Ira Sachs
Ira Sachs is back in the director’s chair with his new movie Keep The Lights On, which was screened at the BFI London Film Festival earlier this week.
We caught up with him in London to chat about the movie, the inspiration behind it and shooting and casting the actors.
- This is quite a departure from your previous films and it feels more intimate so I wondered where this movie and this story began for you?
I think it is different because I think that it is less repressed - which doesn’t mean better (laughs). I think it is not a film that utilises metaphors it is a film about transparency and so the subject is also very much an end verse.
But similarly to me previous work it is about what people hide. I wanted to make a film about shame but do so shamelessly and I hope that I have succeeded in doing that.
In a lot of ways you can see the arc of the character, both characters, who are two men who grow to accept themselves in a different way and become comfortable with themselves in a different way - that mirrors my experiences as a filmmaker and as a person.
So I think all those are reasons why this film is my most accessible film emotionally and it is certainly the one that is most on the surface.
- Do you feel like it has autobiographical elements?
Yes, it certainly does. I ended a relationship in 2007 and on the last day of the relationship I was aware than ten years before there had been a very first day - which doesn’t always happen with relationships.
It was very specific and there was literally a moment when that relationship was over (laughs). I knew that there was a drama there and I knew that if I told it with enough detail and specificity that it would actually resonate to a wider audience - much like a memoir if you get the details right then it relates to other people who don’t have any connection with the details but they have a connection to the dynamic between the two characters.
In my first film I had had gay characters in it but for the next fifteen years I didn’t have a gay character in my work, and there are many reasons why this was true.
There are these different closets that we go into and while I came out of the closet at the age of sixteen but there are many more closets that people might enter - for me that included sexual spaces that I couldn’t share with other people as well as issues of addiction that were other dark corners that I needed to hide.
Professionally there is so little support… you want to be accepted so you start to shift the stories you tell. You want to be accepted economically as well so how do you sustain a career? These are all questions that tend to guide you into specific places.
- Within the music you make extensive use of the music of Arthur Russell, he is a key figure in the downtown scene, so what is it about his music that suits this film? And to what extent do you feel that you are continuing this excavation of his work?
Excavation is a good work for me as I feel that his whole film is a form of excavation, a way of making visible the invisible.
And also telling history and I think that that is one of the roles that you have as a filmmaker - it is one of the fortunate roles - you become the document of a time, a place, city of characters.
I saw Wild Combination by my now friend Matt Wolf which is about Arthur Russell, he was a musician who lived in New York and died in 1993 of Aids.
I was very moved by both the story and the music and I had the idea that I could use Arthur Russell’s music similarly to how Simon and Garfunkel is used in The Graduate. I worked very closely with my editor and my music editor and they spent months just listening to the entire catalogue.
What I didn’t realise and what has been very moving to me is the last song in the film is called This Is How We Walk On The Moon and , in a way, that is what the movie could be called as that is the excavation that I am talking about.
The film is about how these two men walk on the moon and it is also about how we… I bet London looks not so dissimilar to New York - this is how we walk on the moon.
It is different then when I first staring to make films because as a queer filmmaker questions of identity were central - the coming out narrative - which is not longer, having lived thirty years ‘out’, that is not where I am struggling. I think that this film is actually a form of progress in a certain way.
- The characters of Paul and Erik are very raw and very real so can you tell me a little bit about the casting process and how you came to work with these two great actors?
I feel very proud. People sign up for something and they don’t know what is going to happen and so it is nice when it turns out well - also they are being recognised and that makes me happy.
I met Zachary Booth first as I was friends with his agent and he set us up for a lunch. I loved how much he loved Paul, which was really important because the film needed an empathy for Paul and an understanding and Zach brought that to the table.
Erik was much harder to cast and it took a bit longer. I sent the script to one agent in LA and he came back and he told me that he loved the script and he was very excited about the movie but no one at his agency would be available for the part.
So there was a resistance to what ultimately does not seem very radical film but somehow on paper the explicitness of the sexuality was challenging - the context of American cinema and American movie making.
I had heard about Thure Lindhardt who had been described to me as ‘the bravest actor in Denmark’ and also one of the best. He had already done three or four films as the lead.
- It is great to see two great Danish actors in this movie being able to speak Danish and it seemed like a very natural thing so was that on purpose?
I had worked with Paprika Steen before as she had a small part in Forty Shades Of Blue and so we became very good friends. The part was actually written to be Erik’s grandmother but I rewrote it so Paprika could play his sister.
I liked the idea of contextualising his foreignness by seeing him at some point in his native language- it makes it all seem very real. They are also so good together - it was exciting to see Paprika and Thure have a couple of scenes together.
I mean Danish cinema, it’s not how I came to cast a Danish actor, but I am interesting in the mess of it. European cinema in general and European acting is something I have often been attracted to because it is very different to American acting.
American acting is more theatrical and I think that there is a realism that… I think that Dogma is undersold in how important it has been to my generation and how it brought the cinema verite into narrative filmmaking in a whole new way.
- The movie is set in New York and I was wondering how much you think the city is a life giver and a life zapper and the effect that is has on the characters in the film?
I think the giver and the zapper is adulthood, more than the city, as adulthood is hard. All of my films have been about coming of age and the struggle for an individual to accept him or her self in their adult self - who they become.
I think that there is this internal turmoil that I don’t think New York is unique in causing that turmoil. But on the other hand I do feel that New York gripped me when I arrived there in a way that it took me until I was forty to disentangle.
- In what kind of ways?
Drugs and sex and career and ambition and all of those things that were hopeful antidotes to who I was. I think I wasn’t alone in the struggle of what made life worth living and also made me worth living it. I feel less like that now - you still have hunger and drives and needs but I think they are enormously impulsive.
