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Cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry on a Most Powerful Framework for “Sorry, Baby”

The cinematographer shares the process that allowed its director and star to handle both jobs on one of the great debuts in recent memory.

A funny thing about “Sorry, Baby,” a film replete with sly humor, is how you always know where you are, which would seem to run counter to how its lead Agnes (Eva Victor) starts to drift through life. First as a grad student that hasn’t entirely found confidence in their voice as a writer and then after a traumatic encounter with a faculty advisor (Louis Cancelmi) leaves her shaken, Agnes is beholden to a malaise where the passage of time is acknowledged with shrewd perception by Victor in their exquisite directorial debut as chapters with titles such as “The Year of the Good Sandwich” or “The Year with the Bad Thing” rather than with numbers, and the filmmaker rarely embeds any descriptive detail in the dialogue as to where this all is taking place when other than the road from the small liberal arts college they attend and the house, everything else feels like an abyss.

Still, there’s never a question of where Agnes is either emotionally or even geographically when cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry can so precisely capture a sense of place in every frame, whether pulling the crispness of a cool Northeastern autumn into the sharpness of an image or framing the bookcases full of novels around Agnes as they turn from inspiration to intimidation. As noted around these parts before, Henry is one of the most exciting directors of photography working today with her command of compositions, seeing stillness as a virtue when she trusts the details of any given environment or the performance on hand to pull you in and even the slightest bit of movement takes on enormous power. (The judicious approach not only pays off within individual scenes when Victor’s radiance as both a writer and actor has a way of breaking through without calling attention to themself, but a tracking shot following the monumental event that rocks Agnes to the core, bound to be revered by cinephiles for years to come, is at odds with the static scenes that illustrate a generally quiet life.)

For “Sorry, Baby,” Henry wasn’t only recruited for her keen instincts when it comes to visual expression, but her gift for articulation in all respects after Victor caught the eye of principals at Pastel, the production company of Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak, and it was thought Victor would make a strong multihyphenate despite a background only in front of the camera as a series regular in the later seasons of “Billions” and on stage as a standup comedian. A social media meet-cute led to a screenplay, and adding Henry, who regularly shows burgeoning filmmakers the ropes as a professor at NYU’s Tisch Graduate Film program, proved to be another moment of kismet for the production where the announcement of a distinctive new voice in Victor reverberates so vibrantly because of the clarity Henry brings to it. When there’s no one better to talk to about filmmaking, it was a great privilege to catch up with the director of photography on the eve of the film’s release to talk about the collaboration with Victor and the amount of preparation required to develop a shoot where their intentions would come through even as the director had to star in every scene as well as finding the right locale in Massachusetts and the bane of pointing a camera at wood paneling.

Mia Cioffi Henry on set of "Sorry, Baby" with Eva Victor and Louis Cancelmi
Photo Credit: Philip Keith

How did you get interested in this?

It’s a little bit of a funny story because it wasn’t a script that crossed my desk through my agents. I had been connected with Adele [Romanski] and the team at Pastel through Charlie Wells and Greg Oke on “Aftersun.” They put me in touch with Adele and we had a funny conversation, [where] I was just game to be helpful in any way I could at the time. When they wrapped that, Adele was back in L.A. a month or two later, and [said], “Okay, I’ve got another weird situation, and I need your help. I have this amazing script and this amazing performer who has never directed before, but they really want to direct this script, and we don’t even know they know what directing is. Would you meet with them? And if it’s a good match, we want to put together a couple of scenes and just do like a workshop, not for financing or for proof of concept. Nobody’s going to see it. It’s really just for practice.” And I [told Adele], “Oh, this is actually really in my wheelhouse because I teach.” And Adele didn’t even know that.

So Eva and I met, and they were in town at the time working on “Billions,” and we started talking through the script and prepping the project, but also just talking about what is visual storytelling and how you take a script and translate it into images. It was a lot of, “Oh, have you seen this film? Watch this. Pay attention to that. Look at this for blocking.” Eva had never been on a feature film set before. They’d only really done TV and a couple of shorts, so it was a lot of, “This is how you break down a story. This is how you kind of translate the idea of beats and subtext from actors’ work,” which I’m also very familiar with in my background as going through acting training. [Then I was explaining] “This is a lens, and this is what a lens does. I remember one weekend I just brought a set of a point and shoot [camera] or a DSLR and some Prime lenses, and we just talked about the difference between a wide and a telephoto [where] either one could make a wide or a tight shot, but it changes how the face looks and changes your connection with the character. We really just talked about all the building blocks of creating a shot list and creating images.

Then we shot a little thing I brought a bunch of my students on and it was two scenes over two days, we cast it. We brought in a cat. The whole work’s just in an Airbnb in Bushwick. And at the end of it, it was a lot of fun. We were so well prepped, we actually said, ”But was that actually independent filmmaking?” Because nothing went wrong. [laughs] There was nothing to push against. You didn’t have to kill any darlings. You didn’t have to really test your decision making or your understanding of the story. After that, Eva then went and followed Jane [Schoenbrun] on “I Saw the TV Glow,” and that was directing on like 11 in terms of pushback from producers or dealing with actors or losing locations or shooting on film [since it was a live feature film set] and all of those things that I think Eva really needed to experience firsthand and just the pure marathon nature of what shooting a feature film can be.

