Ira Sachs, Director of the film 'Passages,' speaks about being an American filmmaker with a European influence & why his movies aren't made for the world.
Variety Lounge presented by Zurich Film Festival
Variety Lounge presented by Zurich Film Festival
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00:00 I had a conversation with Adele Exakopoulos about the film,
00:02 and she said the scene that was hardest and most vulnerable
00:05 for her was not the sex scene.
00:07 It was when she had to sing on camera.
00:09 I'm always trying to create opportunities for actors
00:11 to reveal themselves and to share themselves
00:14 with the audience.
00:16 And sex was certainly a part of that.
00:18 It also plays a big role in the story,
00:21 because it is the story of a man who
00:24 has been in relationships primarily
00:26 with other men who's now in a relationship with a woman.
00:29 So physical intercourse and sexuality
00:34 is really at stake here.
00:35 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:38 The MPAA very controversially gave it an NC-17 rating.
00:47 Movie chose to release "Unrelated" instead.
00:50 Did that frustrate you, that rating from them?
00:52 You know, for me, it didn't have a huge effect,
00:55 because I'd already made the film that I wanted to make,
00:58 and I was supported by Mubi, who wanted the film that I made,
01:01 and understood that it was a film made
01:03 in the atmosphere of liberty, and they wanted to preserve
01:06 that liberty, that freedom.
01:08 I didn't have any conflict, really.
01:10 I think what's upsetting about the rating to me
01:13 is the warning signal it gives to other artists
01:16 and filmmakers.
01:17 Certain images will not be allowed,
01:19 and they will be punished.
01:20 That's the reason censorship exists,
01:24 which is to try to narrow what is allowed.
01:28 If my party and my husband doesn't want to dance with me,
01:32 I'll dance with you.
01:34 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:37 This is the third film you've made
01:40 about a long-term gay partnership,
01:43 but it's quite different from those films.
01:45 Is it important for you to keep those relationships
01:48 visible on screen?
01:49 Because we still don't have many films about them.
01:52 It's important for me to make work that's
01:54 personal to my own experience.
01:57 I think it's valuable culturally,
01:59 but that's maybe not the incentive
02:01 that I, as an artist, have to tell certain stories.
02:05 You write what you know, and you try to share what you know.
02:09 So I have often made work about gay people, and artists,
02:15 and city people, and people who have lives
02:19 that look a little like my own.
02:21 And I think that's hard to do, because the industry asks
02:26 for you to make films that are, by nature, global.
02:29 And I'm trying to make films that are anti-global,
02:32 but maybe will be able to be experienced all over the world,
02:36 but come from a very specific place.
02:39 When you say anti-global, you mean
02:41 specific to your experience of the world?
02:44 Yes, and thus specific to a experience of the world.
02:48 With both Keep the Lights On and this film,
02:50 there was a moment where I just said,
02:53 oh, my life and the world I live in has value,
02:56 and I want to look at it, not away from it.
02:59 And that felt almost radical.
03:01 I felt when I was making this film that I
03:02 was making something new.
03:05 And I feel like that's, in a way, how it's been received.
03:07 What feels new about Passages to you?
03:09 I guess if I was going to put it in words,
03:12 I would say that I felt, even in the moment when I was shooting
03:16 it, that my craft had caught up to my instincts.
03:20 In a way, I thought a lot about my earliest work
03:23 when I was 20 years younger, 25 years younger,
03:26 ways that I wanted to approach narrative cinema, which
03:28 were very essential to me.
03:30 But I was still also learning my way, which I'm still doing.
03:33 But I felt like somehow I felt very free,
03:36 and I had a kind of collaborative group
03:39 that gave me, as well as my experience,
03:41 a certain confidence that felt new.
03:44 The relationships in Passages are very fluid.
03:49 And Tomás, your protagonist, is very freely bisexual.
03:53 There's a kind of openness to the way they
03:55 interact with each other.
03:57 Do you think Passages captures a more modern queer culture?
04:01 Does it feel more contemporary to you that way?
04:03 I think it does.
04:03 I think these people, these actors and these characters,
04:07 are a generation younger than myself.
04:09 So I think their reference, in terms
04:11 of how they might live their life and their identity,
04:13 is maybe less binary than my own.
04:16 I had this idea that I could remake this film
04:19 with three 70-year-olds, and it would look very different.
04:22 Like sexuality would be more pronounced,
04:27 maybe, in those characters.
04:29 The other change for me, when I look at Passages,
04:33 which is progress--
04:34 I don't see everything as progress,
04:36 but this seems to be.
04:37 It's a film without shame.
04:39 Nothing is hidden in the film.
04:41 And that, to me, seems very profound.
04:45 I think I'm falling in love with you.
04:47 I say that to learn how you feel.
04:49 I say it when I feel it.
04:52 You say it when it works for you.
04:53 How do you make your actors feel safe
04:55 when you're shooting those scenes?
04:56 Do you work with coordinators?
04:58 I haven't worked with coordinators.
04:59 I think there is a trust that actors have with me that
05:03 begins with them choosing to do the film with me.
05:06 I think it's an environment in which they
05:08 sense that I'm listening to them.
05:11 And the first question I ask around shooting sexuality
05:14 or sexual scenes is, what is your boundary?
05:16 And then the boundary is stated.
05:17 And then it's never questioned.
05:19 And every actor has a boundary.
05:21 And so I think they feel a comfort there.
05:25 They also seem to trust each other in this situation.
05:28 And I think the challenge with an intimacy coordinator
05:31 is that they become another voice in the process.
05:34 I'm not sure how that would be integrated into, for me,
05:39 a strategy working with the actors
05:41 where I'm not having those conversations in general,
05:44 either.
05:44 I'm not having them in a scene about a restaurant.
05:48 Like, I try to avoid specific conversations which
05:52 are going to define subtext, define motivation,
05:55 because I want to leave room for the unexpected.
05:58 So I'm not rehearsing.
05:59 The act of shooting is, in itself, a rehearsal.
06:02 You begin in the morning, and you start shooting something,
06:04 and you spend all day shooting scenes,
06:06 and you discover things.
06:08 I try not to verbalize and to make concrete the things that
06:13 are happening under the surface.
06:15 I want them to remain unexplained and also
06:19 discovered.
06:21 So it's a lot, to me, like what happens with a good therapist,
06:25 in the sense that you feel confident that you are being
06:29 listened to and that you have a space that seems very warm.
06:34 But also, there's room to explore these things
06:37 that you can't control.
06:39 And I try to create that atmosphere.
06:41 And then someone described my look as that
06:45 of a New York therapist.
06:47 Maybe it's my other soul.
06:49 And that's a compliment.
06:50 I took it as a compliment.
06:51 That's why I'm sharing it with a variety of audiences.
06:54 Is making films therapeutic for you, then?
06:56 No.
06:57 It's more active than therapy.
07:00 That's one of the things that I really came to making.
07:02 This film was thinking of cinema as a kind of action.
07:06 I think I made an action film.
07:08 I think we should use that term more,
07:10 because humans are all volatile.
07:12 Even small actions are actions.
07:13 Yes, if I can consider what I want to do as a filmmaker
07:17 is to create the environment in which actions can
07:20 be observed by the camera.
07:21 And those actions, they're both big and small.
07:24 But the small ones are maybe the experience by the audience
07:27 in the biggest way.
07:28 I'm interested in people behaving badly,
07:30 because I find it very familiar.
07:32 We don't follow our highest ground.
07:35 We follow something that is more animal instinct.
07:38 And those things seem to me the most human.
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