Eva Victor: ​‘I used the title as a way to reward myself once I wrote it’

Eva Victor’s first brush with celebrity came through viral comedy videos, most famously one on Straight Pride, which earned them a writing gig for the satirical website Reductress. Taking the road less travelled, their next step was to write, direct and star in Sorry, Baby a rare work of traumedy (trauma + comedy) that stands as an antidote to cinema’s glib and exploitative history of sensationalising sexual abuse and simplifying its impact. There is no lurid depiction of a violation by a college lecturer, instead the film shows how it seeps into every part of grad student Agnes’s life, affecting her in ways that go largely unseen by others. The tone is alternately very funny and very sad, as the film depicts horizons beyond her trauma, while showing that years later, she is still wrestling with ​“the bad thing”. Following a Sundance première and Directors’ Fortnight slot in Cannes, the film finally arrives on these shores and we had the pleasure of speaking to Eva over Zoom.

LWLies: Do you happen to be a fan of the French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve? 

Victor: Things to Come is one of my favourite movies, I love that film.

Perfect, I wanted to present you with a quote as, like you, she works in the domain of autofiction. She said: ​‘I felt it wasn’t totally over until I had told the story. There’s something cruel about fiction or making films. It’s a way to turn present into past. You put something that you still have within and that occasionally makes you suffer into fiction, and it becomes memory. If it’s too early then I can’t tell the story. There has to be some distance. But then there comes this perfect moment where it’s far away enough, but not too far, so that it can still touch the emotions.’

Wow. That’s so beautiful and so true. I don’t know if you can identify the exact sweet spot until it’s over. And there was a time I tried to write it a little bit earlier and it was just too soon. So it tracks exactly with my experience. I think the beautiful thing about being able to fictionalise an emotional truth is getting to tell the story. Like, things in life happen randomly, but in a story you plant a seed at the beginning that then turns into a tree by the end and you create all of these things that support this person. Everything is purposeful in a story that in life, it doesn’t feel like there’s always threads of meaning. So I love that quote, it’s so beautiful. It’s so true. Wow.

I’m really glad that it resonated. 

I’m new to this feeling of releasing a film into the world. The making of it feels so important and essential and euphoric and difficult in a lot of ways. But the release is this other emotional thing that I didn’t expect was going to hit me as hard – having to really release the film that was in my body for so long and now exists outside of me. I keep looking up symptoms of postpartum depression. I know I’m not going through that because you have to have a baby and that’s a really different thing and this is not as crazy as that. But I am experiencing the baby blues. So it’s been a whirlwind. But it’s also a dream come true that the movie gets to have a life outside of me.

If you’re in postpartum now, what was the peak of creative excitement in this process? 

I think there were a few moments in the edit… There was a lot of catharsis for me on a personal level getting to perform the part, because the words had lived inside me for so long. Training as an actor, and then getting to actually say the words for the real run of it – these are actually her words that she’s getting to say finally – that felt so good. Then the edit was so mind-bendingly difficult, just on a spiritual level, having to watch this and having it all strung together was so weird, but in looking back on it I have only good memories. I feel like I look back on it already with nostalgia, like, ​‘Ah, the edit.’ When, really, I got my bellybutton pierced, I dyed my eyebrows and my hair. I was not well, but I liked the private creativity of it a lot.

So, you got your bellybutton pierced as a direct response to a hurdle in the edit? 

I was watching the film and I was like, ​‘That is not me. I’ve decided that’s not me,’ so I bleached my eyebrows blonde and then I pierced my bellybutton and it got infected immediately. Six months later someone was like, ​‘If you don’t take that out, you are seriously gonna have an issue forever.’ And so I took it out. It’s still infected. But, you know what, it’s a good memory. It’s not the most destructive thing that could happen.

Was Sorry, Baby always the title? Or were there other working titles en route? At what point did you settle on it? 

I used the title as a way to reward myself once I wrote it. So I finished it and I remember making a little list and it was the one that stuck. I remember looking at it and thinking: I like how these words look and how it sounds, and the comma feels literary. It feels like within it exists these two tones – one that’s earnest, like, ​‘I’m sorry,’ and the other one sort of like, ​‘Life is crazy.’ I liked that the title doesn’t make sense until the end of the film. No one ever challenged me on it. So, it stuck.

