All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on. Ira Sachs More Quotes by Ira Sachs More Quotes From Ira Sachs All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That’s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment. Ira Sachs shifting cinema reality Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema. Ira Sachs cinema gay stories By 1988, I was living in New York myself. Ira Sachs new-york To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those. Ira Sachs rejection pain artist I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way. Ira Sachs distance world thinking The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain. Ira Sachs pain trying character I'm a version of the same person. Ira Sachs The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films. Ira Sachs intimacy film I've worked with non-professional actors, I've worked with movie stars, I've worked with kids, I've worked with older people, and I've found my job as a director is to cast them well and to understand what they need on set to bring the material to life. Ira Sachs movie-star kids people For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional. Ira Sachs individual I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character. Ira Sachs character As a father, I wanted to make a movie that my kids can love. Ira Sachs father kids You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear. Ira Sachs fearless economy decision Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experience I had when I was a kid. Ira Sachs utopia kids thinking People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves. Ira Sachs kind people moving I try not to articulate ideas in the film once I've arrived on the plot and the characters. I believe that if I focus my attention with enough compassion and heart on those things, then other things will be revealed, and that's from the education that I've had from the novel. Ira Sachs heart character believe I have a career now, and I have to say, five years ago I didn't. I'm 50, and you never know what works, but I think part of that is because - in this way that can't be defined but which can be examined - we cannot work alone. Ira Sachs thinking I love a certain kind of acting style that I would call non-American, which tends to be more detail-oriented and less externalized. There's a kind of naturalism that I often find in non-American actors. I also find that quality in the American actors I work with, but I like to bring in those influences creatively. Ira Sachs style quality acting I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy. Ira Sachs comedy tragedy drama To me, honesty and the difficulty of honest communication are at the heart of both my life and my movies. The difficulty of being yourself. Ira Sachs being-yourself communication honesty
