Tag: Ira Sachs

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Strange Road to “Love Is Strange”

It’s January 30, 2005, in Park City, Utah, the last day of the Sundance Film Festival, and the greatest single day in Memphis film history. Craig Brewer, having just accepted the Audience Award for Hustle & Flow, has retuned to his seat just in time to hear the winner of the Jury Award announced: 40 Shades of Blue, directed by Ira Sachs.

“When they announced Ira, I embarrassed myself. I let out this scream, and I leapt off of my seat,” Brewer recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. Two Memphis filmmakers, with two Memphis films, just took the two top prizes at Sundance.”

It wasn’t Sachs’ first Sundance. In 1997, The Delta, his coming-of-age story of a gay teen in Memphis, had screened at the festival to great acclaim. But the indie film business being what it is, it took him eight years to get back to Sundance, coincidentally the same year as Brewer, his friend and fellow Memphian.

“Out of all of the filmmakers I know, he’s my hero,” Brewer says. “He’s held to his style through a challenging time in independent cinema. The individual auteur is not rewarded in this global marketplace.”

* * *

It’s 10 a.m. on August 22, 2014. Ira Sachs sits in his Greenwich Village apartment as the first commercial screening of his new film Love Is Strange is happening in New York City. “It feels great,” he says. “It’s been a long road to get here, but now it’s in other people’s hands. It’s with the audience.”

Sachs’ new film has been gathering buzz on the festival circuit ever since its debut at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where Memphis filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox was in the audience “I saw about 10 to 12 movies that were incredible, but only one of them got a standing ovation, and that was Love Is Strange,” he says. “As a director trying to make movies about queer culture, Love Is Strange is one of the most important and affecting films I have ever seen.”

Sachs has been gently deflecting this kind of hyperbolic praise for his film for the past nine months. “Real personal reactions to this movie are what I was hoping for, and what I am seeing,” he says. “I think people go into it expecting one thing, but then they find that it’s a portrait of a family, and in that way it is a portrait of all of our lives. It’s very much about the different stages of life we go through and how love looks differently in each one. I feel very differently about the possibilities of love as a middle-aged person than I did when I was 20.”

* * *

Like Brewer, Sachs’ Sundance win resulted in the opportunity to work with a much bigger budget. Sach’s 2007 film, Married Life, was a finely crafted, 1940s period piece starring Chris Cooper, Rachel McAdams, and Pierce Brosnan. It cost $12 million to make, but earned less than $3 million at the box office.

“I had to reinvent myself,” Sachs says. “You have to keep assessing what is possible and recalibrating your strategy about how to keep going.”

Sachs’ 2012 film, Keep the Lights On, couldn’t have been more different. It was an abandonment of the Hitchcockian style Sachs toyed with in Married Life and a return to his indie roots. The raw, unflinching story of a doomed love between a filmmaker and a drug addict spiraling out of control was as harrowing a bit of autobiography as has ever hit a screen.

“Each film is really an expression of where I am at that moment in my life,” Sachs says. “The movie is somehow a way to translate that into a story. I began working on Love Is Strange in January 2012, with my co-writer Mauricio Zacharias. That was a point when I went from living alone in my New York apartment to living with my husband, our two babies, their mom, and occasionally visiting in-laws. So the idea of a multi-generational family story told inside a cramped New York apartment seemed like a good idea.”

* * *

Alfred Molina first heard of Love Is Strange when his agent gave him the script. The 61-year-old actor, whose big break came playing Indiana Jones’ ill-fated guide in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, has been in comedies and dramas, films large and small. But he knew this little $1.5 million film was going to be something special.

“It’s a story about how love survives,” he says. “Anyone who is in love, or anyone who has fallen in love, regardless of who or how, can relate to that.”

The story opens with George (Molina) and Ben (John Lithgow), a couple whose easy rapport speaks of a long and fulfilling relationship, getting ready in the morning. After decades together, it’s a day neither thought they would ever see: Their wedding day.

“The refreshing thing from an audience’s point of view is that whenever you see love stories, it’s almost always at the younger end of the age spectrum,” Molina says. “It’s couples struggling to find themselves, to find each other, to find their place in the world. But these characters are in the autumn of their years, and after many, many years of a committed relationship, they suddenly find themselves in crisis.”

George is a music teacher at a Manhattan Catholic high school. His homosexuality has been an “open secret” for years, but now that he and Ben, a 71 year old who has retired to his painting, have made it official, his boss can no longer shield him from the diocese, and he is unceremoniously fired.

In the hands of another writer/director, that would be the story: a gay couple, finally granted their right to wed, continues their fight against the forces of intolerance and discrimination. There would be protests and perhaps a climactic court scene with George and Ben giving stirring speeches about tolerance and acceptance, ending with a favorable verdict and applause. But that’s not Love Is Strange.

“In real life, people don’t have those big scenes,” says Molina. “You never have those cathartic moments where you let everything out and you make a great speech that encompasses your life. That’s why Ira’s so brilliant, because he’s not afraid to be truthful about it.”

Sachs says he takes inspiration from Italian Neo-Realist filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni. Working in postwar Italy with very few resources, Antonioni’s films concentrated on the mundane details that would be cut from a Hollywood production in favor of sweeping but artificially heightened drama. “We have very dramatic lives without necessitating melodrama,” Sachs says. “The things that happen to us in the course of our lives are major, even if they’re described in a minor key.”

