BEFORE STARTING filming on Janet Planet, Annie Baker and her sound designer, Paul Hsu, recorded two weeks of the ambient noises of the Western Massachusetts countryside. For the coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old girl, Lacy, and her mother, Janet, Baker had found the home where she wanted to set much of the movie: an angular but cozy wood cabin with large windows huddled in the forest, a droplet of civilization in the midst of the woods. ¶ “The sound of nature around this house was so incredible,” Baker tells me over coffee and a sandwich at a café just south of Prospect Park, where she had arrived in a ’70s-ish brown jacket, toting a well-used orange backpack. “There were, like, bears wandering around.” Baker has a mop of Pre-Raphaelite bangs…
