Two weeks before the limited release of Eva Victor‘s feature directorial debut, “Sorry, Baby,” the multi-hyphenate was busy with some off-beat grassroots marketing: assuring Instagram followers that the film‘s feline supporting star, who appears in much of the Sundance hit’s marketing, was OK. More than OK!
“I keep having to do them,” Victor told IndieWire during a recent interview about those homegrown PSAs. “Someone told me that their friends aren’t going to see it because they’re worried the cat dies. And I was like, OK, so, something must be done. I’m continually trying to remind people, but I don’t know if it’ll work out. But I hope the word will get around eventually that it’s not that kind of movie. [And it’s not just] ‘the cat doesn’t die.’ I want it to be ‘the cat lives a wonderful life and nothing bad ever happens to the cat.’ You know what I mean? Because that’s different.”
Related Stories
That’s the sort of care and attention that Victor — who wrote, directed, and stars in the film — lavishes on everything they do (Victor uses she/they pronouns). And it’s that exact sort of sensitivity that runs through every minute of “Sorry, Baby,” which premiered to great acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it also picked up distribution from A24 and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Victor.
Victor’s debut is a darkly funny and enormously tender film that is about what happens after the worst happens, but with plenty of room to weave the light next to the dark. As the film’s logline hints, “something bad” happens to Victor’s Agnes, but the creator and star is wise enough to understand that’s only part of the story, because that’s only part of life itself.
Told in non-linear chapters, the film follows Agnes as she deals with said awful life event, all of it set in the small New England town where she attended grad school and is now a professor. While “Sorry, Baby” might be rooted specifically in Agnes’ story and the bad thing at its center, in its specificity, there’s still tremendous room for wider recognition and revelation. Plus: cute cat.
So, yes, the cat (named Olga in the film, as played by Noochie the cat) is just fine, more than fine. Other animals? Well, there is a key scene in the film involving a mouse who doesn’t fare quite as well, though that’s all treated with the same blend of kindness and dark humor that sets the film apart. Victor is incredibly easy to talk to, and on a wide array of subjects, so chatting about Olga soon led to talking about their own cat (Clyde) and this writer’s pair of tuxedos (Felix and Oscar) and their various adventures with in-house vermin (mostly bad).
Then, of course, came this exchange, which feels as if it could have been pulled directly out of “Sorry, Baby”:
Kate Erbland: I got a hamster when I was nine.
Eva Victor: Bad?
And while “bad” doesn’t even begin to cover it (anyone who has ever owned a hamster can see where this is going, and that’s before I mention that my hamster came to me pregnant), the quickness with which Victor can read emotion, respond to it, and do it in such a way that you feel like instant confidants, well, that’s probably why “Sorry, Baby” is such a revelation.
Cats, mice, hamsters, oh my! aside, how is Victor feeling now, on the cusp of the film being released?
“I’m feeling good. And weird. But I feel really excited for the movie to come out and have real people see it,” they said, speaking in the same clipped manner as Agnes. “It’s been so amazing that film people see it, but it’s also a movie I made for a version of myself that didn’t know much about film and just wanted to feel a film. That’s sort of who the film’s for. It just feels like kind of this pent-up thing, but I’m ready to release. It’s funny it’s called a release. It’s mirroring so much about birth in a way that I’m surprised by.”
Victor is quite thoughtful on the subject of who the film is “for.” “Whenever you’re in a finance meeting, people love to talk about ‘target audience,’ and I’m like, ‘Honestly, I think for a film like this, it’s actually so much based on your lived experience,’” they said. “I remember all the financiers were like, ‘It’s young women!’ and I’m like, ‘Maybe?’ I don’t know, but I’m excited to figure out who ends up seeing it and who finds it.”
Taking the film around to other festivals and screenings has been instructive, and Victor has spent the weeks and months since that Sundance premiere getting a sense of who will find the film. Who needs the film.
“Once in a while, I’ll do a Q&A after a screening, and then there are people who I meet, people who are feeling connected to it,” Victor said. “It’s not always the people I expect, based on how they look or something, but I really like that.”
They noted that producer and Pastel principal Adele Romanski has a “finance bro friend” who is “obsessed” with the movie. “I feel like the more time I spend in gender-fluid mentality, the more I’m like, ‘Everyone’s just fucking figuring it out.’ I think people are surprising. People can surprise you with what hits for them,” Victor said.
Victor talks about film in a very visceral, physical way. Films can hit you. They can move you. They can lodge in you.
“The way I keep thinking about movies right now, it’s like there are some films that come in as you’re watching them and then move through you and leave. They leave your body. And then there’s some films that lodge themselves into your body and soul,” Victor said. “Because the movie is so personal, I can’t really tell [which one it is]. It’s up to each person, whether it lodges or whether it moves.”
