With a career spanning more than three decades, Ira Sachs is one of the most acclaimed American independent filmmakers of his generation with work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. Among many accolades, his brooding queer feature, Keep The Lights On, won the Teddy Award at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival, as well as that year’s Outfest Grand Jury Prize, while his family vacation drama Frankie, starring Isabelle Huppert, was nominated for the prestigious Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2019.
Much of his work has explored queer life with sensitivity and nuance, such as his Grand Jury Sundance-nominated feature debut, The Delta, shot in the filmmaker’s hometown of Memphis; Love Is Strange with Alfred Molina and John Lithgow portraying an older gay couple forced to leave their Manhattan apartment and live separately; and most recently the Parisian set Passages, focused on the fallout of an unexpected love triangle starring Adèle Exarchopoulos, Franz Rogowski, and Ben Whishaw.
It was while Sachs was working on Passages that he first encountered Peter Hujar’s Day in book form. Published in 2021, the text is a transcript of a conversation between the late photographer Peter Hujar and his close friend, writer Linda Rosenkrantz, that took place in her Upper East Side apartment on December 19th, 1974. It was part of a larger planned project by Rosenkrantz where she would ask artists to recount in detail how they had spent their previous day. At once quotidian and poignant, even profound, the transcript offers a fascinating window into Hujar’s artistic process and gently urges us to contemplate how we spend the hours and days that make up our own lives.
Inspired to adapt Rosenkrantz’s book for the screen, Sachs saw it an ideal opportunity to continue his collaboration with Whishaw. Recognizing him as a kindred spirit drawn to examining queer artistic New York life of the 1970s, Sachs cast him as Hujar. Starring opposite Whishaw, who gives a layered tour-de-force, is fellow BAFTA and Independent Spirit Award-winning actor Rebecca Hall, who delivers a masterclass in listening with her remarkable performance as Linda Rosenkrantz. The resulting work, shot on 16mm film by cinematographer Alex Ashe, is intimate, beautifully composed, lyrical and riveting.
Away from his work as a filmmaker, Sachs founded the organization Queer|Art in 2009, in recognition of the generation of artists and audiences lost to the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis and the resulting absence of mentors and role models for a new wave of LGBTQ+ creators. Queer|Art’s mission is to highlight and address the fundamental lack of economic and institutional support for LGBTQ+ artists needed to achieve success and visibility for their work.
Following the world premiere of Peter Hujar’s Day at Sundance, and a festival run that included Berlin, New York and London, the film opens in US theaters from Friday, November, 2025. Ahead of the thetrical release, Ira Sachs spoke with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about the initial draw of the text, his approach to shaping it into a screenplay, how he overcame the challenge of making a static extended conversation between two people cinematic, his admiration for Hujar’s work, and his favourite LGBTQ+ culture. With exclusive photography for The Queer Review by Steven Menendez.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: taking you back to when you first read the transcript in book form, what were some of the things that drew you in?
Ira Sachs: “It had qualities of what I love about memoir and cinema and documentary. It was instantly intimate and utterly authentic and also really interesting in terms of what his day looked like, moment to moment, beat to beat. All the details were so layered naturally upon each other, but revealed so much. It’s a small text with a lot of depth and volume. I was really affected by the final images of Peter’s description of his day, which was of him standing by a window in his apartment—a building that I knew, on Second Avenue and 12th Street, above what is now the Village East cinema—listening to the sex workers on the street below in the pre-dawn light of New York City. It struck me as such a cinematic image in terms of time and precision and being alone, but not alone. I felt witness to something that was very moving in that moment.”
“At the time that I read the book, I was working with Ben Whishaw on Passages in Paris and I felt like that he and I could continue and build upon a collaboration which was already meaningful to me. I felt certain we’d both find interest in it, partially because of Peter Hujar and what a great artist he is. Ben and I are also both really invested in, and have an affection for, queer life in New York City. Especially queer artistic life that is risky, aesthetically and artistically. The kind of life that Peter was a hero of as part of a community in which that was valued.”
I love the references to New York geography in the film, like Peter talking about his walk from his place in the East Village over to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment on the Lower East Side to photograph him. It is a city that has transformed in many ways since then, but those buildings are both still there, so we have that connection to history as we walk the streets today.
