Robert Kojder chats with Eva Victor about Sorry, Baby…
It is fitting that Eva Victor has a background in comedy, as that’s probably the only way someone can pull off a film this tonally bold. The director, writer, and star of the breakout Sundance hit Sorry, Baby has accomplished telling a story about processing a horrific personal trauma and finding the strength to move on and live life, which also has a humorous side.
Part of that is because Eva Victor is primarily fixated on telling a story of friendship between Agnes (played by Victor) and Lydie (Naomi Ackie), depicting them joking around before and after the trauma. Naturally, the context behind the amusing banter is different. The film also doesn’t shy away from the heaviness of its material, but presents it thoughtfully and considerately. There’s pain here, but it’s also a beautifully moving, life-affirming story that also happens to feature kittens (yes, I asked questions about the kittens).
Sorry, Baby has remained one of this critic’s favorite films of the year ever since seeing it virtually at Sundance. A second watch to prepare questions for this interview only reaffirmed that feeling, while also revealing more depth and smaller details, as it does not unfold entirely in chronological order. As such, it felt right that the Chicago Film Critics Association (which I am a part of) selected the film as part of its programming. Eva Victor (who actually studied at NU) joined the screening and also spoke to press, giving some truly well-thought-out, lengthy, eloquent responses. Please enjoy the interview below and check out Sorry, Baby…
I’ve seen the movie twice now, and I love it.
Thank you for seeing it so many times!
You’re welcome. I’m aware that you’ve shadowed Jane Schoenbrun while they were making the incredible I Saw the TV Glow.
Yes, I did.
That movie not only played Sundance, but also our Chicago Critics Film Festival last year. Sorry, Baby was also picked up by A24 and is having the same trajectory!
I’m in a good legacy here!
Haha, and I also interviewed Jane last year, so for me it is a full circle moment interviewing you. Does it feel similar to you?
It is very cool and beyond my wildest dreams that people like my movie and, yeah, I owe so much of my confidence and my film to Jane, who has been such a supportive voice for me since the beginning. They were such a voice of support, and I think they saw me as a filmmaker before I could see myself that way. I had a truly transformative experience on TV Glow‘s set because it’s very rare to be on a set and not have another job on it. So I try to absorb as much as I can, but usually, I know I’m there for a certain job, but here I was able to be simply dead weight and sit by Jane’s side and watch them make every decision under the sun.
I was there for a bit of prep too, which was very helpful to understand what I needed to do in my prep, because I was also adding my actor prep to my prep time. It was really helpful to have seen an example of how one preps for a film, so that I could create my own version of it. It was a completely amazing experience. It was like going to camp with 100 geniuses for a summer.
The film is beautiful and it also taught me… I read the script, of course, and I saw them shoot the whole thing, but then to see a few different versions of the edit like I did, I’d never been given access to versions of a film before. It allowed me to then go to my edit with a real sense of ‘let’s burn this house down and rebuild it’. I understood that we have to break this in order to put it back together, and they were very fearless in both their filmmaking on set and also their editing. So, it was a great example. I think they gave me a lot of confidence, both actively and passively.
This is a film that obviously deals with heavy material, but you smartly allow room for the friendship between Agnes (Eva Victor) and Lydie (Naomi Ackie) not to be defined by one helping the other process “the bad thing”. They discuss and joke about all sorts of things, making for a friendship that’s very lived-in. So, can you discuss balancing that from a screenwriting perspective?
Totally! The film really is about their friendship to me, and how their friendship moves as Agnes is trying to heal, and what it looks like when someone can hold someone through a very difficult moment. And also how healing functions after someone does such a good job at being a friend through it. The film always was sort tracking how they move through the world and how we stay with Agnes because she is stuck, but we really feel the absence of Lydie, and then when she comes back, it’s such a relief. So yeah, the friendship is really the joyful part of the film for me.
The thing that made me want to make the film – because I really had never thought about and had no interest in making a film so relentlessly devastating about someone who goes through a trauma – was it’s really meant to be a film about the trials and tribulations in a very small scope of trying to heal in the four years after something like this happens, and the things that keep you going even when it feels really hard to keep going. So like a really good friend and a really good sandwich and a stranger… I think I was always trying to find the reason she keeps going, not the reason why she wouldn’t keep going, and Lydie’s that reason.
Both times I come away from the movie thinking Naomi Ackie would make the best friend in the world. Can you talk about capturing that chemistry with her to create such a believable friendship?
Well, I seriously believe Naomi Ackie would have chemistry with a wall.
True.
