Born in 1965 and starting his career in the ’90s, Ira Sachs is one of the most important and acclaimed voices in American independent cinema and one of the best-known queer film directors.

After a few short films, he made his debut in feature film in 1997 with the highly praised The Delta, and later cemented his reputation with dramas such as Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Keep the Lights On (2012), arguably his most famous film, which he described as semi-autobiographical, Love Is Strange (2014), Little Men (2016), and Frankie (2019).

His latest effort, Passages, a European production shot in Paris, starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos, had its world premiere at Berlinale 2023. The film follows a gay couple whose marriage is thrown into crisis when one of them impulsively begins a passionate affair with a young woman.

In an exclusive interview with Films in Frame for Romania, Ira Sachs talks about working on this film, his collaboration with the actors, his career, the state of American independent cinema, his relationship with Hollywood, and recent American queer films that he enjoyed.

Passages comes out in Romanian cinemas on March 8 and is distributed by Transilvania Film.

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You said in an interview that Passages exists frame by frame in the present. Can you explain this and why was this important for you?

I can’t say it was something that was predetermined. It’s just something that I realized after watching the film and thinking about how it moves and also what remains in the film. Certain scenes, for example, were in the screenplay, but don’t exist (in the film). And I think part of their tension was that there were scenes that described the past. Ultimately it’s a film driven by image, not dialog. The image is always in the present. So the language and the narrative became very present tense. Now I’m working on a new film and It’s something I think about more consciously, which is how to create a script that works in the present. And if I go back and I look at some of the films that have influenced me most directly, I would say they tend not to be films filled with storytelling. They’re  more films of experience.

Your films, including Passages, don’t seem to be necessarily plot-driven, but rather driven by feelings and desires.  

Well, I would say that the will to fulfill one’s desires is plot. So I would disagree that they’re not plot-driven films. But in a way, the plot disappears for the audience in the experience of watching the film. The plot is, in a way, hidden. My co-writer, Mauricio Zacharia, and I are pretty conscious about the plot, that each scene moves things forward. Every event creates a consequence which leads to a question. And this is narrative momentum. 

I was trying to say that they’re not plot-driven in a very conventional and classic way.

I’m only pushing back because I think, underneath the surface, there is a very classic interest in plot. So maybe not in a very conventional way, but I think if plot is considered narrative suspense, it’s something that’s essential to me in making a feature film. 

Passages speaks about a love triangle, but in a very different way.  You mentioned somewhere that for the actors the fact that this man, who is in a relationship with another man, falls in love with a woman is not seen as so unrealistic as it would seem for you.  

I think that was something that became apparent to me in the transition from  screenplay to production. I write a film from my own perspective, and given my life experience and the fact that I’ve lived a life as a gay man, it would be quite surprising if I started a relationship with a woman. These actors, these characters are twenty plus years younger than me, and it seems that, for them, identity, at least as I’ve presented it, is not as fixed. What surprised me, in the transition from idea to realization, was that this initial germ of what would happen if a gay man started a relationship with a woman unexpectedly didn’t seem unexpected. So in a way, it becomes a whole different set of thoughts than the one that I might have expected. 

In Passages, everything is revealed. Nothing is hidden.

Ira Sachs, director

And sexual identity is not so much an issue as it was in the past, right? And we can feel this watching your first films and comparing them with this one, for example.

Correct. Very much so. In my first films, I think sexual identity comes hand in hand with the illicit, with the hidden. In this film, everything is revealed. Nothing is hidden.

Maybe this is one of the biggest changes in your cinema.

Well, I think it has to do with something very internal for me. Everything before Keep the Lights On, the films were made by someone who remained in hiding. Very personally. The films are not autobiographical by nature, but they do reflect my sense of internal conflict or experience. And I think my experience really shifted around the point I made Keep the Lights On. And the turmoil tends to be less interior and more exterior. 

And you can feel this very well in Passages.

There’s a tension in Passages which  I think I call the conflict between the bourgeois and the bohemian. 

You also said that you wanted to make a realistic film but which plays with the “pleasures of cinema”. What do you mean by this combination of pleasures of cinema with a realistic perspective, and how did the fact that you filmed in Paris influence this style?