When Adele called me back and [said] “Okay, we have the money, we’re shooting this,” then Eva and I started prepping the film every single week and going through shot listing and the idea was we really needed to be extremely prepped so that Eva could be performing in front of the camera and the decisions would be made ahead of time as much as possible, so that I could execute within Eva’s vision [without Eva] needing to be next to me by the camera or the monitor for every single shot because I already knew what we were trying to get out of the scene. I got to really be in the process very early on, which isn’t always [the case] on a feature film. [Sometimes I] see locations after they’ve already been picked or after a production designer has already made designs and I got to be very involved early on doing those scouts.

What went into finding this house and how you could shoot it from the outside as well as within?

Yeah, we had an awesome location scout Stephen [Hartman] who got what we wanted to do and that was a really important relationship for us because we knew we couldn’t afford any builds or to modify much of anything other than changing the color of the walls in our hero location. Most everything else we had to really use what was there. The vision for the film was right there on the first page of the script — a wide [shot] of the house in isolation, but it couldn’t be in the woods. We didn’t want to be able to see anything else around it and it needed to feel like something too good to leave, but at the same time, you would worry about somebody who was living there alone. So it had to fulfill both of those things within it. Through that prep process over the years before we shot it, really understanding what the importance of that location was helped and hindered the location search because we looked at a ton of houses and we got very stuck on this one house. It felt very much like this or nothing and if that didn’t work out, we kept trying to say, “This is just where the bar is set.”

But Stephen really made that work. That house is on a land trust in the North Shore of Massachusetts. It was the laundry house of a mansion that is since gone and it’s part of a working farm on the other side of it. Interestingly, another part of the property [is where the] house that they shot “Sound of Metal” in and another is owned by the same land trust where they shot “Knives Out,” so our scout in the area knew all of these locations and really steered us to that. We were also tasked with how the production design and then the framing and the lighting all would change around the house as we would see it over the years, so what the house meant to the story had to be able to evolve. Working with Caity [Birmingham], our production designer, to tell that story through the location was another big piece of why the house was so important to us. We could spend a lot of time in the house when we were prepping the film, which was really great. We were able to go in there a lot as we were shot listing, so we could really tailor the shot list to the peculiarities of the house because it’s a tiny space.

What was it like finding the right equipment to shoot this on?

We shot January through March 2024 and just before we went on our director’s scout, the November before we shot it, I shot a short film called “Appliance” that takes place in a house that has a very similar feeling, and that was more on the horror scale of things in that the house felt haunted, but it was also a very similar old house. Callie Hernandez was living there and she shot three films in a row [there] – this was the second of the three [between] “Invention,” which has been making the rounds, and “The Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick” — and I was really thinking about how to frame in that house and I had “Sorry, Baby” in the back of my mind, even though we hadn’t found the location yet. I shot that on the Alexa Mini LF with the DNA Primes and I was testing things specifically through that experience. I just loved that large format in a very small interior. It made the faces really stand out because you don’t have a lot of space to get away from walls, to get away from furniture and pull things out. Sometimes interiors can start to feel very flat when you’re seeing them time and time again and I loved that feeling of portraiture that I could create in these tiny spaces that felt a little bit bigger when I wanted it to.

That was my trial and then I was able to bring the lenses with us as we were scouting on our first director’s scout [for “Sorry, Baby”] and that was really helpful for Eva to really see exactly what lenses we were going to be using on all of the locations. And I love those lenses. It’s really beautiful and the two films look so different [because of] the production design and the style, but it’s funny that there is this little strand of DNA. And it’s hard to test lenses in a sterile rental house because you’re looking at charts or somebody sitting in front of the camera and you miss that real world experience where you add a foreground element or there’s movement or different lighting scenarios, so it was like using new tools on commercials to then bring into your longform work, which is always a great way to really test something out.

You mentioned prepping in advance so Eva wouldn’t have the weight of directing on top of a performance, but how did that actually work out in practice, particularly when this film involves a lot of longer takes?

We had such a good rhythm because we’d already spent a weekend on set together, so we had so much mutual respect for one another from the prep process. It was also really important to me going on set that Eva was the director and the crew knew that, so we really talked in prep about the chain of conversation because we had agreed ahead of time when were the moments where Eva was going to be looking to me to help evaluate performance when Eva couldn’t do that and be the outside eyes on their process, so I knew when those moments were we would be able to recall something we had spoke about wanting out of the scene in the prep. Then I knew how to have those conversations in a way that wasn’t in front of the entire crew or the other actors. It was much more nuanced and really talking in code almost between each other.