“When Ben came to town before we started shooting, he and I actually took that walk together. It wasn’t like we learned so much from the walk itself, but we learned more about each other because we were chatting along the way. It was time together in an area that is very human and the movie itself relishes the pleasure of conversation and spending long hours with your friends. For me as a gay man, Peter and Linda’s friendship feels really analogous to the particular relationships that I have with a few of the women in my life, both heterosexual and queer. They are women who I feel really loved by and something you can be certain about is that Linda really loved, and still does love, Peter.”
I read a recent interview with Linda in The New York Times where she was reflecting on that relationship. She thought that Peter probably didn’t have any other friends like her, a straight woman with a domestic life, and said that he would visit her on his way to go cruising.
“Yeah, probably would have been in Carl Schurz Park, a cruising site near where Linda lived in Yorktown on the Upper East Side. I think there’s something lovely about how Peter and Linda are together and also how Ben and Rebecca made that so visceral in their performances.”
In terms of dialogue in the script, Ben had something like 55 pages, whereas Rebecca only had around three, but when watching the film it feels far more balanced than that because she is so actively listening to him.
“Rebecca is an actor who also works as a writer in her acting. She is very detailed in the subtext that she can convey without being literal. I think she really understood, almost more than I did, how this film was a kind of love story. It’s a love story about a friendship between two people who cherished each other. I think that quality, as well as Rebecca’s love for Ben, including her deep curiosity and her warmth, brought so much to the film. We added quite a lot of action that wasn’t in the text, such as her making tea, giving Peter cookies, and peeling oranges. But, in the original text, Linda does really worry about his smoking. Rebecca took a few clues and created something very dense in her depiction of Linda listening and just being with Peter.”
What were your guiding principles as you set about writing the screenplay based on the original transcripts, which included some elements that had been edited out for the published book?
“I brought back pretty much 99% of the original transcript. The conversation about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford that Peter and Linda have on the bed towards the end of the movie was not in the book, so that was recovered from the dustbin of the archive and brought into the light again. I’m happy that’s been salvaged because I really like that part. There were a couple of things that I left out, including something that Linda said about Suzi Quatro. It wasn’t terrible, but I felt like it didn’t need to be in there. I asked Linda about it and she said, ‘Oh, I’d rather you not include it.’ I was interested in putting back pretty much everything, but ultimately, as I edited the film, certain things came out because they didn’t work for the flow of it.”
There’s a lot of humour that comes up very naturally in the way that it does in a conversation between friends.
“Ben and Rebecca really found the humour in it themselves. I didn’t direct them by saying, ‘this is funny’ or ‘this is not’. As performers, they were able to do incredibly acrobatic but light translation of these words into something more resonant than just text.”
You’ve said that the film is about photography, could you expand on what you mean by that?
“It was challenging to figure out how to make a film about two people talking visual and cinematic. The way that I did that was by breaking this probably physically very simple conversation that two people had over a table, into 26 scenes that occur over the course of a day and setting those scenes in around 12 different locations within this imagined apartment space. Breaking it apart in that way meant that I began to think about how these characters look at different times of day in different rooms.”
“I photographed two stand-ins for Ben and Rebecca on location with my cinematographer, Alex Ashe. Over the course of three or four days, Alex and I were able to look at them in different light and in different spaces. That was where the film reconnected to what Peter does without directly using anything from his images. There is an attention to the impact of light and space on form and narrative and it becomes a series of cinematic portraits, room by room, time by time.”
There’s some really beautiful use of natural light in the film that draws your attention to it in a way.
“I wanted the film to be pleasurable cinematically and I think that’s something that the photography gives you. It allows you to relish in the pleasure of what light does to film. That’s why I chose to shoot on 16 millimeter.”
What do you admire about Peter Hujar’s photography?
“I love the curiosity and the respect that he shows his subjects. For me, any great artist has some quality of being a great analyst and they’re able to look with such clarity—not only without judgment—but also without speaking too much. They give space to the being in front of them. I love that about Peter’s work.”
I found the part of Peter’s day where he describes meeting Ginsberg really enlightening in terms of what it reveals about his approach to his subjects as a photographer. He recalls trying to make a connection with him and then feeling somewhat frustrated by the end result in the dark room.
“I think the window into Peter’s questioning of himself and his success in creating one singular work of art is rare and special. It is not something that we often have access to. It’s hard to write about the making of art and somehow, almost by accident, that is what Linda successfully did with the concept of asking artists what they did the day before and in speaking to an artist like Peter who was able to describe it with such fine detail. I also find his lack of confidence very comforting.”
