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

Categorized in : People Kids Movie Star

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.

shifting cinema reality

Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.

cinema gay stories

By 1988, I was living in New York myself. by Ira Sachs

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

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.

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.

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.

pain trying character

I'm a version of the same person. by Ira Sachs

I'm a version of the same person.

The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.

intimacy film

For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

individual

I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the... by Ira Sachs

I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character.

character

As a father, I wanted to make a movie that my kids can love. by Ira Sachs

As a father, I wanted to make a movie that my kids can love.

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.

fearless economy decision

Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experi... by Ira Sachs

Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experience I had when I was a kid.

utopia kids thinking

People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move toward... by Ira Sachs

People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

being-yourself communication honesty

I can be incredibly angry with someone, I can be incredibly critical, but... I went through a period where I was reading a lot of memoirs of guards in holocausts and serial killers. I like to understand why people do bad things.

holocaust reading people