Ira Sachs: Stuck in the Middle

Watch my full conversation with Ira in video here.

Ira Sachs is an American filmmaker whose work explores messy relationships, family, queerness, and more. Perhaps best known for Passages and Peter Hujar’s Day, his films also include Keep the Lights On, Love Is Strange, Little Men, and Frankie. Across his career, he’s worked with actors including Isabelle Huppert, Ben Whishaw, and Franz Rogowski, and his latest feature, The Man I Love, which premiered in Competition at Cannes and will have its North American premiere at TIFF next month, stars Rami Malek.

Ira Sachs appears on Zoom from New York, framed by artwork behind him, including a piece by Keith Haring, one of the artists commemorated in Sachs’s 2010 short film Last Address. Before I can finish my first question, about John Cassavetes, he interrupts to tell me that, twenty minutes earlier, an Instagram account named “Zoe Cassa” had followed him, briefly making him wonder whether it was Zoe Cassavetes. “If I can get any connection to Cassavetes,” he jokes. Sachs has spent much of his career moving toward and away from Cassavetes’s influence. Ken Loach, he tells me, got him out of Cassavetes, while Maurice Pialat kept him out. Lately, though, he has found himself returning. From there, our conversation moves through his upbringing in the Memphis Children’s Theatre, making autobiographical work, creating intimacy through images, working with Isabelle Huppert, filmmaking as a series of middles, and the films that continue to change the way he works.

You’ve said that Cassavetes showed you a new approach to cinema, that it could go beyond this shape and artifice you could feel in cinema. You’ve also said that you’ve moved away from him, so could you tell me a little about coming back to him?

I think in the last couple of films, I’ve been really interested in creating an atmosphere of the unknown. Where there is a sense that at least emotionally, there aren’t a lot of rules set or expectations, so that there can be a kind of observational quality. But, also, and maybe this came around working with Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar’s Day, an embrace of some level of theatricality in a performance. Because that was where, I, in some ways, lost faith, or lost obsession, let’s say- not faith, never faith. Because I think when I first saw the work, I thought it was really real, and then I began to think otherwise in terms of what the actors were doing. The level of performance in those films. And now, I’m more interested in how those two things join than I was at some point in my life. I think [Ken] Loach got me out of Cassavetes; [Maurice] Pialat kept me out of Cassavetes. Now I’m just really interested in the melodrama, and the actorly exploration, adventure, risk-taking, and mess.

Peter Hujar’s Day, 2025. Dir. Ira Sachs.

You grew up in theatre, and often you explore theatricality in your own work, like in Peter Hujar’s Day, and even in The Delta; it’s this man [Lincoln] that’s performing a version of himself, as a closeted gay man.

It’s interesting because you’re talking about the white guy [Lincoln], but I was thinking about the Vietnamese guy [Minh], who’s really performing some version of himself. The curtain is pulled, and then you go backstage when he begins to speak Vietnamese.

Yes, and Vaudeville, of course, is about a theatre troupe. Could you speak a little to growing up in theatre and how much of that has shaped your interest in theatricality?

I think, in a way, the theatricality of stage is less central to me than the community of theatre. That seems to be the ongoing thing. When I watch, or think about, the film I most recently completed, The Man I Love, you could call it a backstage musical drama. In that way, Opening Night was certainly interesting for me to look at. But I think I’m drawn, as a filmmaker, to the community of people who make movies, and to the particular subculture of making art collectively. What people do, and what they reveal. I spent six years backstage at a theatre, from when I was 12 or 13 to when I went to college. I was really backstage every day, and I was a terrible actor, but there must’ve been some feeling I’ve been trying to get back to. I feel I’m constantly trying to recreate that creative environment that I knew at the Memphis Children’s Theatre. That was such a part of my life.

You’ve been very open about how a lot of your work is very personal. With Keep the Lights On, that was drawing on your own life very directly, and you were taking this real relationship you had in the past and taking that into fiction. What was that process like?

