When Eva Victor brought Sorry, Baby to this year’s Sundance Film Festival, she knew she wanted to keep its plotline as much of a mystery as possible. The film, a quiet and contemplative campus tale, isn’t the type of project that would typically elicit that level of obfuscation, but Victor — who wrote, directed and stars — felt strongly about not revealing what exactly makes the dark comedy dark. “We knew it was our one pure chance to have people go into the movie without knowing anything, so we chose a logline that basically said nothing,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “All we said was, ‘something bad happened to Agnes, but life moves on for everyone else.’”
Victor’s instincts proved fruitful, and Sorry, Baby was one of the festival’s biggest breakout hits, earning rave reviews and quickly selling to A24 for distribution. The auteur still prefers not to over-explain the premise, so when it releases on June 27 most viewers will only know the basics: Victor plays Agnes, a professor who has stayed on at her rural New England college despite a lingering trauma. Her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), returns for a visit, sparking big questions about what it means to move on. Post-Sundance, Victor has been describing her debut as a movie about aftermath. “It’s about trying to heal when you’re stuck, and how to return to love and joy,” she says. “What happens to her is part of her life, but I was really intentional to not make her a person who is defined by something bad happening to her. Hopefully the film isn’t defined by that either. For me, it’s really more about friendship and holding someone through a hard time than it is about this one violent act.”
Can you talk about what it’s been like in this post-Sundance, pre-release limbo?
There’s a little bit of grief for me that the creative work is over. Now it’s just talking about the film in order to get people to go see it, and my dream would be that people just go see it and then we could talk about it. Because the film has everything I want to say already in it. It’s also sort of euphoric to release it. Maybe this is how my mom felt when I went to college.
When you brought the film to Sundance, did you have a dream distributor or ideal outcome from the festival?
The team did ask me, who is your dream buyer? And honestly, I just wanted to see in their eyes that they understood why this movie is important to me. I was scanning rooms to figure out where the eyes were that I needed. It’s like bringing on any collaborator in the creative process, you’re looking for someone who feels like the script is theirs too, that they have some fire in them about it. There was a moment when I met with A24 where I was like, these people could be my midwife. They will support the way I want to have my baby. I keep using this baby metaphor.
To that end, what did you like about the way Naomi Ackie saw the film?
When we were looking for someone to play that role, I thought of it as, I think Agnes is the moon and Lydia is the sun. They’re both poles of light, but they’re different. I first met Naomi on a Zoom call and she was so warm and funny. I’d seen her work, but everything she’d done then was really serious. So meeting her, I was surprised by how goofy and warm and silly she is. We read together and it just clicked immediately. It was very romantic how it happened. We never rehearsed, we just spent time together and got to know each other and it was very effortless and I’m grateful for that. I think she is why the film works.
So you hadn’t seen Blink Twice or Mickey 17 when you cast her?
She’d shot both of them by the time she got to set, but I hadn’t seen them. It was really cool to then watch both of those come out. I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, what can’t she do? Every time I talk about her I get chills.
Eva Victor in ‘Sorry, Baby.’
Mia Cioffi Henry/Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Do you feel confident that people get what you’re trying to say with this movie and that people understand both the film and you as the person who made it?
I think that came at the Sundance premiere where I was watching people watch the movie, and they were laughing really early on. I remember when I was trying to get financing, I kept saying that I wanted people to feel like they have permission to laugh early on. When we did friends and family screenings I would sit in and try to figure out where I lost people, or where they checked out emotionally. By Sundance, nobody checked out. People felt what they were meant to feel. People can lie about what they think, but the vibes don’t like.
How did you decide on the mix, tonally, of comedy and the more serious moments?
The script very much moved between tone. But then on set there would be things that I wrote as more comedic, that didn’t feel like they should be. I remember performing the jury duty scene, and I wrote it broadly funny, there was a lot of physical comedy in it. But on set, I realized Agnes should feel really claustrophobic and scared, she’s trying to hold back real fear and she’s being forced to say something about what happened to her that she isn’t ready to say. The performance became more emotional. The same thing with the doctor scene, for a while it was landing really heavy, and we thought, what if we do that broad? Almost like Juno. The question we always asked was, what’s the balm that we need? And balm doesn’t mean the character feels better.
I read somewhere that you wrote this while staying in a house in Maine, and you filmed in New England as well. How did that affect you?
This is crazy, but whenever I think about where I want to live someday I picture the house in Mother. The way it is in the beginning. It’s a lake house, it’s made of clay or something. I think my dream is to live in a clay house and maybe Jennifer Lawrence is there too. But I definitely yearn for New England.
What was it like having Barry Jenkins as a producer — especially for a project that is so personal to you?
There was a moment right before we locked the cut when Barry called and was like, I have an idea. And when Barry says that, you unlock the cut. But he’s so collaborative. We just did some experimenting down his road, and then I took a weekend to think about what I wanted. I realized, OK, the movie works in these different ways, which way is the one that matters to you? And I chose a version that was sort of a combination, that was more in between.
How did you cast the kitten?
There were two cats playing one kitten, they were fro a local shelter. Their names were Evan and Bebe. They were very cute. We had a cat wrangler, and he put chicken goop on my face to make the cat want to look at me and touch me. They had been adopted before they even got to set, but the crew kept asking if they could adopt them.