In 2008, Ira Sachs got fired by his manager. The most indie spirited of independent filmmakers had refused to play the game for too long, and the bill had finally come due.
“I understood it in a way,” Sachs, more than a decade and a half-dozen features removed from that experience, says. “Because I was not entering the business, and his job was to facilitate the business of Hollywood, which was not what I was interested in doing. They were trying to get me jobs as opposed to what I was trying to do, which was produce my own work.”
For the record, Sachs thinks that he never would have gotten the gigs that his representatives wanted him to land. But the experience helped rethink his value in an industry that usually measures those things in terms of box office grosses.
“Before that, I thought I was kind of owed a career based on certain successes, or hoops that I had jumped through,” says while sipping a ginger tea in the lobby of a West Village hotel. “And after that, I thought, can I have a career? Let’s see.”
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Money, or rather the lack thereof, is front-and-center in Sachs’ latest feature, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” which premieres at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The movie centers on an extended conversation between Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a brilliant, but struggling photographer, and his close friend, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), who recorded their talk for an art project. Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1987, was only celebrated as an artist posthumously (his prints now fetch eye-popping figures), and during the 1974 chat with Rosenkrantz that Sachs dramatizes, he’s very much living on the economic margins. “When you listen to him, you realize that art is all about money and cents and dollars and middle of the night questions about ‘how can I keep this going?’” Sachs says.
But despite those pressures, Hujar is also part of a vibrant cultural landscape that is exploding with ideas and inspiration and possibility. He counted Susan Sontag and Fran Leibowitz as intimates. While recounting his day to Rosenkrantz, Hujar talks about being visited by four different friends and having five or six extended phone conversations.
“There was this subculture of artists that was filled with tremendous energy, and which was much less bourgeois than the one we live in now,” Sachs says. “There was this tremendous sense of community, and that’s been lost today when we have all these virtual relationships.”
But Sachs worried that the film, a two-character drama that moves from the kitchen of a New York City apartment to its living room to its bedroom, with a few fleeting rooftop interludes, might not have enough action to sustain itself. Six weeks before the film was set to begin pre-production, he started to panic.
“We had a green light and were ready to go and I just thought, ‘How do I make this cinematic?’” Sachs remembers. “I had a crisis of execution.”
So he went back to some of the films that inspired him, such as Christopher Münch’s “The Hours and Times,” a fictionalized look at a real holiday taken by John Lennon and manager Brian Epstein, and the work of Chantal Akerman. “These were very handmade personal works that were often about a subject and a camera and someone listening,” he says.
As a filmmaker, Sachs isn’t a maximalist. His best movies, such as “Love Is Strange” and “Little Men,” are about relationships. The action is emotional; the scope is intimate.
“I’m interested in the microcosmic instead of the macro,” he says. “I focus on the details.”
In this case, the movie has two parallel themes, the struggle to create art and the vital importance of connection. Hujar is thwarted in one — he recounts a photography session with Allen Ginsberg that didn’t go as he hoped — and sustained by the other.
“The movie is about this bond between Peter and Linda,” Sachs says. “Theirs is a specific friendship between a gay man and a heterosexual woman. There’s a tone and texture to that kind of relationship that I find deeply personal.”
Though Hujar died before society and culture caught up to his genius, Sachs feels he lived a rich, albeit shortened, life.
“His story did not seem tragic to me,” he says. “You think about how much he packed into it. He had what very few people have, which is this dense and active community of friends and comrades and enemies. And then there was his art.”
And like Hujar, Sachs draws energy from his work (the pandemic, he says, was especially taxing). So it’s no surprise to find out he’s already planning his next picture, which will, once again star Whishaw, with whom he previously worked on “Passages.”
“We are two gay men who have a curiosity and a fascination with gay life and queer art,” Sachs says. “It’s a cliche, but I feel like I found a brother in Ben.”