Ira Sachs

“I have to say this is the film that we remade with Little Men. So this is one of two films that Ozu made. This was in the '50s and in the '30s he made another film called I Was Born, But... And they're both about kids who go on strike against their parents. So we took that plot and we wrote our own film, Little Men, and these are better.”

“Francesco Rosi, great, great, great filmmaker who should be in the list of Pasolini, Visconti, Fellini, but no one knows Rosi except thanks to the Walter Reade, I do.”

“This film and The Soft Skin, which you also have somewhere, were both these love triangles that taught me everything I need to know about pain.”

“I have not seen Shoah since I took a class from Shoshana Felman, who wrote a whole book on my class in college. We studied only Shoah for a year and she wrote a paper, Psychoanalysis and Shoah.”

“Do you know there used to be a time in New York when you could see a Samuel Fuller film any day of the week that you wanted at one of the 12 rep houses in this city? There was always showing a Samuel Fuller double feature. Now who's seen Samuel Fuller anymore? You guys, right?”

“I'm working on a Montgomery Clift film and we keep think going back and forth between Raging Bull and All That Jazz as both biopics. Actually, if you think about them, Goodfellas is also a biopic that, and they're each somehow, you kind of because you don't know the person that they're about, you kind of have this freedom of storytelling that is incredible. This film is obviously the manic version of an individual's life.”

“In Love Is Strange, there's we were shooting a scene in a concert hall with John Lithgow and he said to me, in this movie The Magic Flute, Ingmar Bergman begins the film with a series of close-ups of the audience. And I'd never seen the movie, but I thought it was a really great idea. So on the set when we were in production, I stole from Ingmar Bergman, never having seen the movie.”

“Great. I'm going to complete my Rosi, my Rosi collection right here. Thank you.”

“I do not have Sirk. This should be preserved. When I saw Imitation of Life for the first time, I was probably 12 and I watched it in my house. It was like on at night, late in the evening, and my parents were asleep. And I just never having heard of melodrama, never heard hearing of Sirk, but growing up in Memphis and knowing about racism, I wept. I just sat there and I guess it also should have told me that I was a gay man. Like I should have known right then that my future was going to be told in a certain way.”

“I wrote about Playtime when I was in college because I couldn't get a print of Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which is what I wanted to write about, because the only copy was in Gena Rowlands' bathroom and she wouldn't send it to me, though she thought about it.”

“I’m going to start at 3 Women. I worked for Robert Altman for four days. And he was stoned, I will say, and… But what I did for him is I went to his warehouse in Queens and I sorted things out, and I stole a poster of 3 Women, which I still have, but it was one of about seventy-five copies, so I don’t feel bad. But it’s unforgettable. That’s all I would say. It really is one of those films that seems like part of your body after you watch it, so this is a really good one.”

“I love this movie: Night and the City. And I made a movie called Keep the Lights On, and I thought for a while of calling it Night and the City. I also thought of calling it Compulsion, which is, I think, what this movie is about. So, whether it’s gambling or drugs or sex or love or… this film is just fueled with energy of desire and need that is insatiable. I guess it’s one of the best films about addiction, I think, for me.”

“This film and another, I picked Cold Water. These two films together were transformative to a generation of American independent filmmakers living in New York City in the early ’90s. They are cinema as poetry and as pain and as beauty. They were also films about youth, Beau travail in a different way than Cold Water. But they were films that somehow spoke to the yearning of our lives, and I guess I would say that there was this back-and-forth: there was Cassavetes and the influence of Cassavetes on French cinema in the ’90s, and then there was French cinema in the ’90s and its influence on American independent cinema. And this one has a 30-minute sequence in the middle, which is a party that… like the end of this film, these are things that you can’t forget you’ve seen once you’ve seen them.”

“This film and another, I picked Cold Water. These two films together were transformative to a generation of American independent filmmakers living in New York City in the early ’90s. They are cinema as poetry and as pain and as beauty. They were also films about youth, Beau travail in a different way than Cold Water. But they were films that somehow spoke to the yearning of our lives, and I guess I would say that there was this back-and-forth: there was Cassavetes and the influence of Cassavetes on French cinema in the ’90s, and then there was French cinema in the ’90s and its influence on American independent cinema. And this one has a 30-minute sequence in the middle, which is a party that… like the end of this film, these are things that you can’t forget you’ve seen once you’ve seen them.”

“I want to talk a lot about Michael Roemer. He made a series of features, several of which are some of the best American movies made in the 20th century. This is a film… It’s a film about a couple who are together, madly in love, and by the end of the film, something has been destroyed by the environment. It’s a perfect metaphor, in a certain way, for the experience of living in a culture which is hateful and demeaning and destroys something. So this is a film– It’s almost like a Fassbinder film if made by a man like Michael Roemer who survived the Kindertransport, came to America, became a wonderful filmmaker, and made these extremely human films. Nothing but a Man. A great one.”

“This is The Heiress. Amazing is all I would say. There is something about the desire of the central character, Olivia de Havilland, and its failure to be realized which is breathtaking. Again, I weirdly keep coming back to Fassbinder. This is like a Fassbinder film made by William Wyler, based on a Henry James novel.”

“I’ve been in this Closet before, but I cannot believe that I did not speak about The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant or that I did not speak about Rainer Werner Fassbinder at all. Thank you, Richard Meyer, my art historian friend, he quoted this for me, that… that Andy Warhol says all art is copy. And I think probably no one knew that more than Rainer Werner, who was in conversation with the entire history of… of Germany and of cinema in such a beautiful way. It was also this time when there were groups of people who could make art together in a community and over a sustained period. And there was that cohesion and that trust, even if it included violence, which certainly with Fassbinder it did, that was beautiful. I think it’s not dissimilar to what happened in the studio system, it’s not dissimilar to what happened in New York with certain theater companies, or what comes out of these people who commit to each other to make art and beauty collectively. And this is a testament to that.”