With the energy of this film we thought a lot about Goodfellas because I think that that is also a film that was driven by desire and it is told with the same desire and it is told with the same energy that the character exhibit - and that it what I hoped.
I wanted to make a film about bad behaviour but to do so without judgement but without avoiding the consequences of that behaviour on the characters and also to have the joys and the pleasures - both cinematically and personally - that come with that.
- How have you response to the movie so far? And how have European and American audiences differed?
I think the response has been very personal and that has been very rewarding. People of any number of stripes and histories seem to relate to the dynamic of the relationship and they speak to me about that.
So I think that it worked in the sense that I told a very personal story and in doing so I told a story that other people could find themselves in - which was significant.
The film within the context of European cinema seems much more ordinary than in the context of American film. I don’t find the film particularly radical and yet it was embraced in Berlin in a way that was exciting and I think it was because the context of nudity is not something that seems foreign in European film.
Having said that I feel that the film has found an audience in America and I think Americans are not as repressed as their cinema.
- You have talked about being a historian when you are making fiction so how important is it to look at different sub-cultures with this movie?
I think that there are lots of layers of excavation and it is a film that makes important the story of these two men and yet it is in a context of a lot of other stories that also the film brings forward.
What I wanted to say that this story is important but no more important than all of the others that are layered into a city. One of the last shots in the movie is the two men saying goodbye in the street and you see the street going by - how can something so important be so unimportant.
But I think that that shift back and forth in terms of focus is something that really interests me. In general I am also trying to make things visible that aren’t visible and that includes the history of art making in New York and counter culture in New York.
That history for me is like super inspiring and it is very different than the history of independent film - so it is not the history of Sex Lies and Videotape or Reservoir Dogs.
It is a history of Felix Gonzalez Torres and John Walters - this underground that isn’t necessarily economically rewarding but something else comes out of it and it is powerful. And I think that that is what this movie is; I’m not sure it is economically rewarding but it is powerful.
- Erik is a very likeable character and is someone you can identify with - as a woman you have often been in that relationship where you think ‘oh he is going to change’. Do you feel he is just as addicted as Paul but he is addicted to trying to make this relationship work and he can’t work away from it?
I think that he is someone… I have thought about a Sandra Bernhard movie called Without You I’m Nothing and I think that, in w way, Erik does believe that.
That shifts in the course of the film - there were actually more scenes with Igor towards the end of the film but we took them out because we wanted to make it a film about Erik with himself. The final shift is that Erik walks away with himself and I think that that is difficult.
- The character of Paul I found to be quite elliptical as he come into Erik’s circle but we don’t see him come ‘out’ or leave his girlfriend so how much was that to accentuate the helplessness of the Erick character?
I think that I always knew that was a protagonist to the film and yet it is a story of a relationship so there would be a shift between those two drives. But it was written by Erik in a way and that is the narrative push - it is his story.
But about three quarters of the way through the film it really becomes a relationship movie, it begins when Paul get sober and he reappears at the table after being apart for year. He seems like a different person and that is really a testament to the performance because he wasn’t a different person it was just the next day.
You feel that he is suddenly more comfortable with himself and he is suddenly visible to the audience - you are like ‘oh, I know that guy’. And that is what happens to the story as well as the last third becomes about them and the others disappear.
I am not so interested in trying to create why people are the way that they are as I hope that the front story answers that through the audience’s interpretation of another individual.
- You have talked about the city of New York a couple of times and when I watched it I found the city to be a character within itself and I was wondering how much that was by design?
Very much, to the extent that it has taken twenty five years to do it as I have lived there for that long and not made a film there - I made a short there called Last Address. It is an eight minute film about a group of New York writers who died of Aids and I went and shot their last residence that they lived in -it was just a series of images of their house.
I feel that it dipped my toe into looking at the city as a narrative filmmaker. But for me I see a city in a context of a story about intimacy and so you view the city from the inside. How the city comes out to the audience is how these people live in the city so there are very few wide shots instead you are seeing restaurants, apartments and bedrooms.
All of the locations ended up being places that were nearly 100 years old - in New York that is an old restaurant - so there is a sense of trying to hold on, not nostalgic, but appreciative of the history.
My cinematographer had never been to New York and so there is a freshness about his eye.
- He finds the sunlight doesn’t he?
If you see the movie now and you think ‘oh it is shot by a Greek guy’ it begins to make sense as there are lots of bare walls (laughs) and there is a simplicity to it.
He also knows how to shoot sex really well because he is not uncomfortable with it and so there is a warmth to those scenes and also a lack of distinction between those scenes and any other scenes.
For me that becomes a theme to the film so the movie doesn’t shift of hide when characters are intimate with each other.
- It’s very rare for an American movie that is dealing with a gay subject to be so accessible to general audiences as it gets put into its own genre. So were you deliberately trying to break that or what do you think of gay themed films in America?
I wasn’t approaching that way as I approach it just as a story teller and I have a way of telling a story that is consistent - I think that if I get the details of the particular story right then it will be both specific to the characters and the story but also a good film.
I think that these labels ‘gay cinema’, ‘queer cinema’ are significant and insignificant - they are not meaningless because there is the absence of that kind of representation so they do play a certain role for people culturally. I think that it is minimising to narrow a film like this into… and for me my inspirations are certainly the Cassavetes.
I am inspired by the likes of Parting Glance, and early American ‘queer’ film, as those are the films that give me permission and I needed that representation. I needed to see it - you see things and then you think that things are possible.
BFI London Film Festival runs 10 - 21 October
Keep The Lights On is released 2nd November
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in BFI