Sean Baker has a problem, and it’s not the kind that can be solved by a twelve-step program or an intervention from concerned friends. The Academy Award-winning director of Anora has spent nearly three decades amassing a collection of approximately 1,500 movie posters, transforming his one-bedroom apartment into a museum of cinematic history that happens to also contain a bed, a kitchen, and two very patient chihuahuas named Boonee and Bunsen.
Baker began collecting in his teens, starting with the poster books that accompanied the original Star Wars trilogy—those fold-out treasures that allowed you to decorate your walls with the Millennium Falcon without having to raid your local theater’s display case. From there, he graduated to horror and genre films, haunting flea markets for original one-sheets of Friday the 13th and Dawn of the Dead.
By high school, he had acquired a poster for Maniac, the 1980 slasher featuring a bloody knife and a dangling severed head, which he displays with the pride of someone who knows exactly how disturbing it is and doesn’t care.
The collection now spans decades and continents, ranging from American classics like Cassavetes’ Husbands to obscure Hindi horror films like Khooni Panja (1991), from exploitation documentaries to 1980s teen sex comedies. Baker doesn’t discriminate based on prestige—he collects for the artwork, for the stars, for the films that shaped his cinematic education. His most prized possession is an original French Grande poster for François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, which hangs in pristine condition and probably costs more than most people’s cars.
What makes Baker’s collection fascinating is how it informs his filmmaking. For Red Rocket, his 2021 film about a washed-up porn star returning to his Texas hometown, he surrounded himself with posters from early 1970s Italian sex comedies and erotic dramas, particularly those featuring actress Ornella Muti, who served as inspiration for the film’s female lead.
His Instagram account, where he regularly posts his latest acquisitions, functions as a curated film school for his followers, offering recommendations that range from obvious classics to deep-cut discoveries.
The director approaches poster collecting with the same intensity he brings to his films. He rotates his displays regularly—though he only has fifteen frames in his apartment—swapping out Spielberg’s Sugarland Express (a major Red Rocket inspiration) for Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik when the mood strikes.
He buys multiples of favorite films, collecting not just for the movies but for the stars, particularly Italian actresses from the 1970s who embody a specific aesthetic of Mediterranean glamour and danger.
Baker is philosophical about his obsession. He sees himself as a temporary custodian of these artworks, preserving them during his lifetime before passing them on to the next generation of collectors. He takes framing seriously—UV-treated plexiglass, proper mounting—because he understands that these posters are historical artifacts, physical connections to cinematic moments that can never be recreated.
The collection also reveals Baker’s cinephile credentials. This is not a director who came to filmmaking through music videos or television commercials; he came up through genuine love of the medium, through hours spent in flea markets and comic book shops, through careful study of the films that came before.
His poster for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert—found for $5 in the back of a Detroit comic shop and later valued at $500—represents the kind of discovery that defines both collecting and filmmaking: the ability to recognize value before the rest of the world catches up.
With nearly 1,500 posters and counting, Baker’s apartment has become a physical manifestation of his cinematic brain—eclectic, obsessed, and deeply knowledgeable about the history of the medium he now helps define. The chihuahuas don’t seem to mind.
Explore the collection—follow Sean Baker on Instagram for a masterclass in film history through poster art, then stream Anora to see how those influences shaped his Oscar-winning work.
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