Night Cap with Sorry Not Sorry

Interview with Julia Thelin, director of Sorry Not Sorry

Your film is really powerful. Can you tell us a bit about how you worked on the scenario?
The feeling of the story was very clear in my head when I started, as well as the feeling of the character, what she was like. It was kind of concrete from the beginning although even more crazy things were happening compared to the finished film. I kept the turning points from that even crazier version and then wrote a script that was a little bit easier to shoot. It was a very fun scenario to work on, I let my characters do just what they felt like doing and I let myself write the pictures I saw. Also, worth mentioning is my interest in how “female” behavior has been diagnosed as ill or crazy in recent history compared to male behavior.

  Can you tell us a bit about how you worked with the actors – especially with the actress of your film?
Gizem Erdogan who plays the main character is really inspiring. I had a starting point with a reference for the “crazy” scene from another film but in the end you just have to try out and see what works. We had a few rehearsals before shooting and that was really good.

  Your previous films Pingis (2012) and Helljus (2015) also explored gender issues and stereotypes. Is it a theme you want to keep exploring in your future films?
I like exploring gender stereotypes among a lot of other stuff and I think it is hard not to make fun of or use our presumptions about gender when writing. What I want to explore more is also the theme of inequality because of social class or ethnicity, which is as much a theme of Sorry Not Sorry as gender. There is a reason why all the boys in the film are white and sing very bourgeois songs.

What sort of freedom would you say the short format allows?
It allows me to be simple. Both in the storytelling and the expression, make something big out of small, ordinary things. And be close to myself and my surroundings. Sorry Not Sorry is not a perfect story for the short format though, for many reasons. I felt like I wanted out of the format all the time when writing but maybe that was a good thing, it is a very compact film, haha! But the thing with the short format is that you can be open and leave a lot to the audience to experience outside of the cinema.

  What do you consider your cinematographic references?
Before shooting this film I thought a lot about the forest in Antichrist and the boat situation in Knife in the Water. But when writing the script, I didn’t have that many cinematographic references consciously, but genre can come kind of unconsciously because it has to do with the story itself or how you have seen others use suspense for example.

Sorry Not Sorry is part of International Competition I14.