Filmmaker Sophie Brooks can’t wait for audiences to see her second film, the darkly funny and very wise “Oh, Hi!” this week at Sundance. When the film, starring Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman, unspools this weekend in Park City, it’s coming to the festival nearly fresh out of the box, all the better to conceal the delightful twist and turns at its heart. Please, don’t let anything spoil it. (Don’t worry: This chat is spoiler-free.)
“What’s crazy is, we finished the movie yesterday. We finished the mix, literally last night at 7:45 PM,” Brooks said when she spoke to IndieWire last Wednesday afternoon. “Even this morning I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, oh, I don’t have to go to work today.’ It’s been this wild process where we submitted [to Sundance] on a rough cut, got in, which was incredibly exciting. Then it was like, ‘But, you have to finish the movie.’”
It’s been a long time coming. Brooks’ first film, the romantic comedy “The Boy Downstairs,” starred Zosia Mamet as a New Yorker shocked to discover her ex-boyfriend lives below her brand-new apartment. Horrifying, right? It’s all the worse, because Mamet’s Diana might also not be entirely over the dude, and close proximity is the last thing she needs. It came out in 2017, announcing Brooks as a whipsmart rom-com voice to watch. She’s been eager to make another once since.
“[That film was] so instructive, but it’s hard for me to differentiate how much of [my learning] was just growing up. I made my first feature when I was 26 and I’m 35 now,” Brooks said. “It took me nine years to get my second feature made, and I was working as a writer that whole time, and I was attached to projects as directors and I was in development, but it was really hard to get my second feature made. There were moments where I was like, ‘Oh my God, when is this going to happen?’”
Brooks readily admits her first feature came together very easily — “I just was like, ‘You write a script and then the first actress you send it to says yes, and then you get financing and then you make it!,’” she said with a laugh — and the interim between “The Boy Downstairs” and “Oh, Hi!” now feels a bit more reflective of the challenging work of getting an indie movie made. But that interim? Maybe it helped.
“My writing has [been] refined in a really deep way over the last nine years, life experience taught me a lot about the stories I wanted to tell,” she said. “I think I’m a braver writer now than I was in my twenties. I’ve experienced a lot more of life, the joys of it and the heartbreak of it.”
The idea — as much of as it we can reveal! — was born of a different kind of challenge. It started in March 2020, when Brooks (who lives in New York), just so happened to be a home with her parents in Los Angeles. You can guess where this is going. “I had a carry-on bag with me and ended up staying at my parents’ house where I grew up for eight months in 2020,” Brooks said.
Before the onset of the pandemic, Brooks had been readying to shoot another film, which fell apart, as so many things did in the early part of 2020. “I was having an existential crisis of what my career was going to be in COVID, which I think a lot of people can relate to,” Brooks said. And then she got on the phone with her agent Amanda Heimson.
“I was on the phone with her and she said, ‘See if you can come up with an idea that could shoot during COVID, with limited actors and limited locations,’” she recalled. Brooks loves a prompt. “It kind of felt like being in film school again and having a professor give me a prompt,” she continued. “I really loved film school, and I actually work quite well under constraints. I think it breeds a lot of creativity for me to see how I can come up with an idea with limits. We hung up the phone, and probably five minutes later I had the premise in my mind.”
So, the premise. Here’s how Brooks likes to sell it: “A guy and girl take their first romantic trip away together, they realize they’re on different pages, and things take a turn.” (And, yes, if you go looking, you can find a more detailed synopsis that was touted when the film first went into production, but we really encourage you not to.)
With the idea in mind, Brooks turned to her long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Molly Gordon, who also happened to be riding out the pandemic at her own childhood home, and was one of the few people she was seeing during those early days. “I told Molly the idea and I was like, ‘I don’t know. I feel like there’s something there, but I’m not sure what it was,’” Brooks recalled. “And Molly, who’s the most enthusiastic, full-of-life person was like, ‘I love that. I really think there’s something there.’ We, kind of at the same moment. were like, ‘Should we do this together? Do you want to be in this?’”
They spent a weekend together, developing the story, workshopping the concept, and just generally bouncing ideas off each other. Then Brooks went home — back to the childhood bedroom — and spent two and a half weeks, by her own count, “in a fever dream, alone, my parents weren’t there, staying up until 3:00 AM writing this script.”
Gordon, who is also a credited producer on the film, “really pushed me to be brave,” Brooks said. And knowing she was writing the character of Iris for Gordon was also instructive. “She’s such a talented performer, she’s such a good singer, she’s so funny, all of these things I know that she’s good at,” she said. “It was first time I’d written with an actor in mind, and it was really exciting to think, ‘OK, I have these constraints, I have these limited amount of locations, these limited number of actors, what’s the funnest version of this movie with these constraints?’”
Much of that hinges on not just the characters Brooks created, but the ways in which they look at the world, and this specific weekend trip from hell. Without spoiling too much, it’s fair to say that “Oh, Hi!” is mostly rooted in Iris’ perspective — mostly, but we’ll get to that — and how she reacts to the revelation that Isaac (Lerman) isn’t as into their relationship as she is. Iris does some wild stuff to win her man back, but Gordon sells the hell out of it. So does Brooks’ script.
