
As an emerging screenwriter, you can take the success of The Florida Project as a sign that you can do this yourself.
You can do this yourself at a very high level, and you don’t need a lot of money.
Here is Willem Dafoe, who has obviously done some huge movies, who isn’t doing this film for the money– who is doing this because someone has written a beautiful role that he just needs to play. And seeing the performances that Sean Baker, second time in a row, has gotten out of these extremely inexperienced actors—Bria Vinaite along with little Brooklynn Prince, who gives one of the finest performances you could ever ask for, and she is seven years old– shows you just how much you can do with very little if you have the right script and the right actors.
I also want to talk about the form and the structure of The Florida Project. Because The Florida Project is not put together like most movies we see at the theater.
Rather than hurling us into the action, or into the plot of the film, it just kind of drops us into a world. And lets us wander with the characters through that world, watching their lives as if we were living them.
Watching The Florida Project is like watching Beasts of the Southern Wild in pastels.
You might feel like you’re just drifting through a world, but you’re actually being propelled on an extremely powerful journey, into the experience of some extraordinarily compelling characters whose lives are changing forever, and whose journey will change the way we see ourselves and our world.
The Florida Project is an incredibly hopeful film that takes place in a world that should be filled with despair.
It takes place in a rundown motel just outside of Disney World, where a bunch of low income families are attempting to raise their children in these tiny little one bedroom motel rooms.
The movie is primarily seen through the eyes of children, and it centers around a really complicated and beautiful relationship between six year old Moonee, who is played by Brooklynn Prince, and her mother Halley played by Bria Vinaite.
Moonee is not quite old enough to recognize her mother’s problems, her destitution, her desperation, her drug addiction, her violence, her despair. Instead, she sees her mother through the eyes of any child– through these beautifully idealistic, Disney World, pastel eyes. This child who is having the time of her life, in her own private Disney World with absolutely no supervision, and absolutely no awareness of the danger that is all around her.
And what is gorgeous about this film, what makes us feel connected to these characters, is not that these characters are perfectly good.