I think maybe the most important moment was when I involved a writer as a collaborator. I started, during the pandemic, writing a kind-of memoir, kind-of prose book, which I just put aside five years ago. But I think in some ways, I still look at that, as I did with Keep the Lights On, with someone kind of permitting me, someone telling me the story is interesting. There’s a way in which you don’t trust that your story is interesting. I think when I found Mauricio Zacharias, who read these hundreds of pages of ideas, emails, notes, letters, and diaries, and he said, ‘Well, this is an amazing and interesting story. This is the story you seem to be able and desirous to tell.’ And I feel he permitted me to do that. Once that permission was given, I feel it wasn’t so different than making a fictional film. Because it was ultimately structured scenes, characters were invented, actors were cast. Right now, I’m working on a film that’s set in LA in the 1960s. And I’m thinking, ‘where can I find as much documentary material as possible from that time?’ so I can try to live a little in that time, before I try to recreate it. So I think, my own autobiographical experience was just this great resource for me, in making a fictional film. It’s structured, the film, and in a way it probably took over the memories. Things that weren’t true become true. When people meet me, and I like them, and I feel close to them, part of me says, ‘Oh, you should watch that movie! You’ll learn a lot about me!’ Which is not visible, I think. People who meet me don’t think that was me. Not because the character is being played by a Danish actor, but because one hides your past, in a certain way. Our past is not visible, like I don’t know anything about you. But there’s a story; there are lots of stories that would tell me a lot very quickly about you.

So is cinema a way of sharing yourself with the world in ways you can’t quite do with language?

I was just reading Catherine Breillat; there’s a great 30 hours of interviews that a woman did with her, and published as a book [I Only Believe in Myself: In Conversation with Murielle Joudet]. It’s very good. She’s really a figure; she’s really a character. And she says at some point that cinema is her way to talk about things that she can’t speak and say. And I felt, ‘Oh, that’s not just me!’ I was glad to know that was familiar for other people who I really admire, because, yes, I feel I’m able to share [in my films]. I hide much less in my films than I do in my life. Luckily, I will say, I don’t hide that much from my romantic and intimate partner, my husband, in the way that I did during the Keep the Lights On age. I am transparent in some personal relationships.

It’s remarkable how much of your life you’re willing to share in these films, and it really comes across. What’s your favourite Catherine Breillat film?

I think the one that was sort of an unforgettable experience was Fat Girl. Partially because of the violence, and mostly because of the intimacy, the transparency, the vulnerability. When I talk about Fat Girl, and I think about the scene between the two sisters in the bedroom, and the sex, and watching each other. I think, for some reason, about Chantal Akerman. The relationship between Breillat and Akerman, between Fat Girl and Je Tu Il Elle, this idea of watching these things that cinema, for the most part, has said we shouldn’t watch, we shouldn’t be witness to. As an artist, I go back more to Akerman. I’m actually about to watch all of Breillat; I just want to watch it all, which is on Criterion. I feel I just need to see the whole thing.

Breillat has some really great films. Super provocative, but only in the best way.

I think in a very honest way. Right? Not to be a provocateur. But to be a generous, thoughtful woman, filmmaker, and artist.

On this topic, intimacy is such a big part of many of your films. How do you think you go about choosing when and how to include intimacy, and what do you think that reveals in your characters?

I was trying to explain the film I want to make next to somebody, and I said, ‘The only things that interest me are tenderness and vulnerability,’ and I think plot is in service of those things, and plot hopefully activates those things. I would like to create environments where intimacy is scene by scene, important in every moment. But it could also be the intimacy of the audience with the image. This is where I think about [Jean-Luc] Godard somehow. I find myself so close to the images that he creates in some of his films because of the relationship between the camera, light, the object, and the viewer. All of those things seem just really tender and intimate to me. So photography is intimate, right?

So you think intimacy is showing tenderness and vulnerability in cinema? 

I guess I wouldn’t use the word showing intimacy; I would say creating intimacy with the audience. And one of the different ways you can do that is sometimes through intimate moments, but sometimes it’s through intimate images. And intimate images mean images that, in a way, transcend themselves.