Also, I felt very protective of Eva’s time and attention as a performer to be able to funnel a lot of the noise of set through me so that I would be able to say “Yeah, now’s a good time to go talk to them” or “I can answer that question for you because I know what they want, so even though it was like very much Eva’s vision and their pacing on set, being able to work how they needed to work, it was like if the script supervisor had a question about something that they would usually turn to the director and whisper to them at monitor, they were able to come to me and say “Oh, you know this is happening,” and I could say “Yes, they’re aware, they don’t care” or “No, let’s go have a conversation.” I think I was noticing some tough moments for Eva at the beginning where Eva would be self-making a note about performance and then three people would come up and [give notes], so we were able to come up with an easier flow of conversation. And then you save time at the top or between takes because notes don’t have to get explained because Eva was just implementing them on their own.

We would have to do playback sometimes, [not] after every take, but after the first and then the last take pretty much, just to make sure the scene was going well and they liked the framing and things like that and they got a good variety of takes that felt like it was going in the direction that they wanted to. But it felt like a very good collaboration in that way. And I had a fantastic operator Dean Egan, who came on as a steadicam op and then stayed on as a full-time op for the rest of the show. I operated some of the more intimate scenes, where Eva and I could be in the same room, just whispering to each other. It was also really great for me as the [director of photography] because sometimes when you’re behind the camera, you’re thinking about, “Oh, is that light a little soft or it’s too much or there’s something in the frame I need to move?” You’re constantly evaluating the frame. Is there a boom? Is there a shadow out of place? And you can lose track of the performance. So it was great to sit back at a monitor and be able to see it a little bit more objectively and be able to be the second eyes on performance as well as doing all of the technical stuff I was doing, [in terms of] lighting and camera and framing.

There are too many striking images to count, but the one that stuck with me is the courtroom scene where I’m not sure the camera ever actually moves, but the frame seems to deepen and Agnes goes from appearing for jury duty to feeling as if she’s being put on trial herself. It reminded me of “Saint Omer,” not for the coincidence of a courtroom setting, but how absorbing the shot became. What was it like to achieve that depth?

We definitely looked at “Saint Omer” as a reference, mostly not because it was a court scene, but because once we found that location, there was so much wood and wood can really suck in light and be very distracting, so I really was looking at how Claire Mathon had treated the wood and created distance and depth in the wood. And on “Superior,” we had a wood paneled room that I just was fighting with the entire time in production and then again in post, so I wanted to avoid that.

We shot all of [the jury duty scene] in one day in a decommissioned courthouse, and that was our one summertime section of the film, but we were shooting it in the dead of winter in Massachusetts, so it was really important to get really strong lights in there to actually separate [Agnes] from the wood paneling and then to really create the shape overall of the scene that did have that feeling of a microscope when you’re just like clicking in closer and closer and those kind of jumps. A lot of how that scene ended up, I give mad props to Randi [Atkins] and Alex [O’Flinn], the editors, who really pared back so much. We shot a ton more and there’s a whole bunch of backstory in the script that didn’t end up on screen and they stripped it back to being very much a portrait of a person as [Agnes] is. We find them again and they’re still being triggered by things.

Our job was just to find that magnification and focus solely in on Eva, and just as an aside, there were so many characters in our background. Every single person was such a character. It was so hard not to put the camera on every single person. Because there were just some amazing faces and performances that were constantly cracking us up, so it was really playing off this balance. I insisted we get a shot of the stenographer and I just love how Alex and Randy used it in the cut where it just goes to her. She’s just sitting there in that blue sweater. I made us turn the lights back on so I could get that shot and it works really well. [That scene] was also playing off this contrast of seeing her all the time alone in this house and to see her out in the world and how she’s dealing amongst people. We knew that was important in the script and we had this chance because we have all of these chapters and you’re jumping through time and you don’t really know how long it’s been until you’re in it. So we had a chance to make some big leaps where we wanted with how we were playing with the camera as well.

What’s it been like to see this get out into the world?

It’s extremely exciting. Knowing the previous films that Pastel had done felt a little bit like a weight at the time we were prepping the film. A film like Eliza Hittman’s film [“Never Rarely Sometimes Always”] or Charlie Wells’ film [“Aftersun”] felt so consequential to the culture and the zeitgeist of filmmaking. They became these real touchstones, and “All Dirt Roads” as well because of the visuals and the intimacy. So personally, I felt a little like, “How do we make this?” It’s so different because of the humor and the comedy and the characters. It doesn’t feel like any of these other things, but at the same time it’s has this same throughline of strong filmmakers, intimate storytelling, and a very truthful and honest take on life. So I felt a little bit of pressure to try and make this bigger than it was. But in the end, we focused in on character over everything and the cinematography ends up being quite subtle. It’s not this big, flashy film, but I think it is a film that you really feel and you are laughing and crying no matter how many times you see it. Regardless of fancy tricks or glossy cinematography, it was going to be something that you could come back to as an example of a character in a story that you could relate to, and I still laugh. I still cry. So that was the goal.

“Sorry, Baby” opens on June 27th in limited release in Los Angeles and New York and expands on July 6th.

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