The Russian Oligarch Behind Anora’s Brooklyn Mansion

Oct 21, 2024

Before the director Sean Baker finished the script that would become Anora, he was looking for locations that would show an aspect of Russian American life in New York. That’s how Baker works, an approach he has called “anthropological or sociological” filmmaking, which allows places and the people living and working in them to shape his characters and inspire his plots. For Anora, Baker envisioned one scene in a vape shop, then discovered an old-school candy store and gave a character a job there. Those real tidbits ground a Cinderella story that follows Ani (Mikey Madison), a savvy stripper who knows enough Russian from her grandmother to chat with a client, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). He turns out to be the son of an oligarch, and Ani gets the first glimpse of his wealth on a visit to his modern-day castle where their love story unfolds. Those scenes were shot last year in a Brooklyn mansion built by the family of a real Russian oligarch. And Baker told Variety that he found the house fairly easily, after a Google search for “the biggest and best mansion in Brighton Beach.”

The real house is actually a quick drive away in Mill Basin, a waterfront neighborhood where Russian families have been buying for decades. 2458 National Drive isn’t just huge, it’s distinctive. A façade of limestone, stucco, and dark glass looks like a cross between a Miami waterfront mansion and Richard Meier’s Getty extension. A half-circle of stairs leads to a double door, flanked by wings like the blades of a sci-fi ship. Then there’s the interior — a great room of endless marble floors and wide vistas over Jamaica Bay, where a hidden door, leveled against a mirror, reveals itself to hold coats. Outside is a 1,000-square-foot pool, a private dock, and a pavilion that seats 40. Downstairs are rooms for staff, a theater, and a white-walled garage. And up a curving staircase are five bedroom suites with enormous closets and marble-filled bathrooms — including a primary with big windows over the water.

“That was my mom’s room,” remembered Anna Schafer, born Anna Anisimova. Once a model labeled the “Russian Paris Hilton” by this magazine, she was a teenager like Anora’s Ivan when her family had the house. Schafer — who now co-owns an organic skin-care line and is working as an actor in Los Angeles — said she was in fifth grade when she found herself driving around Mill Basin with her parents and a real-estate broker. The family had been living in Fort Lee, New Jersey — another popular neighborhood for Russian Americans — but they had friends in Mill Basin, and her mom wanted to be closer. When the broker passed 2458 National Drive, her father asked about it. Was it for sale? It wasn’t. “My dad was like, ‘Can we knock?’ And my dad rang the doorbell. The family opened the gate and my dad walked in, and as a joke was like, ‘Do you want to sell your house to me?’”

Vasily Anisimov seemed to like that the house sat at a dead end, hidden behind metal gates, its only exposures on the waterfront. “There’s no through traffic,” Schafer said. “I think my dad liked how secluded it was and how private it was.” Anisimov is now worth $1.6 billion, according to Forbes. A former friend of Vladimir Putin’s (they were judo sparring partners), he came to control a not-irrelevant slice of the world’s aluminum, then transitioned to real estate, with a portfolio that once numbered 37,000 acres and included land in an elite Aspen-ish enclave where Putin’s cronies built dachas. Schafer has praised her father as a self-made man who worked his way up. And he clearly had a gift for talking his way into deals: The owners did answer the doorbell that day and went even further. “We ended up having dinner there,” Schafer said. And she remembered coming back another day and sleeping over inside the house while its owner slept outside — though not in tents. “They had this beautiful boat,” she remembered.

That owner was John Rosatti, a Brooklyn-born businessman with a hustle flipping yachts. At one point, Rosatti had a 162-foot-long boat big enough to hold six cabins, two Harley-Davidsons, two Vespas, and a $1 million cigarette boat. (It was named Remember When, after the most famous line from The Sopranos.) Worth an estimated $400 million three years ago, Rosatti made money as an auto dealer who founded the Plaza Auto Mall on Flatbush. (He also worked with a partner who supplied Donald Trump with helicopters and helped design his Trump-branded limousine.) But Rosatti also had another life: He was convicted of a felony for attempted auto theft and, later, for carrying a gun as a felon. Confidential informants named him a “made” man in the Colombo crime family, according to a report by a state gaming board, and the Baltimore Sun quoted an anonymous Colombo crime “associate” who claimed Rosatti had a sideline as “a mentor to the Russian gangsters who dominated the 1990s.” (Rosatti did not respond to a request for comment.)

Rosatti reportedly started building in 1989, and Schafer’s parents paid him $3 million for the house in 1996, asking him to put money in escrow to settle a lawsuit over a deck he built over protected wetlands. “And that was that,” Schafer said. Her parents furnished the house but didn’t change much until 2003. That’s when her mother, Galina Anisimova, took on a major project: adding a third story and redoing interiors to her exacting standard.

Galina had a taste for mirror and marble, which was imported from Europe to wall a primary bathroom that opens into a walk-in closet with custom millwork. “It was like a palace, built in the early 2000s — they don’t even do work like that anymore,” said a family staffer who preferred to remain anonymous. Everything is custom — the tile, the pocket doors, the patterned wood floors, and innovative perks are cleverly hidden, like a generator buried under a lawn and a room devoted to the cold storage of furs. Schafer remembers waking up in the enormous primary suite to views of the bay and sounds of the water. On summer mornings, she would run downstairs to hop on a Jet Ski, taking it out to meet friends. “It wasn’t a terrible childhood,” she said. “It was very free.”

The family listed after Schafer and her sister moved out of the state, when Schafer was in her mid-20s. But the Mill Basin house failed to sell quickly, and with each price chop, there were headlines mocking its design, its extravagance, its connection to Rosatti. Galina told her daughter that her heart broke over the thought of the house sitting empty. In 2018, it sold for only $10 million to an LLC. Those owners partitioned off the main house, selling it three years later for $7.2 million. A broker said the buyers were a family from the neighborhood who “wanted an upgrade.” In Variety, Anora’s director described them as “a beautiful Russian American family” that was “proud of their home and wanted it shown on the big screen.” (The owner praised Baker but otherwise didn’t respond to a request to participate in this story.)

Production designer Stephen Phelps says he remembered touring the house for the first time, which required some “exploration,” given the sheer scale. “There were so many rooms we didn’t even use,” he said. When Phelps and Baker discovered a garage with a mirrored wall and white floors, they saw an easy way to broadcast extreme wealth by filling the room with luxury car rentals. A solarium with a round sitting area seemed like the spot Ivan’s friends would choose to party. And a media room cheated as an office, where the family keeps important papers.

Phelps had tuned his radar to what might feel right for a Russian family by scouting with Baker around Brighton Beach and seeing what people actually had. But to fill out the rooms at the house, he and his set decorator did not need to buy much. “I was able to scavenge and hunt throughout the mansion.” Even some of the owner’s artwork, like surreal figure paintings and statues of women, felt linked to Baker’s story. “The style and the choices that were made in the construction feel real,” Phelps said. “They were made by people who have a similar kind of background in that way.”To the real family who designed the house, seeing their home onscreen playing a palace in movie that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes is a kind of fairy-tale ending. “I’m happy for the house,” Schafer said. “It’s going to have its moment.”