She is the warmest, delightful, kindest, and most emotionally present actor ever. I was so happy to find her. There was a sigh of relief for everybody when we wrote it together and it worked, that we had a film. If this friendship doesn’t feel true and fun to watch, then this film won’t work because this is what we’re living for through it. Finding Naomi was a complete miracle to me… that she read the script and then wanted to do it. Also, it was very, very easy because she came to set completely down, patient, and supportive to me even though she had no reason to believe I could do this. I remember day one, we were shooting something, and I didn’t know if we should wait for this thing to happen in the day or if there was a train that was going to go by. I kind of wanted the train. She was like, you do whatever you want babe. I’m just here. And I was like, man, what a gift to give a first-time filmmaker your trust and your confidence. She’s like I’m here to do whatever you want. So it was a real joy to work with her.
We were shooting the scene on the couch, laughing, and somewhere there’s a nine-minute take of us laughing on the couch facing each other, and Naomi drinks a sip of tea, and then chokes on it, and then we laugh for three more minutes. It was a truly euphoric experience to work with her. And it was beautiful how Lydie, being such a light, was so true of Naomi being such a light on set. Everyone flocked to her. I was just in Boston doing a screening of the film, and a bunch of the crew were there, and they were like, “Where’s Naomi? We miss Naomi.” That’s a testament to how much she affects the people around her.
Lately, movies have gotten creative about avoiding depicting abuse on screen. When did you know you wanted to shoot “the bad thing” from a view of the house across the street, with silence and ominous time jumps? It’s unsettling and forces the viewer to use their imagination darkly, and that’s probably more impactful than showing it.
Yes. Thank you for asking. I never wrote the film without the time jump outside the door. That was always how the film was going to be. I don’t know if this is a memory or a made-up memory, but I kind of think it’s a real memory… I remember writing everything up until that moment and then just looking at my page and thinking, ‘Of course we don’t go in; why would we ever go in?’ I’m not interested in going in, I’m interested in being outside and waiting because I don’t want to see this violence. I don’t want to put anyone through that because it’s not what I wanted to see in any of the films I was watching, because it was too intense. It’s too triggering, and not because it’s not done well, but it was too… I think it actually makes it harder to have clarity in continuing to watch something. It makes me shut down, and I wanted to keep people emotionally open if I could.
So I didn’t want anyone to go inside. And then I also think about it and seeing the film a million times, because you have to see it a million times when you make it, it kind of feels like we stay with Agnes emotionally when she goes into the house. Her body enters the house, but she doesn’t really inhabit it there. We are kind of witnessing her memory or her experience of that dissociation from her body. Then she emerges from the house, and there’s a real before and after experience of the body that did this thing, and then the body’s coming out, but we don’t get to know because she’s not caught up yet. And I don’t want us to hear about it until she tells us. I want her to have the agency to decide when she wants to tell us. I also don’t think she knows what happened in there until she’s able to say it. And I don’t even think she knows after she says that. I think it’s Lydie saying that’s “the thing” that completely shows her that that’s what it was. The whole way home, she’s just trying to get home.
So yes, it has always been that way, but I think in the script it was day and then blue hour and there was one cut on the door, but we ended up doing two cuts on the door because I was told that it was unrealistic to be able to do blue hour for about seven hours and we didn’t. We couldn’t go back to the same location. So it ended up being shot at night. But Barry Jenkins relieved all my anxiety when he told me it’s okay that we shoot it at night because it’s about how Agnes feels and time moves in the way that she feels and it’s okay that it’s such a big time jump because it’s emotionally true and that helped me not worry about being necessarily realistic.
That’s a great way of thinking about it. Also, there is a part before that where Agnes says she would tell Decker (Louis Cancelmi) “no, but thank you” if he did try to make a sexual move. Can you talk about how terrifying it is to explore the notion of what someone thinks they could do in that situation versus what they don’t or can’t?
Having that scene means a lot to me because Agnes and Lydie are playfully talking about what it would be like to sleep with your professor who’s hot, and that is so their right because it’s all in fantasy and it’s all within the confines of it would be a romantic tryst between me and my professor. There’s a real joy in talking about that fantasy. It’s about the idea of their relationship becoming sexual, in a consensual way. I liked the idea that Agnes could very well have a little crush on her professor, and then this is a completely different non-sexual, non-consensual experience.
It doesn’t matter at all what Agnes says to what Lydie asks, because this has nothing to do with sex. This is all about power and violence. And I remember at a Q&A at Sundance, I think someone asked me how it felt to have both consensual sex scenes and non-consensual sex scenes in one film, like between Agnes and Gavin (Lucas Hedges) and between the professor and Agnes. I have never thought about what happens in the house with the professor as sexual or sex. It’s violence. The scenes with Gavin are, yes, an exploration of sex in a dissociated body and then in a body where one is present in it, but those things have never been in conversation to me.
