Julia Louis-Dreyfus back in Sundance Film Festival for ‘You Hurt My Feelings’

Julia Louis-Dreyfus at the Sundance Film Festival at the Eccles Theater at Park City High School for the premier of her film "You Hurt My Feelings" on Sunday, Jan. 22. Photo: TownLift // Michele Roepke

PARK CITY, Utah — Julia Louis-Dreyfus appeared at the Premier of the Sundance Film Festival film she’s in entitled “You Hurt My Feelings” at Park City’s Eccles Theater on Sunday evening.

The 1,200-seat theater is located in the same building as the Park City High School and houses the live entertainment production nonprofit, The Park City Institute. 

The fiction movie is about a New York novelist, her therapist husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister, and the comedy and drama that ensues as she’s writing the manuscript of her latest book. TownLift took the opportunity to talk about a previous Louis-Dreyfus movie which takes place entirely at a ski resort, “Downhill.”

Moviegoers to You Hurt My Feelings were treated to, just like before every other Sundance film, a two-minute prerecorded Land Acknowledgement clip as a call to action to support indigenous peoples struggles to stem climate changes. The second two-minute prerecorded video has a voice over from Festival founder Robert Redford touting the sacred spaces of Park City and of the Sundance Mountain Resort which ends with him saying, “Welcome and enjoy.”

Inside the theater, the lobby offers people snacks and soda from a popup Park City Coffee Roaster and to peruse and purchase stuff from the Sundance Merch Store.

The building also has a ‘Waitlist Room’. Here, no less than 400 people who electronically got on the Waitlist stand in a windowless room for the off chance that one or some or all will get to go in and find seats, which for whatever reason ticket holders didn’t show up to use.

This night, a person collapsed in that line. Witnesses wondered aloud if perhaps from dehydration from beverages in general or perhaps from hyper-hydration of beverages of a certain type. They were brought back to their feet a minute later with a little help from caring venue volunteers.

The whole dance of lines and lists comes with customer kudos for quite the QR code choreography. 

Tobias Menzies, costar of Sunday night’s You Hurt My Feelings film spoke to TownLift, seen here.

Sundance film Premiers like this one have live Q and A sessions about the filmmaking process, on the stage after the film with cast and crew. They’re normally pretty predictable and intellectual. The Eccles Theater on Sunday morning, however, at a different film which ended in a slashing wound of one character by another with a knife, amid the run of the mill questions from audience members came an outburst from one. She loudly exclaimed that violence should never be an answer to life’s challenges with others. The female director, microphone in hand, didn’t miss a beat when she calmly spoke her quippy retort of, “This is just a movie, about fictional characters, for entertainment purposes only, and I do not condone violence of any kind in real life.” To that there was a round of applause which was laughter-laden.

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