While directing her first feature “Sorry, Baby,” Eva Victor received a lot of encouragement from a reliable mentor – Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins.
Victor – whose popularity soared during the pandemic lockdown via countless social media comedy videos – was approached by Jenkins via DM after they followed each other on Instagram. He encouraged the budding director to send anything she had to his production company when it was ready. That was the extra kick she needed to try for real.
“I just felt that he saw me as a filmmaker before I could see myself as one,” Victor said at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. “He – I think maybe at the beginning, before I made the film, or even wrote it – said, ‘the videos you’re making online are directing. You’re directing them, even if you don’t know it. You’re making every single decision in them and that is directing.’ That I think planted the seed in my head, and that was very helpful.”
She continued: “Then we edited the film in the same place where they were working in post on ‘Mufasa,’ and so he was around and was incredibly positive at a time when I was like pulling my hair out. He just kept coming and he was like ‘This is the thing, this is the shit. You’ll feel like shit. It won’t always feel that way.’ That was very helpful.”
Victor – who wrote the film in addition to directing and starring in it – plays Agnes who struggles in the wake of a sexual assault. She was joined in the cast by Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch.
She said that making the jump from social media creator to director felt like a natural transition to her, though mileage may vary person to person.
“I don’t know about other people’s experience, but I was really happy I got to do it – the leap,” Victor said. “I felt really grateful that people, that my producers, could see that I could do something on this big of a scale from what I came from, which is such like a small scale thing.”
Watch the full Sundance video with Victor, Hedges, and Ackie above.
