Ira Sachs on His New Film ‘Peter Hujar’s Day,’ Coming of Age in the 80s, and the Art of Creating Art [VIDEO INTERVIEW]
There are really just a handful of directors whose work feels so quintessentially New York and that list doesn’t exist without Ira Sachs. Which makes the fact that he’s not a native New Yorker all the more fascinating and unique.
Sachs was born in Memphis, Tennessee but grew up in Park City, Utah (the now former home of the Sundance Film Festival). He didn’t move to New York City until the late 1980s, as the AIDS crisis was in its fullest and most virulent swing – a topic we go into as we talk about our nearness in age and how lucky we both feel to be alive and to have made it through that period.
In our conversation, Sachs talks about how and when he was introduced the titular subject of his latest film, Peter Hujar’s Day, Ben Whishaw’s “musical” performance, the apartment used in the film, his favorite two-hander films and more. Engaging on the state of film today and the difficulties of getting almost anything made, Sachs talks about how the 2008 recession left a lasting impact on funding (“the money disappeared”), gets frank about his own films (“I wasn’t making people money”) and how he “turned away from expectation and towards optimism.”
Peter Hujar’s Day is now in select theaters from Janus Films.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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