‘Tangerine’: Inside the Transgender Revenge Comedy of the Year

For Baker, the chance to simply follow these two women around as they interacted with each other and any passerbys who happened to wander into their sphere was like a DIY director’s dream come true. “Mya and Kiki have been friends for years, so they have a rapport,” he says. “But it’s beyond that: They finish each others’ sentences. It’s like a stand-up routine. There’s this yin-yang energy between them that when, you heard them talk to each other — we knew that was going to be the movie more than anything else. We had a loose story outline, what we called a ‘scriptment,’ and we knew we wanted to end up at the Donut Time right on that corner. But everything else was, do what you’d do and say what you’d say. It was ‘We need to get from Point A to Point B, but other than that, add your own dialogue in and just make it as real as possible. That’s where the humor and the drama will come from.'”

The director trusted that this dynamic duo would be able to add a level of been-there-seen-it verisimilitude and street vernacular into the mix if he let them go off-book. (“There was a lot of me calling them up six months after we shot and going ‘Kiki, what’s a teener?’ when we were mixing,” Baker says, laughing. “I was consulting online slang dictionaries a lot.” For the record, it’s a measure of crystal meth.) As for the actresses, improvising lines was easy; the hard part was initially putting their trust in some guy filming them on the street — on an iPhone, no less — was on the up-and-up. “If you’re in Hollywood and on the streets, do you know how many times you hear ‘I’m a filmmaker, I want to put you in a movie’?” Rodriguez says. “Especially if you’re as gorgeous as I am? My first reaction was ‘Great, OK, so where’s Ashton Kutcher? This is some sort of Punk’d situation, right?” Asked when she realized this was a legit offer, she joked, “After we filmed the whole movie! I kept telling Sean, ‘Until you make this whole thing and get it into Sundance and get this movie in theaters, I do not believe you!'”

“Honestly, I just thought it would be a regular project,” Taylor adds. “I had no idea it would sort of turn into something a lot bigger than what I figured. At the beginning, it was simply me telling him my experiences on the street, stories I’d heard and things I’d seen. But Sean told me that he actually started to fall in love with how I told the story as much as what I was telling him. That was what he wanted to capture. And Kiki and I are very close but we’re complete opposites, so I knew that she would bring a certain energy to the project that was necessary. Once things started to happen, I needed to get our personalities and our neighborhood into it as much as possible.”