I just watched Frankie; one of the fun things about it was that Isabelle Huppert is playing a famous French actress. How intentional were you about knowing that the audience is going in knowing, ‘This is Isabelle Huppert, and she’s playing a famous French actress.’ Did you write this character based on her, and how aware were you of that audience relationship?

I think, to some extent, in that moment in my life, I was really not interested in asking actors to transform. And in this way, Cassavetes is a good model, because the actors bring themselves to the table in such a complete way. Like, that’s Peter Falk; that’s not a character, it’s Peter Falk, drawn as a character, but lived as Peter Falk. So, I think I was just interested in thinking about Isabelle Huppert as an actress, but actually, more as a person. Right? She’s a person who is an actress. And then, the scenario is one where fiction comes in. But then, I would say, something really changed with Peter Hujar’s Day, because both Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall really transformed. That was the first time I’ve had actors, well-known too, not working in their native accents. So they’re transforming by the theatricality of having a different voice. It’s become interesting to me, the non-realistic. But I think, with Frankie, I just felt that was a very natural character for me to create with Isabelle.

The ending is so lovely too, because you’re not ending with some sort of banal view of death, but instead with Frankie being with her family and with her loved ones in this moment. And you do a similar thing at the end of Love Is Strange, not ending with death and grief, but instead with a sense of renewal. Could you speak to that choice, in both of those films, of not ruminating in grief in the end?

I think I consider my films as a series of middles. So, each scene is a middle. The beginning: there was something before; the end, there’s something after. In that way, I’ve taken a lot from documentary, to a certain extent. I like films that open like this [gestures hands moving outwards]. Where, instead of the triangle coming to the point, the vortex goes outward. So, all of my films end with a sense of the future being part of what the audience leaves with. So, that was really significant for me. I also wrote that film after losing a very dear friend of mine who died of cancer in her early 50s, and I think the presence of that grief and the finality of her death, and how that grief has stayed with me, was really part of what was on my mind, too. That grief for the living becomes part of life, which is maybe cliché to say, but it’s really true. The film is also about everyone; it’s a democratic film. There is a hero, who is Isabelle, but it’s really about the whole set, and the ensemble, so there isn’t one ending.

That’s true, and we end with this possibility of this new relationship forming, with Frankie’s current husband. So yeah, I think you’re right; there are still many paths that all these different characters are going on.

And I think that is a very important moment because it’s the first moment that Frankie can imagine that there will be life and living, even though she’s not going to be around. It’s quite an intense thing to suddenly recognize that, truly, you will not be alive. I think most of us live with the idea that it’s a fiction that we’re going to die. That’s the only way we can bear it, is to think of it as fiction. And I think particularly, for someone dying younger than they might, like when they’re struck by something. I imagine, for the very old, death becomes closer. So there’s something really tragic about having to confront [it]. It was important dramatically that Isabelle’s character, and then in The Man I Love, Rami Malek’s character, at some point, have to confront the fact of their imminent death.

On that topic of confronting death, you have this short film, Last Address, and it’s the first time Peter Hujar is present in your filmography, where you show the address of the last place he lived. That’s fifteen years before you made Peter Hujar’s Day; how has your relationship to his work evolved in those fifteen years?

One of the great things about Last Address, for me, very very personally, is how much time I’ve spent with that film after it was made, as well as while we were making it, figuring out the details, doing the research, and going and shooting those places. I really know the last address of all those people. I might not always be able to find the house, but some of them are noticeable. I hold that memory close to me; it stays with me when I live in this city. Literally, I just walked by Joe Brainard, who was an artist who lived in SoHo, on Greene St. I know exactly where Cookie Mueller was living. I received a lot of that memory, and it’s part of me, so even though I wasn’t actively thinking about Peter, I always, and I still do, look up every time I'm at 12th St & 2nd Av, and I think about him, because the windows are very iconic, actually, for him. So, I feel he became a part of me very much, while very specifically never having known him, so there’s such a limit in my intimacy. I don’t feel more intimate with Peter Hujar, even though I’ve made that movie, than I do, to some extent, with Jack Smith, Ron Vawter, John Sex, or Keith Haring [gestures to a Keith Haring piece behind him]. They all stay in my thoughts in a really active way, without having known most of them. So, I think it’s important for me to say I have no ownership. Someone close to Peter said, ‘Oh, now you’re part of the Hujar family,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ I just made a film based on this text, which gave me a window in, but not a window in so different from your window in having watched the movie.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see The Man I Love yet, but I’m curious about this new work, and what exactly you were trying to portray about late-1980s New York, and, if you feel that anything is missing in terms of how that time and place is portrayed in cinema.