Victor has been open about the very personal nature of her film, and that Agnes’ experiences are inspired by things that happened in her own life. In the early days of lockdown, Victor did what many people did — got super into watching movies — and while they’d already been performing by that point (stand-up, incredibly hilarious social media bits), their interest in movies took a different cast. She started looking for stories that appealed to her own lived experiences, and that desire to see those experiences and stories and emotions eventually led to Victor writing the film’s screenplay.
“When I was writing it was like, ‘Can this [even] be a script?,’” they said. “And then I started to understand how movies are not a script. One part of what the film will be exists in the script, and the rest is visual, and you can try to write towards it, but it’s a completely different medium. That part I actually found a lot of joy in.”
The kind of films that inspired Victor — they named some “really intense” titles like “Three Colors: Blue,” “The Double Life of Veronique,” and “The Piano Teacher” — were more about the feelings they wanted to convey. “It started becoming clear that this is what the movie looks like and this is what the movie feels like in different moments,” Victor said.
Victor said there are two distinct moments in the script where all of that blended together during the writing process — how it would look versus how it would feel, and what visuals were needed to bridge that — including the opening shot of the film and a key moment that happens in the film’s second chapter, “The Year with the Bad Thing.” Both moments focus on a building: the opening shot is of Agnes’ small country house, the other scene is of her professor’s (Louis Cancelmi) rowhouse over the course of a few hours.
“Those were two moments where I was like, ‘This is very clear to me, the filmmaking in this is very simple and clear to me,’” Victor said. “And they’re sort of driving moments of the film visually that allowed me to see it as a movie and that it needs to be a movie. I think the screenplay part, I felt pretty comfortable, I felt like I understood what the screenplay was, and it was really about translating it into a film. That was the part that I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ But, also, if you have a screenplay, it is in there. You just have to figure out exactly what you mean.”
Starring in the film? That was an easier ask for Victor. Directing it? OK, a bit more fraught.
“I knew I wanted to act in it because I wrote it for myself ultimately, honestly,” they said. “I was like, ‘Maybe we should find someone else to direct it, because that seems like a lot,’ and I thought about it for a little bit and I was like, ‘Wait, this feels weird.’ My producers were like, ‘Go think about it, let it crystallize.’” I took a couple months and then I think I wrote back an email that the subject was like, ‘Crystallizing Happening’ or something.”
Those producers include the team at Pastel, including fellow filmmaker Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski, and Mark Ceryak. Pastel came on early to the project, and were instrumental to Victor in many ways, including getting Victor to the point where directing felt possible.
“It took me a little bit. Then I was like, ‘I do want to direct it, and these are the places where I feel very insecure about that,’” Victor said. “They sort of set me up on a journey. We collaborated on a journey of getting me to feel comfortable directing. Which, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt comfortable directing, but I got to a place where there was no more learning to be done not on the job.”
Romanski and co-producer and Pastel exec Catalina Rojter were often on the film’s Massachusetts set, Victor said, joined by Jenkins when his schedule allowed. (Victor said the pair really bonded during the editing of the film, when Victor was editing “Sorry, Baby” at the same post-production facility as Jenkins’ “The Lion King: Mufasa.” “We edited in the same place as ‘Lion King,’ but they built a wall so that we couldn’t see what they were making, because it was very private,” Victor said with a wry smile. “Like, one time I saw one image of an owl, and I was like, ‘Fuck, I’m going to get fired.’ And then I was like, ‘Fuck, that looks good.’”)
To prepare for their first day on set, Victor also turned to other filmmakers for some advice. Jane Schoenbrun offered some that really stuck, speaking to both the pragmatism and emotion Victor wanted to bring to the production.
“At that point, I was just ready,” Victor said. “I was really nervous though, too, because I was trying to set tone in all these ways before [we even started]. I remember Jane told me this thing while they were shooting ‘I Saw TV Glow,’ and they were like, ‘The most important thing about the first day is making the day.’ So, you have to finish on time, because morale needs it, and people need to trust that you know how to do that. That was a lesson that I took with me. I was like, ‘We’re finishing the day on time.’”
The first shot? A little trickier, as it involved Victor as Agnes and Naomi Ackie as her devoted best friend Lydie going for a walk near Agnes’ house (which also used to be Lydie’s house).
“There was a train that went by every 20 minutes under the tunnel we were walking over, and I really wanted to wait for the train,” Victor said. “And Adele was like, ‘That’s crazy. This is the first shot of the day.’ And I was like, ‘Ah, man, I don’t know if I should wait for the train,’ and then I turned to Naomi, and I was like, ‘Should we wait for it?’ And Naomi was like, ‘Whatever you want. Do whatever you want. I’m here.’”
