‘Sorry, Baby’ was a way for debuting filmmaker Eva Victor to heal

There is a simple tattoo of a windowpane on the middle finger of Eva Victor’s right hand. When I ask about it, the filmmaker launches into a story that involves miscommunication with an Italian tattoo artist while on a trip to Paris.

“I drew this really intricate fine-line tattoo of a window with all these curtains and little things in it,” explains Victor. “And I went to the woman and she was like, ‘I cannot do that.’ And I was like, ‘OK, what can you do?’ And she drew a box with lines in it and I was like, “OK, let’s do that.’ And she did it.”

With a little distance and perspective, what could have been a permanent disaster now means something else.

“It seriously is a really rough tattoo,” Victor adds with a lighthearted laugh. “But, you know, life is life. And that’s my tattoo and I have it on my hand every day of my life.”

Much like “Sorry, Baby,” the debut feature that Victor wrote, directed and starred in, the tattoo story is one that begins in odd whimsy but takes an unexpected turn toward something deeper, a personal journey.

“I have a lot of tattoos that are day-of tattoos,” Victor, 31, says. “Sometimes with big decisions I find it’s easier to just do it. It matters more to me that I’m doing this than what it is.

Seeing it every day, the little window is a reminder of another life. “It is definitely like a memory of a person I was who would do something like that,” she adds.

“Sorry, Baby” premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and was picked up for distribution by indie powerhouse A24. The film more recently played at Cannes and opens in limited release this week.

Told via a literary-inspired chapter structure across five years, the story follows Agnes (Victor), a professor at the small East Coast liberal arts college where she was also a grad student, as she tenuously recovers from the free fall following a sexual assault by one of her instructors. Naomi Ackie (also recently seen in “Blink Twice” and “Mickey 17”) brings an openhearted allegiance to Agnes’ best friend Lydie, who, over the course of the film, comes out as gay, marries a woman and has a baby, while Lucas Hedges plays a sympathetic neighbor.

Eva Victor in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”

(A24)

It’s a recent quiet Monday morning at a West Hollywood vegetarian restaurant where we meet and Victor, who uses they/she pronouns and identifies as queer, peruses the menu with a mix of curiosity and enthusiasm.

Victor is a self-described pescatarian but will make the odd exception for a slider at a fancy party or a bite of the pork and green chile stew at Dunsmoor in Glassell Park, a favorite. Having moved to Los Angeles a little over a year ago to work on the editing of “Sorry, Baby,” Victor has settled into living in Silver Lake with their cat, Clyde.

“I love it — I do,” Victor says with quiet conviction. “It’s very comforting. I have all my little things I get when I’m home, but it’s been a while since I’ve been home for a bit. So I’m looking forward to being able to rest at home soon.”

After breakfast, Victor will head to the airport to go shoot a small acting part in an unnamed project and by the end of the week will make a talk show debut with an appearance on the “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

“It’s been very intense for me,” Victor says of the period following Sundance. “I’m very interested in my privacy and also in routine of the day. I really like having things I do every day. It’s weird to go from making a movie for four years, basically, that nobody knows about. And then it premieres at Sundance and that’s how people find out about it and everyone finds out about it in the same night. That is a very bizarre experience for the body.”

Victor adds, “It does feel like there are a lot of layers between me and the film at this point.”

There’s an unusual, angular physicality to Victor’s performance in “Sorry, Baby,” as Agnes struggles to reengage with her own body following the assault, mostly referred to in the film as “the bad thing.”

“I keep hearing, ‘Oh, Agnes is so awkward.’ I’m like, ‘What the hell?’” says Victor, protectively. “I’m very humbled by people’s reactions to how bizarre they think that character is because I’m like: ‘Oh, I thought she was acting legitimately normal, but OK.’”

“It’s life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: ‘Is anyone else feeling like this?’” says Victor. “And it’s nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Victor, grew up in San Francisco and studied playwriting and acting at Northwestern University, moving to New York City after graduation with ambitions to work as a staffer on a late-night talk show. She got a job writing for the satirical website Reductress and began making short online videos of herself, many of which became offbeat viral comedy hits for the way they jabbed at contemporary culture, including “me explaining to my boyfriend why we’re going to straight pride” and “me when I def did not murder my husband,” and “the girl from the movie who doesn’t believe in love.” She also appeared as a performer on the final three seasons of the series “Billions.”

The character sketches of those videos only hinted at the nuance and complexity of which Victor was capable. Throughout “Sorry, Baby” there is a care and delicacy to how the most sensitive and vulnerable moments are handled. In the film, the sexual assault itself occurs offscreen — we don’t see it or hear it — as a shot of the facade of the teacher’s house depicts the passage of time from day to night. Later, Agnes sits in the bath as she describes to Lydie what happened, a moment made all the more disarming for the tinges of humor that Victor still manages to bring.

“At the end of the day, I really wanted to make a film about trying to heal,” Victor says. “And about love getting you through really hard times. And so the violence is not depicted in the film and not structurally the big plot point of the film. The big plot point of the film in my opinion is Agnes telling Lydie what happened and her holding it very well. That to me is sort of what we’re building to in the film — these moments in friendship over time and the loneliness of a person in between those moments.”