The way money comes into what he says is fascinating too, as he is trying to make a living from his art.
“I think any artist who doesn’t take money seriously, however much they have, is missing one of the great areas of human life and conflict. What you see here is that Peter couldn’t divorce himself from questions of economy, and neither could any of his subjects. The great 19th century novelists really understood how character is defined by economic narratives and I think that’s what this is to some degree. This portrait of Peter is really an economic narrative as much as anything else.”
As you were preparing to shoot, did you go back and watch any films that are set in one location?
“Yes, I was specifically liberated by a few films from the 1960s including Portrait of Jason, a great documentary that Shirley Clarke made in her apartment at the Chelsea Hotel where she filmed Jason Holliday for about twelve hours over one night until the early hours of the morning. The way that film uses cuts and ellipses is really wonderful. I went back to another film that was shot at the Chelsae Hotel, Andy Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl with Edie Sedgwick. I also looked at Jim McBride’s My Girlfriend’s Wedding, which features Jim and his girlfriend, Clarissa. Essentially, it’s just him just looking at her, but the day passes and the location changes. They’re on a bed at one point, then they’re outside on a terrace overlooking New York City. Those films really gave me a way of moving through time in these very simple setups that saved my ass.”
I thought you might mention Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
“Well, I certainly did look at that too. In fact, there’s a shot in our film which is a direct lift from Petra. It’s where Rebecca goes out of focus. I was trying to take pleasure in everything that I love about movies. So there’s a shot that’s directly from The Mouth Agape by Maurice Pialat of two people lying on a bed in profile with a yellow background. I relished the enjoyment of making the movie and I feel like that’s one way to make a film. I don’t know if it’s the right one, but if I feel love and deep pleasure in the making of it, then maybe the audience will feel that as well.”
What was your intention behind drawing our attention to the fact that we are watching a film, which you do in various ways? We hear “quiet on set” and see the clapper board at the beginning; later you include a shot of the boom microphone and some of the crew; while there is a recurring fade to white thats reminds us that we’re watching something that was shot on film.
“It was a way to have a conversation with an audience in which I was I was announcing that this is a film made in the present time. This is not a film that’s about recreating the past. It’s about playing with the past—images, ideas, and text of the past—but it’s a film made in the present moment with me and Ben Wishaw and Rebecca Hall and Alex Ashe and the costume designers, Eric Daman and Khadija Zeggaï, and the rest of the crew. We were creating something together and the process of making things has been one of the narrative through lines of my work since I started making films. The other thing is, I like the audience not to be too lulled into comfort. I want to say, ‘Okay, you’re in…’, then ‘Now you’re out’, and then ‘You’re going to go back in.’ But if you’re pulled out, what does it feel like to go back in? Do you feel different because you had that rupture? Sometimes time can be a rupture, sometimes a cut can be a rupture, and in this case, the artifice of the production was a kind of rupture.”
Finally, a broad question for you, what’s favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that has had an impact on you and resonated with you?
“Last year, I read every word that Andrew Holleran has written. If people know him as a novelist then they tend to know him for Dancer From the Dance, but my God, what a master, what an incredible writer. I really admire his singular devotion to the most intimate and specific qualities of his own life as a gay man at a certain time. It’s not that he’s only writing about that, he is writing about that in a way that I find magnificent. The fact that he isn’t recognized as one of the great artists of the 20th century says a lot, let’s put it that way, because word by word, sentence by sentence, image by image, feeling by feeling, I don’t know any better American writer than Andrew Holleran.”
What made you focus on his work last year?
“His most recent book, The Kingdom of Sand, came out a few years ago and I was blown away by its depth. It’s really out of time, it’s so deep. I was like, ‘Wow, who is this guy?’ So I went back to The Beauty of Men and Grief. I wanted to read every word he’d written. I think part of the motivation was actually that I had dismissed him as a gay writer. I was part of the larger cultural feeling about him in that way. But in marginalizing someone, you marginalize their talent and their value, even as you try to counter that in other ways in your life. I was shocked by how good his work is.”
By James Kleinmann
Peter Hujar’s Day opens in theaters on Friday, November 7th, 2025 from Janus Films.
Really Interesting interview
brilliant question