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Eva Victor touched down at Dublin’s Storyhouse screenwriting festival this week, where the actor-writer-director broke down the challenges and lessons they learned when making their debut feature Sorry, Baby.
The film, which Victor wrote, directed and starred in, premiered at Sundance in 2025 before it was snapped up by A24 for $8M. The film’s logline is ‘Something bad happened to Agnes, but life goes on…for everyone around her at least.”
Victor said that after they wrote the script “the challenge was actually with the fact that I realized I wanted to direct it but didn’t know how to do that. It took about three years between sending the script and shooting it and, in that time, I needed to prepare to direct because I wanted to do it very well.”
Barry Jenkins produced the title with Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak’s Pastel. Victor recalled Jenkins sending them a DM after watching some of their viral videos that they had posted on Twitter. When they first met Jenkins, Victor said: “I was wearing too much blush – I always think about that actually. He was very complimentary of my videos and said what I was doing was directing, even though it’s really different, it’s a small version but you’re making decisions, you’re choosing how the camera goes and you’re choosing what shot you want to use. He was very affirming that what I was doing had a value in some filmmaking practice way. I think that placed a little seed in me that made feel like these people see me in a way that is beyond the comedy world.”
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Victor explained how Jenkins’ support helped them to learn to let go of things when making a movie. Speaking about a specific scene after their character Agnes is sexually assaulted and goes to her car, Victor recalls “ultimately wanting that whole drive to be during the blue hour, that magical 20-minute window of the day.”
“My producers told me it wasn’t possible because we would have to come back like six times and I was really worried about it because I didn’t want it to feel like she was in the house forever,” they said. “But then finally Barry was the one who talked me down and said it was ok for her experience in the house to feel subjective, at times moving in a subjective way, and she emerges at night because her whole world has shifted.
“And it’s ok if that’s not true to reality, but it can be true to how she feels. So I was like, ‘Ok, that releases me.’ And that was good producing.”
Source: deadline.com