The relationship between Agnes and Lydie forms much of the core of “Sorry, Baby,” with the chemistry between Victor and Ackie giving off a rare warmth and understanding. The connection between the two actors as performers happened straight away.

“The script was so incredible that, to be honest with you, I already felt like I knew them,” says Ackie on a Zoom call from New York City. “There was something about the rhythm of how the writing was that made me feel like we might have something in common. When I was reading it to myself, it felt so natural in my mouth. And then we finally met and it was like all of the humor and the heart and the tragedy of the script was suddenly in a person. There was a sense of ease in the way we were talking and openness and a joyfulness and an excitedness that was kind of instantaneous.”

Naomi Ackie, left, and Eva Victor in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”

(A24)

The film is the product of an unusual development process spurred by producers Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. Based on their fandom of Victor’s online videos, Jenkins reached out through DMs and set up a meeting, setting in motion the process that would eventually lead to a screenplay for “Sorry, Baby.”

“When Ava sent the first draft of ‘Sorry, Baby,’ it arrived in the way that the most special things have for me, which is fully formed,” says Romanski. “Not to say that we didn’t then go back and continue to refine it, but it just arrived so clear and so emotional. It hit from the first draft. So it felt like it would be such a shame not to figure out how to put that into a visual form that other people could experience what we were able to experience just from reading it.”

From there, the team set about making Victor feel comfortable and confident as both a filmmaker and a performer. Having already had experience working with first-time feature directors such as Charlotte Wells on “Aftersun” and Raven Jackson on “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” the producing trio knew the process would require extra care and attention.

“Part of the reason this challenge felt possible is how much work we’ve done in how best to support a director in that debut space,” says Romanski. “There was a lot of confidence and assuredness around how to be that producer for that first-time filmmaker.”

The team arranged something of an unofficial directing fellowship, allowing Victor to shoot a few scenes from the script and then sit down with an editor to discuss how to improve on the footage. Victor made shot lists after watching Jenkins’ “Moonlight” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” leaning further into the mechanics of how to visually construct scenes. Victor also shadowed filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun during production for last year’s acclaimed “I Saw the TV Glow.”

“There was no prescriptive timeline to the course that it took,” explains Romanski. “It was just kind of, we’ll keep finding things to help you fortify and put on directorial muscle mass until you tell us, ‘I’m ready.’ And then when you say, ‘I’m ready,’ we’ll pivot to putting the movie together. There’s no blueprint for this, at least not for us. We haven’t done it quite like this before, but that’s also what’s exciting about it.”

Without ever sharing specifics, the story is rooted in Victor’s personal experience. Going back to some of their earliest press around 2018, Victor would self-describe as a sexual assault survivor. There was material about it in a stand-up comedy routine. (“It didn’t work,” Victor notes, dryly, adding that they longer do stand-up.)

The experience of making the movie and putting it out into the world has been one of potentially being continually retriggered, sent back to emotions and feelings Victor has worked hard to move forward from. Yet the process of making the film began to provide its own rewards.

“The thing about this kind of trauma is it is someone deciding where your body goes without your permission,” Victor says. “And that is surreal and absurd and very difficult. It’s very difficult to make sense of the world after something like that happens.”

The “Sorry, Baby” shoot in Massachusetts last year was a turning point, says Victor, one of validation. “The experience of directing myself as an actor is an experience of saying: This is where my body’s going right now,” says Victor. “And a crew of 60 people being like, ‘Yes.’ It’s this really special experience of being like, ‘I am saying where my body goes’ and everyone agrees. In the making of the film, that was very powerful to me.”

Eva Victor and John Carroll Lynch in the movie “Sorry, Baby.”

(A24)

Even with the success of “Sorry, Baby” and the way it has launched Victor to a new level of attention and acclaim, there is a tinge of melancholy to discovering just how many people are connecting to the film because it speaks to their own experiences.

“It’s a very personal film for a lot of people and there’s a sadness to that because it’s a community of people who have experienced things that they shouldn’t have had to,” says Victor. “It’s life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: ‘Is anyone else feeling like this?’ And it’s nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.”

While recently back in France, Victor got another tattoo, this time on her foot, where she doesn’t see it as often.

“Maybe there’s a dash of mental illness in it,” says Victor. “But I think with tattoos, it’s such a good one, because it’s not going to hurt you but it is intense and permanent. So it is risk-taking.”

That attention to a small shift in personal perspective, a change in action and how one approaches the world, is part of what makes “Sorry, Baby” such a powerful experience. And as it now continues to make its way out to more audiences, Victor’s experience with it continues to evolve as well.

“There is a process that’s happening right now where it’s like an exhale. I’m like, whatever will be will be,” Victor says. “Putting something out into the world is a process of letting go of it. And I had my time with it and I got to make it what I wanted it to be. And now it will over time not be mine.”

The experience of making “Sorry, Baby” has pushed Victor forward both professionally and personally, finding catharsis in creativity and community.

“I guess that is the deal,” Victor offers. “That is part of the journey of releasing something. I mean it’s legitimately called a release.”