Toronto: Doc ‘Sorry/Not Sorry’ Asks If Louis C.K. Was Ever Really Canceled
In 2017, like a lot of Louis C.K. fans, filmmaker Caroline Suh wasn’t sure what to make of the allegations of sexual misconduct against the comedian that were detailed in a New York Times story. The report included female comics’ accounts of C.K. exposing himself to them, which he admitted to, and led FX, Netflix and C.K.’s management company, 3Arts, to drop him.
“I watched his show religiously,” Suh says. “And when the article came out, I was surprised and honestly thought, ‘Is it really that bad that he should be banished from the scene?’ I didn’t really know how to think about it.”
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Nearly six years later, now that C.K. has sold out Madison Square Garden and won two Grammys for his comedy albums, Suh and her co-director, Cara Mones, interrogate questions about sex and power raised by the comic’s downfall and comeback in their new documentary, Sorry/Not Sorry.
The Times-produced film, which premieres Sept. 10 at TIFF, includes interviews with women who spoke up about C.K., like writer and producer Jen Kirkman, comedians Abby Schachner and Megan Koester and male colleagues of his like Parks and Recreation co-creator Mike Schur and Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman. Suh and Mones also mine archival footage of C.K.’s performances and of other people talking about him, including a remarkable moment at a Q&A in May 2016 when a University of Chicago student asked Jon Stewart about allegations against C.K. that were percolating in comedy circles at the time but were not yet widely known. Watching Stewart’s dismissive reaction, which resurfaced online after the Times story ran 17 months later, is like seeing a time capsule of pre-#MeToo mores. “The hope was to present how people were reacting in real time,” says Mones, “to track how this story evolved.”
Suh, who directed for Netflix the Obamas’ 2023 series Working: What We Do All Day and the 2020 film Blackpink: Light Up the Sky, launched Sorry/Not Sorry after a 2020 meeting with The New York Times, which has been expanding its journalism into nonfiction film and TV projects like Time, the 2021 Oscar-nominated Amazon documentary feature, and this year’s Emmy-nominated Hulu series The 1619 Project. “I had been obsessing over the story, so I brought it up as something that I would be interested in, and they immediately were on board,” Suh says. She recruited Mones, who had produced her Blackpink movie, “because I’m a Gen Xer,” Suh says. “And I knew that I had maybe some kind of calcified thoughts about what’s normalized behavior.” The millennial Mones says she was “terrified” by the idea. “When she asked me to join, I wondered, ‘What are we going to gain by giving Louis more attention?’ ” she recalls. “And once I started to really understand Caroline’s vision for the film, I realized how much had been missing from the conversation and how little I had known.”
The film details the backlash women who spoke publicly about C.K. experienced, from online harassment to dwindling work opportunities. Schachner, who had told the Times about C.K. masturbating on the phone when she called to invite him to one of her shows, spoke out about C.K. because, as she says in the film, she would have wanted to have known about him herself. Kirkman, who was not in the original Times piece but had alluded to C.K.’s treatment of women on her podcast without naming him, says in the film that she is participating because nothing has changed in the six years since the Times story ran.
One of the biggest challenges the filmmakers faced was enlisting industry figures to talk about C.K. “People see it as only inviting career harm, and people don’t want to be in the line of fire,” Suh says. C.K. did not participate in the documentary, but the filmmakers used clips of his work, including a stand-up routine in which he talks about his misconduct as “my thing,” implying that exposing himself is a harmless, if embarrassing, fetish. “In making the film, we came to realize that he did reframe it from being something that related to power dynamics into just his sexual kink,” Suh says. “That was a revelation to us. And I had a lot of questions as a fan as to like, ‘Oh, what is he saying exactly?’ ”
At one point, Sorry/Not Sorry was set up at Showtime under the cable network’s then-docs chief Vinnie Malhotra. When Showtime restructured early this year, Malhotra departed to become president of the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions and Showtime and the filmmakers parted ways. Now Suh and Mones will be seeking a distributor at TIFF.
In terms of audience, “It was always the hope that the film would draw both sides,” Suh says, meaning both C.K. fans and people who are furious at him.
Their biggest worry entering the festival, the filmmakers say, is for the women who participated in Sorry/Not Sorry, none of whom will be at TIFF. “We’re really nervous on their behalf,” Suh says. “The biggest concern with the film at this point is how it’s going to affect them.”
As for her own opinion on C.K. since she first read that Times story in 2017, “My thinking has definitely evolved,” Suh says, declining to say more. “We try to pose a lot of questions about it to get people thinking for themselves.”
This story first appeared in the Sept. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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