Well, you know, what comes to mind it’s less the city itself, which of course interests me and compels me visually, but I won’t say that it drove the aesthetic of the film. On the other hand, I would say the collaborations I had in Paris were very central to the film we made. For example, my relationship with Josée Deshaies, the cinematographer. It’s significant that we have the same films in our head, that the cinema that we treasure was very aligned. I would say the conversation I had with Josée is that every shot had to have an emotional effect based on light and texture. So we raised a high bar in terms of the cinematic impact of the film, separate from the content. 

And this is what you mean by “pleasures of cinema”? 

I do. I also mean to accept the non-realistic. I specifically think of the wardrobe in the film as being exceptional. It’s not ordinary. And it’s not tied to the realistic, even though it’s grounded in the real. 

From your interviews it seems that you believe that maybe it is more difficult today to make films about intimacy, desire, sex. Do you really think this?

I live in the wealthiest country in the world or whatever. So I always hate to complain. Because I do so from a position of privilege, both personally and nationally. That being said, the kind of cinema that I grew up on and imagined surrounding me has disappeared from the American market. So that’s both the death of independent cinema as well as the end of dramatic cinema in the studio system. So the limits are more and more confined. That being said, this year I was on the jury of the Generation section at the Berlinale, and I saw 17 films from around the world, none of which were from the US, but all of which gave me a sense that world cinema is alive and well. What I talk about intimate cinema is what I think of as personal cinema. Cinema in which you feel a very direct relationship between the creator and the work of art. I’ve been reading about Vincente Minnelli the last few days, and considering the auteur theory, which is one that allows you to be an author within a system of capitalism. It’s true, but I’m less interested in the auteurs of today’s capitalistic cinema than I was in those from the 1950`s.

Maybe because things change a lot. The studios are different. Hollywood is very different. 

I think globalization has meant that, in a way, the human needs to disappear.

That’s why maybe it’s so difficult to find this type of relationship in mainstream movies from the USA and all over the world.

I don’t know. You can tell me, but I think that it’s been a strong decade in Romania for personal cinema. I think France has continued to support personal voices. When I was watching these many films over the last few weeks from around the world, I found there is wonderful filmmaking in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. So somehow individuals are surviving. And I think that does not only give me hope, it actually challenges me to do more personal work.

How is your relation with Hollywood?

I don’t have a relationship with Hollywood. I mean, I go to Los Angeles and it seems like I might as well be visiting Miami or Istanbul. That is maybe because I’ve also navigated to Europe over the last few years, financially and creatively. I’m now working on two projects in New York City. And you know, I’m testing the waters for what is possible. Passages has been an interesting film for me because I think it has allowed an audience here to reflect on the body of work that came before it, as well as the film itself. So I feel that I’m in a decent position to make another movie here. But don’t count on that lasting.

My generation of independent filmmakers have left feature filmmaking and turned to series because it’s the only sustainable way of life. I would say 95% of the people I started out with are no longer making narrative features. 

Ira Sachs, director

Because you spoke about New York City, I wanted to ask you also how the landscape of American independent cinema changed, compared to the ‘90s, the period when you started.

For better or worse, there was a birth of an industry and that industry has disappeared. So for the most part, my generation of independent filmmakers have left feature filmmaking and turned to series because it’s the only sustainable way of life. I would say 95% of the people I started out with are no longer making narrative features. 

But isn’t there a new generation? 

I think there is. I mean, it’s challenging to make your first feature. The question is whether you can make your third or your fourth. Whether you can sustain a career in narrative cinema over a lifetime. The system of support is not there. And whether you’re talking about government or you’re talking about box office, both of those are absent. We’ve never had the government, but we used to have the box office. So it’s very challenging. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was a judge on a section at Berlinale that had 17 feature films and not one was from the United States. But you could say I’m crying wolf, because I’m making movies. 

You basically say that it’s difficult nowadays for young filmmakers to make a career in independent cinema in New York.

Correct. That would be a fact, it wouldn’t even be a subjective opinion. You know, you could say in the days in which independent cinema began, in the days of Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes, there were only four or five, there were not a hundred people like John Cassavetes. But I think John Cassavetes would be really challenged right now in America to find economic stability and possibility. I mean, there are people who have defied the odds, and some with incredible skills and talent, if you think of someone like Paul Thomas Anderson or Barry Jenkins.