In some ways, that’s Agnes and Lydie’s relationship in a nutshell, one borne of love, trust, and confidence. If Lydie is Agnes’ person, it sure sounds like Ackie filled that same role for Victor.
“I really think the reason that the shoot worked was because Naomi had so much trust in me from the beginning, without having any proof I could do it,” Victor said. “There were moments when I had to think about what I wanted, and the patience that she gave me and the love that she gave me was completely essential for me to then become more confident. That’s such a gift from day one for her to trust me without having any reason to, really.”
The last day of production focused on scenes with Victor and co-star Lucas Hedges, including a handful of more intimate moments between Victor and Hedges. No spoilers here, but Victor said Hedges’ last shot sees his Gavin running out of his house toward Victor’s Agnes, and Victor’s last shot was the converse, with Agnes running toward him. That’s a sweet enough note to end it on, but Victor, as ever, had a slew of hilarious details that only added to its power and humor.
“Our Steadicam operator, Dean, was recovering from Norovirus that he got from his kids,” Victor said. “I kept running in the wrong direction, because I was running toward the house, because my intuition was telling me that, but I really had to run toward these lights. I kept running the wrong way, and he just kept chugging Gatorade and I felt so bad. Then it started snowing. The whole reason I wanted to shoot there and then was because I wanted to get fucking snow in the movie, and it snowed the weekend before we shot, and it snowed the night we were wrapping, and we actually had to wait for it to stop snowing because the shots wouldn’t match. So, snow didn’t happen! But I heard that happened to ‘Certain Women,’ too, which is a really important movie for this film. I’m in good company.”
What did it feel like to wrap production? “It was fun, but it was weird,” Victor said. “There’s a grief to it. When you’re imagining your film, it’s endless, and the reason it’s hard is that it doesn’t exist yet, but it’s everything. By the end of the shoot, there’s this sadness of, it’s finite, what you have is what you have. But then it’s also euphoric, because you have it.”
Victor laughed. “And I had never done an edit before, so we wrapped and I was like, ‘We did it! It’s over!,’” they said. “And it’s like, hell no. I was humbled quick. I went to LA the next week to start editing. I had one week off where I was in my parents’ house, comatose. It was an intense time. It was amazing. I miss it. The further I get from it, the more I crave it. I really do miss the part where we were making something.”
There’s little question that making the film was intensely personal and deeply healing for Victor, but they also understand that by saying the film is based on their own experiences or events in their life, that opens a door for people to pry.
“I’m incredibly interested in privacy,” they said. “It’s something I’ve had for a long time. When I was doing stand-up, I had all these boundaries around what I would say. I think it made me a pretty bad stand-up, because I was like, ‘I don’t want to talk about anything about my relationships.’ That’s one of the most interesting things people could talk about!”
But “Sorry, Baby” is, Victor stressed, a fictional narrative film. “I know, [there’s] a lot of curiosity,” Victor said. “It’s obviously a personal film, but I did have a lot of joy in the creation of world-building and in the fictional parts. It was kind of the best of both worlds, where I got to weave in my little truths in ways that are disguised enough in this world that I got to build to support this person’s story. Real life is real life, but a movie has to be contained, because it only lasts a certain amount of time and the world has to support the story.”
Victor added, “People’s interest in my experience, I’m trying to look at it pretty empathetically, that people feel connected to the film and are wanting for more information.” For those wanting more information, Victor points back to the film itself.
“I do think the film is the purest version of what I could ever say about me, and the film is also not me,” Victor said. “The film is the film. The film is what we can all look at, and I’m just a part of it in my own ways. It is a piece of art. It’s meant to be a piece of artistic creation. So, I do always feel it’s appropriate to point people toward the film if they have questions about me.”
As we were speaking in a tucked-away alcove on the second floor of the Cherry Lane Theatre (which A24 purchased in 2023), Ackie and Hedges were on stage doing remote video interviews. A monitor in the alcove featured a live feed, and we could see and hear the interviews as they unfolded. On one hand, so nice! On the other, so nerve-wracking!
“It’s so nice to have Naomi and Lucas around me doing [press] with me, because I don’t want it to just be my film,” the filmmaker said. “I want it to feel like a film we all made, because we did. It’s nice to remember that it’s not just me.”
As another remote video interview started up, Victor couldn’t help but smile at the monitor. “Aw, look at their cute little faces,” they said, just as the interviewer asked a question about Victor. “It’s so awkward. They’re talking about me and I’m not here.”
While we managed to turn the volume down, Victor couldn’t help zeroing in on a slight framing problem, with Ackie and Hedges not quite evenly situated next to each other. “It’s freaking me out that they’re not sitting in the middle,” Victor said, with a smile. “But that’s my problem. I’m the director.”
A24 will release “Sorry, Baby” in limited release on Friday, June 27, with a nationwide release to follow on Friday, July 18.