I think the joy you see in Agnes before this happens to her is really important because I think the professor, and this goes back to my prep I did as an actor, but one of the things that gets her robbed of her excitement about her future is that Decker sees in her that she has a bright future and that is some connection that they share. They have an energy together, and it’s okay that that energy feels artistic. But then all of that gets wiped away because there’s no room for her to have any kind of nuance… it just all gets stripped away. It’s a long-winded answer for what you asked.
It’s a great answer.
Thank you.
Well, here’s a tough question. How well-behaved was the kitten during shooting, and have you ever actually taken one into a grocery store?
Not in my real life. [laughs] I think a lot of writing a movie where you get to act in it is wish fulfillment, and one of those things is getting to carry a kitten into a grocery store. There were two kittens; one was named Evan, and the other was named Bebe. You can tell in the film that Evan has gray paws and Bebe has white paws, and they both make it into the final cut. Bebe was definitely consistent, very on it, but Evan had star power. Evan has this moment when he looks at the camera, and it’s just completely stirring. But Evan was less consistent. So it was a very interesting experience of “wow, which is more valuable”, and in the end, they’re both valuable.
Your next film should just be wish fulfillment with cats, a completely happy film.
I think that everyone would not see it, but maybe I’ll do it privately, fund it myself, something like that. A real, indie with me and a bunch of cats. Good idea.
I read that Barry Jenkins said he saw you as a filmmaker before you saw yourself as capable of directing. So, what do you think illuminated the talent he saw inside you?
I have no idea, but I’m very grateful for it. I don’t know. I seriously am really, really happy he said that to me because it really did change my life, and we’ll never totally know, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’m very grateful for it.
The opening and closing theme from Lia Ouyang Rusli really stands out, and it fits the internalized, quiet, traumatic pain. Can you talk about working together and creating that music?
Yes, Lia is such a genius to me. They are warm, funny, and thoughtful. I really didn’t have the tools to be able to talk about music. It’s such an intense job that they have to do, which is taking me fumbling around, talking about the emotionality of a scene, and then translating that into genuinely beautiful music, and like six versions of a potential song. It blows my mind, and every time I got an email from them with a score in it, I was like, I can’t believe this is my life, and that this person is able to generate so quickly.
They had about five weeks, six weeks, or something crazy to do this. I think we had tried a bunch of temp scores on the film, and it really didn’t work. It felt like it skewed things really dark sometimes, and it skewed things really flippant sometimes, and it was really hard to find something that held both the humor and the pain in the film. It was really difficult, and I don’t think we ever really did. Then Lia came along and blew open the film because the tonal tightrope of the comedy and the drama is such a fine like line you can really like mess it up so easily and they understood, I don’t understand how, but they understood how to ride the same wave and not even just ride the same wave but like elevate whatever we were doing to create some consistent musical language that makes the film feel more like one thing. That opening music was so perfect and helpful because that opening shot can look like a horror movie, and giving it that kind of choir burst, sort of like a starry little delightful twirls on top, just gives it this energy and this warmth. It was a really magical experience, and I don’t totally know how they did it, but I’m very grateful. The score is standout amazing.
One of the more amusing but also intriguing moments comes during jury duty when Agnes is torn over how to identify gender. I know you use they/them pronouns. Are parts of this movie personal, and did making it help you uncover more about your own identity?
You know, always being perceived as very crazy, and when you’re on as like the person people are coming to to answer questions, it is very intense. So yeah, I think honestly just more time with myself and, of course, in making the film, because it was such a gift to have so much creative control over what I was making, I think just made me feel more in myself and aware of how I like to be perceived. You can’t really control how you’re perceived, but you can use what limited language we have to not feel hurt by it. I’ve always felt very fluid on a spectrum in my gender, and I like that to feel like more of a celebration than a rule.
I’m proud of Agnes for having a little moment of honesty with their experience of gender and then also I think there’s a little bit of a moment at the end where Lydie’s partner Fran (E.R. Fightmaster) comes and there is a funhouse mirror to Agnes of who she might be able to be if they were not as stuck. I think that’s where the tension between Agnes and Fran might come from. Fran is to Agnes potentially what they could be someday, but they’re just not there yet. So, yes, there’s a thread of that experience in the film, but it’s interesting to make a film over time because I wrote the film in 2021, and that’s been in the film since then. It’s sort of sweet to be able to honor that person who wrote this in the way that they wanted to write it, and to then be like another person on the other side too.
Thank you for your time. it’s a terrific movie and I loved talking to you.
Thank you so much!
Sorry, Baby is currently playing in limited release and will open wider in the US on July 18th. Read our review here.
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