But the ‘90s, when you started, were a very good period for American independent cinema. Maybe one of the best.

Yes, I think that there were people you could look up to, who had careers that you could imagine emulating or aspiring to. People like Jim Jarmusch or Spike Lee and Gus van Sant. There was a set of people who seemed to be speaking very directly from their own aesthetic and life experience. 

Watching your films, what strikes me is the way you construct relationships: they feel very free, very unpredictable, very complex. 

Well, to me there’s no choice involved. It’s in my interest, because I’m compelled to try to create depth in narrative works of art. And to do so, you have to attempt to create contradictions, complexity. My heroes are Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Chekhov, so all I do is fail in comparison. But those are the people that I’m talking with in my own head. Or Maurice Pialat, and Ken Loach, and Chantal Akerman. I believe in cinema as an art form. And I aspire to make work which is as rich and complex as possible. I mean, what else would I do? (laughs) If I would set out to write stereotypical, uncomplex, simple characters, that would be a waste of everyone’s time.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of films with stereotypical characters and situations.

But those aren’t the films that move me or that I feel challenged or inspired by. I think the thing that cinema has that is lost completely in television and which maybe independent and art cinema has more than commercial cinema these days is room for ambiguity. And space for silence. And ambiguity not meaning non-clarity but rich complexity. 

How did you work with the actors in developing the characters and the situations in Passages? These three great actors come from different countries and cultures.

When we worked together, they didn’t feel that there was any distinction in the approach. There was a distinction in character. Each of them is a very distinct individual, with their own voice and way of being, and the film captures that. I mean, I provide a lot by the screenplay, by the casting, by the locations, and by the wardrobe. I bring a lot to the table that defines character and story. And then I accept a lot, which is the fact of the person in front of the camera.

What do you mean by that? 

I’m not encouraging transformation. I’m more interested in transparency. So I would say 90% of what you see of the characters on the screen is the actors who play them. And then everything else is what I’ve constructed to put those actors into a story. But there’s no separation. You can’t separate Adèle Exarchopoulos and Agathe (her character). They’re not two different people. They are two people superimposed upon each other. So with that in mind, I have a process that discourages excessive conversation, resists rehearsal and overt preparation by the actors. At least with me. I mean, I’m not saying they’re not preparing themselves. I don’t rehearse, but I do spend an enormous amount of time with the cinematographer figuring out how to tell the story in a cinematic language. So what is the sequence of shots that conveys meaning, and beauty, and emotion? All three of those things are very important to me.

I want the camera to be present in the room with the actors, but not intrusive upon what’s happening between them. The same way that I am as a director: I’m present, but I’m not the third person. 

Ira Sachs, director

So in a way your film, especially this one, functions also as a sort of a documentary about acting or about these actors playing.

Correct, I do believe that every fiction film is a documentary and every documentary is a fiction film. I mean, what I’m actually doing is documenting what happened on the day that we shot. And certain things that become set in stone as part of the film are actually accidents of the moment. So, for example, people ask me why there are so many shots of people from the back in this film. I didn’t set out to shoot people from the back, but with the position of the camera, the length of the shot, and the openness of the movement, those things happen and I don’t mind. In some ways, I want the camera to be present in the room with the actors, but not intrusive upon what’s happening between them. The same way that I am as a director: I’m present, but I’m not the third person. 

What do you think about the way LGBT imagery is represented in American mainstream cinema today? 

I think it’s been a pretty interesting year, to be honest. Movies that come to mind are Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, which I think is a piece of personal cinema. And also Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which is a very gay film. In that way, it’s a film that kind of works within the system, but in a very fancy way. And what I like about it is it manages to speak homosexually but not through metaphor. The history of cinema has been about using metaphor as a voice of queerness. And there’s nothing metaphoric about Maestro. So it’s very subversive, on a level of sexuality. I think Passages is another queer film that has been given a kind of broad platform. That being said, I think it’s significant that there’s a woman in the triangle of Passages. And that’s true with Maestro also. Women are used as a way of bringing in the gay experience without shutting out capitalism. 

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.