“It’s all about tone, right? It’s such a thin line,” Brooks said. “The film toes this really thin line of tone and perspective. It was really important to me that both characters felt like real people and fully rounded, realized versions of themselves. It was incredibly helpful to me that Molly is inherently charming. I don’t know that the movie would work if there was a different type of actress who’s an incredible actress, but maybe doesn’t have that charisma that Molly has.”
Gordon’s charisma shines throughout, but she also brings an incredible pathos to the character, as Iris has to carry some pretty heavy concepts, neatly filtered through our concept of what a “crazy woman” looks like. She just wants to be loved, what’s so crazy about that?
“It’s super-vulnerable, it’s incredibly human to want love and to want to give love and be loved,” Brooks said. “Sometimes women, specifically, who say that are considered desperate or crazy, and I think that’s really unfair. Iris is a really brave character, and it’s a perfect storm of everything kind of landing in a way at the end of the first act where you’re like, ‘Oh, if those things hadn’t happened, she probably wouldn’t have done this crazy thing.’ I hope that people can relate to like, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do this, but in a perfect storm, maybe I would.’ … The goal is to do it in a funny, lighthearted way that’s entertaining to people. I think there’s kind of a freedom when you’re poking fun at — listen, I’m poking fun at myself in a million ways, poking fun of this idea of the ‘crazy girl,’ and also poking fun of this idea of this ‘soft boy.’”
Brooks is speaking from her own experience. “I went through a really big breakup in my late twenties, and I definitely had thoughts,” she said “I was like, ‘Whoa, I did not know I could have these types of thoughts or this type of anxiety.’ It was really illuminating about the human experience, and there’s something really interesting to me about exploring those darker thoughts that we have in quiet moments when we’re alone, and what happens if someone acts on those.”
What happens when Iris acts on those desires? Simply put, she tries to make Isaac love her, to really see her, to get to know her and appreciate her and — God willing! — not break up with her. Gordon is delightful in this pursuit, wacky and sexy and silly, and then, well, sort of embarrassing. As she reaches a fever pitch in her quest, suddenly, we get a sense of what this looks like to Isaac, care of a scene that’s both incredibly funny and a little distressing.
“That had always been something that was important, that the audience felt this was a two-hander,” she said. “Even though Iris is the person who drives the twists and turns, Isaac is an active participant and he is making choices too. I wanted to find a moment that felt ultimately funny, right? I don’t want to give too much away! Well, it’s a sequence where Iris is kind of doing what she’s pitched, which is helping him get to know her and giving her life story. It felt like that was the right scene for us to fully shift into his perspective.”
But, no spoilers! You’ll know it when you see it. “I don’t want to ruin what it is, but it’s a fun moment to show what’s going on in his head and what he’s not telling her,” she said. “Because, inherently, the movie’s about miscommunication and how these two people are not on the same page, that moment, the audience is seeing his perspective in a scene where it’s supposed to be about her.”
Brooks typically looks at screenwriting books before she starts work on a new script, which serves to remind her of what she’s trying to accomplish with her stories and how to do it. Her other inspirations for the film were myriad. Both she and Gordon were “really obsessed” with “The Worst Person in the World.” Brooks loved the television take on “Scenes from a Marriage,” with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, plus “Normal People.”
And she “always loves” Nora Ephron. “She’s the filmmaker I think I relate to the most, in terms of personal stories that also have wide appeal, I hope,” she said. “It seems like she really cared about her audience, while also really telling stories that she felt were important to her. I really relate to that. I really care about the audience and pleasing the audience, and I also feel I do my best work telling stories that are personal to me.”
After “Oh, Hi!,” Brooks has big plans. “Next, I’m going to take a nap,” she said with a laugh. “I have a bunch of stories that I’m excited to tell and scripts that I have. One in particular that is actually the first script I ever started writing when I was 22, that I’ve done multiple different versions of and never quite figured it out, and right before we started shooting, ‘Oh, Hi!,’ I kind of cracked it and figured out what the story was. I haven’t finished that script. I’m halfway through it, but that’s the one I’m most excited about.”
Like “The Boy Upstairs” and “Oh, Hi!,” the film is rooted in the personal. “The movie that I want to make next is exploring similar themes, which is relationships,” she said. “My parents are high school sweethearts, and when I was a kid I just assumed I would meet my husband when I was 16. I truly was like, ‘That’s what happens. I’m going to meet my husband when I’m 16, so exciting!’ Then I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was 21 and I was like, ‘I’m confused. What happened here?’ It’s a little multi-generational, exploring how our parents’ relationships inform our ideas of love. I think people think divorce fucks kids up, but I also think having parents who are high school sweethearts fucks you up and gives you a bizarre expectation of love.”
She’s thrilled to share her latest exploration of love with her first audiences, as “Oh, Hi!” readies to make its debut at Sundance, care of a prime Sunday afternoon slot at the Eccles Theatre. With a big crowd, the film will likely play quite well, laughs and gasps aplenty.
“I also am just trying to enjoy this moment, because it’s so hard to get a film made and this is really exciting and special,” she said. “I hope people love it. I love a story that is multidimensional and isn’t afraid to challenge our ideas about love and relationships, and it is also very entertaining. I’m nervous, because it’s vulnerable and scary to put art out into the world and have it be judged.”
And, here’s hoping, not spoiled.
“Oh, Hi!” will premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