Language is this crucial thing, especially – correct me if I’m wrong – only once is the word ​’rape’ used and you instead refer to ​‘the bad thing’. I’ve thought so much about this because, on one hand, as a person of words, the best or most impactful thing you can do is choose the most specific word. On the other hand, words like that can be totalising to an individual who is going through processing, and does not want to be buried under the name of a criminal offence. 

I’ve only had male journalists ask me about [this] and usually, I’ve had their read on it be: she’s not ready to say it. I’m like: Agnes and [her best friend] Lydie have built this language that allows them to talk about this gently with each other. It’s their own private word, and their own private way of talking about it so that they don’t scare each other. The doctor is the person who says the word ​‘rape’ because he doesn’t understand the sensitivity required. I had this playwriting teacher in college who used to say, ​‘your characters could say, ​“I love you,” but what is their really special way that they say ​“I love you”? That no one else says, that is just their words for it?’ It always felt to me like they have their world that they’ve built and their safety in it, and these are the words that they’ve chosen to use to talk about it.

The word ​‘rape’ and the words ​‘sexual assault’ come with these real big, clinical, scary things attached to them. Which is very helpful sometimes, like when you’re trying to make a point. Also, I really wanted the audience to feel safe watching the film. I wanted to approach making a film about this with as much tenderness as possible. Part of that was the language and part of it was what we see and what we don’t see. I was always trying to think of how to soften this so that our bodies don’t shut down watching it.

The space that you give Agnes is also the space that you give for the audience. It’s not that kind of film where she has a week to process the bad thing and then has to rejoin the world. You give her years and the expectation isn’t even that when the film ends she has to be done with it… There’s no sense of a ticking clock. 

It was really important to me that we’re tracking these five years and this small degree of healing. Naomi [Ackie – who plays Lydie] said something I thought was so beautiful. She was talking about this kind of trauma in an interview we did, and she was like, ​‘This stone is put in the middle of your river. And the painful thing is trying to get the stone out, but actually things will grow around the stone, and things will move around the stone.’ The stone will remain, but we’re allowed to move around it. It’s crazy because there’s no choice about the stone being there, that a person is thrust into this kind of situation without any choice. When she said that I thought that was a really beautiful image. And true.

The culture, films/​works of art in general, find violent men really fascinating. Like, ​‘let’s really get into the psychology, how interesting that they’re so violent.’ And I appreciate that your film is not so interested in Decker, like he’s there quite minimally and then it’s all about our lead characters. How did you go about devising how much of him we needed in the film to work? 

We only meet him before this thing happens and I never even thought about returning to him, because the story really isn’t about him. It’s almost a gift to Agnes that he disappears. But it’s the kind of gift that leaves her empty, too. So it just felt truthful. I worked with Louis [Cancelmi] – who plays Decker a lot, we talked about building him in a way that doesn’t undermine Agnes. So, making sure that they do have a chemistry – that it feels exciting, that he is interested in her work, and that he seems smart and a little discombobulated. Basically, I never wanted it to feel like, ​“No, don’t walk in that door!” Maybe that’s confusing because she actually does walk in a door, but I mean more in a horror movie like, ​“Go back out from the garage!” I wanted it to feel like we understand that they do have this creative energy that does have a sensual element to it. That mattered to me, because that’s how he convinces her to come inside.

And I wanted it to feel a little bit romantic so that we don’t feel like she should have known. It really mattered to me to have a scene where Lydie’s like, ​“You should fuck him!” and it’s playful because that fantasy is so allowed. Like, with your best friend, you’re allowed to talk about, like, ​“Oh maybe you should hook up with him,” because it can’t happen. The beauty of being young is like, you’re allowed to have fantasies and it’s up to people in power to be clear on what you’re allowed to do. That scene mattered a lot to me, because I wanted them to be allowed to dream and then have that be used against them. But yeah, Decker is really a device. As, honestly, are most of the men in the film. I love the men in the film, but they’re all pretty much there to reflect back to Agnes her experience of the world at that moment.