No. I mean, I hope I have something new to offer, because I wouldn’t make a film if I didn’t. I got into a fight recently with someone; they’re like, ‘Oh, I think it’s really cool that you’re bringing stories back into the world about people who died of AIDS, and that’s such a great mission for you. It’s so good that you’re doing that.’ And I was just like, ‘Don’t say that.’ I mean, maybe that’s a residual effect of my film, but it’s so not my intention that there’s some responsibility I have, which is moral. It’s a much more personal film than that; like that implies an activist bent, which my work has a political place in the world, but it isn’t the drive; it’s the impact of creating art of any sort, that hopefully you’re making things that exist that didn’t exist before you did. But I think the thing is, late-1980s New York is just part of what I know. It was the world I lived in, and that I came to. That film, as it is about backstage, theatre, rehearsing, and putting on a show, it’s also about the world that I knew from being a theatre director, and watching performance art, sitting in the audience at the Performing Garage, or at Performance Space 122 [now known as Performance Space New York], these spaces that were my education. And I think, because it’s cast with New Yorkers, it’s also the city that I still know, of these amazing people whom I feel connected to, or admire, or witness, who are here to make things. And I feel that’s both late ‘80s, but it’s also my life today.

You’ve said, “I go to the movies actively, because there’s always the chance that a film is going to change my life.” So, I wanted to ask, when’s the last time a film changed your life?

I’ve been seeing a lot of Italian cinema from the 1950s. I was walking by the Cinema Village [last night], and that is where I saw a movie called Before I Forget, made by Jacques Nolot. And that movie really changed my life. Seeing that film, it was soon after the breakup that I went through with my ex-boyfriend, seeing that [Jacques Nolot] had made a film, that he starred in, played a character based on himself, an older gay man in Paris, who was living a life that was so specific to him, and maybe would not be shared with others, but he was just really transparent with who he was sexually, and intellectually, and also, his friends could only have been French-Parisian gay men. I loved how local that movie was. And I thought, that movie permitted me to say, ‘Oh, I never see my life in the films. How come I never see contemporary gay men, our sexuality, our actions, our conversations?’ I just was like, ‘I want to make a film about my life,’ and so that film, I walked out, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna make a movie.’ And that movie was Keep the Lights On. I kind of knew it by the time I walked out of it. But I will say, last week at the Film Forum, I saw White Nights, which was a [Luchino] Visconti film, and there’s a great party scene in that movie. So often, this is what happens: I’m like, ‘Wow, I need to get a hold of that party scene.’ Like, it might not have changed my life, but it gave me the way that, traditionally, art has given artists. Sometimes, you get ideas in a second, in a flash, that wouldn’t exist without that stimulation, and that happened with the Visconti for me last week. Maybe six months ago, I saw an Italian film called Bitter Rice; I had never heard of the director [Giuseppe De Santis]; it’s an astonishingly well-made, huge, masterful film, with incredibly melodramatic, in the best of ways, performances. Every element: lighting, shooting, casting, direction, mise-en-scène. All of it is, just like, ‘wow!’ What I’ve really been feeling is we don’t live in that time. You have to have an industry, a rich industry, to develop that level of craft, that has an ecosystem that supports, encourages, teaches, shares, transmits a lot of information and a lot of experience, to get that level of work. I don’t want to be nostalgic. We have other things, I guess, but we don’t have that.