Pretty Babies World Premieres at Edinburgh
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- "Pretty Babies" world premieres Friday in competition at the Edinburgh Intl. Film Festival, marking Tyler-Marie Evans' feature directorial debut with producers Christine Vachon's Killer Films, Jordan Wagner's Wagner Entertainment, and star Ashley Benson.
- Evans said she wanted to portray sex work "in an interior way," avoiding framing the characters' choices as either tragedy or liberation and instead centering the film on a sisterhood that includes hurt alongside love and connection.
- Emily Alyn Lind and Sadie Stanley lead as best friends Marie and Luna, joined by Ashley Benson as Sapphire and Madelaine Petsch as Gemma, with Luna partly inspired by Edie Sedgwick — a character Evans said she "never wanted to make a villain."
- Evans' influences span Old Hollywood (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, "Gone With the Wind") and 1970s cinema including Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides," Robert Altman's "3 Women," Ingmar Bergman's "Persona," Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," and Warhol's films — references she absorbed growing up in a Texas household where post-sixties films were forbidden.
- Production relocated from New Mexico to Tulsa, Oklahoma after costs became prohibitive, with Tulsa's untouched Art Deco architecture providing a "ghost town" aesthetic that Evans said nods to Hollywood's golden age.
- Evans' "breathing moments" directing method asked actors to remain in character through extended takes, generating a first cut of about two and a half hours that editor Benjamin Rodriguez Jr. — a frequent Paul Schrader collaborator — trimmed to a final 90-minute runtime.
Why it matters: The debut lands with heavyweight indie backing from Killer Films' Christine Vachon at a major festival, signaling that the Edinburgh competition slate this year includes a film reframing sex work not as exploitation or liberation but as a study of female friendship under pressure — a tonal choice Evans framed as a deliberate counter to the "woman saved by a man" trope.
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