Without George’s income to support them, the couple is forced to sell their apartment and separate. Ben moves in with his nephew Eliot (Darren E. Burrows) and his wife Kate (Marisa Tomei), sleeping on the bottom bunk bed in his great nephew Joey’s (Charlie Tahan) room. George crashes with some friends, a pair of gay policemen who love to play Dungeons and Dragons and throw parties.

“He uses the injustice as a device to explore the human condition in other areas,” Brewer says. “Love Is Strange is probably Ira’s most subversive film because it’s so accessible. It moves you on a human level, and doesn’t hit you over the head with politics. That’s what makes it so compelling. In a way, it quickly stops being a movie that explores gay issues and becomes a movie about old love and commitment, and especially about what some people are having to face in this current economy.”

After reading the script, Molina was the first actor to sign on to the project. “It went through all of the usual vicissitudes and stumbles along the way that independent film is subject to,” he says. “But I stayed with it because I liked the script so much.”

* * *

Sachs says the character Ben was inspired by Memphis artist Ted Rust. “Ted was my great uncle Ben Goodman’s partner for about 45 years. I had the opportunity to really get to know him well. He’s a guy who, at 98, began his last sculpture, which was of a young teenager with a backpack on. At 99, he died, and the piece remained unfinished. But to me, the idea of a man pursuing his passion and creativity until the last minute seemed extraordinary.”

In Love Is Strange, Ben finds solace in his painting, even as the life he has built with George crumbles around him. “It’s about the uncompleted sense of possibilities that an artist, or any of us, can have. It’s something we can strive for,” Sachs says.

As Sachs struggled to raise money for his film, he managed to land a great cast. Tomei signed on for the important role of Kate, a writer whose long-suffering kindness is tested when Ben moves in. For Ben, Sachs landed the legendary Lithgow. “I brought Lithgow in, with the approval and encouragement of Molina,” the director says. “They had been friends for 20 years in the same social circle in Los Angeles. Once we started working, they were like kids who met at summer camp who had been reunited. They had so much history to talk about, and so much common life between them.”

Once on set, the chemistry between the two lead actors was effortlessly real. “I think the fact that we’ve been friends for so long certainly helped,” Molina says. “We didn’t have to spend any time creating a shorthand. We made each other laugh a lot.”

Sach’s on-set technique is unusual. The actors come to the set with their lines memorized, the scene is blocked out, and the cameras roll. “Everything is emotionally improvised,” Sachs says. “The text is there, and they stick to it, but we’ve never rehearsed before we start shooting, and they’ve never heard another actor say a line. It’s a strategy I’ve worked with ever since the days of 40 Shades of Blue. Film is really about the filming of what’s happening in a moment, and it doesn’t need to be repeated. I find that you get the most spontaneous performances when you don’t talk too much before hand.”

From the beginning of his career, actors have responded enthusiastically to Sachs’ direction. “He creates a very pleasant, very respectful atmosphere on a set,” says Molina. “He’s not a shouter. He’s not standing behind a video screen screaming ‘Do it again!’ He’s very quiet and unobtrusive.”

If, like most people, your image of Molina is of Doctor Octopus in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and your image of Lithgow is the manic alien invader from Third Rock from the Sun, you’re in for a shock. Molina’s George is the breadwinner, quietly struggling through repeated indignity to find a place where they can recreate their lives, until one wrenching scene where he shows up on Eliot’s and Kate’s door to cry into Ben’s arms. Lithgow’s Ben is kind, centered, and empathetic, but his immersion in his art makes him myopic. Together, they’re beautiful, inspiring, and heartbreakingly real.

“I have yet to see a performance this year that bests either Molina or Lithgow,” says Brewer.

* * *

Sachs’ first movie was a short called Vaudeville, about a group of traveling performers. “All of my films have been about friendships, but in the context of community,” he says. “To me, you can’t separate the two.”

Love Is Strange

Love Is Strange‘s New York setting provided many natural details. George’s hard-partying cop friends are inspired by a couple who were living upstairs from Boris Torres, Sachs’ husband, when they first met. “This kind of Tales of the City communal living is very wonderful and how we get by in our lives,” Sachs says. “The most important thing to me in New York is the relationship and the family I create for myself — both the biological family and otherwise.”

Sachs says Memphis’ contribution was more subtle, and more profound. “Memphis is a real inspiration. You think about the great music and art that’s come out of that town. What’s more entertaining than the Staple Singers or Isaac Hayes? But they have emotional depth. Jim Dickinson is a perfect example. He’s like Falstaff. He’s a perfect mix of drama and comedy.”

Love Is Strange is a dramatic film structured like a comedy, starring three actors with impressive comedic chops. Sachs compares it to 1930s comedies of remarriage, such as It Happened One Night, where a separated couple struggles to reunite. “It’s the structure of the Shakespearian comedy. I felt really fortunate to work with these extraordinary comic actors in the movie. It is a dramatic film, but there is a lot of lightness, because of the genius timing and effortlessness of actors like Marisa Tomei and John Lithgow. They brought a little levity to serious situations.”

Lithgow and Tomei are two actors who, like the late Robin Williams, can swing easily between comedy and drama. “I think it’s their timing, and I think it’s very lifelike to bring humor into a situation. It’s one of the shades of experience. It’s also pleasurable. This is maybe the most entertaining movie that I’ve made. That doesn’t mean it’s less deep, it just means people have an easier relationship with it. They’re happy to be there.”

* * *

Where Sachs’ Keep the Lights On was a sexually explicit film of passionate love gone bad, Love Is Strange is a meditation on long-term love, with nothing more sexual than a cuddle in a bunk bed between two fully clothed old men. And yet, somehow, both films have the same rating from the MPAA: R. Why? Is the mere fact that the lead characters are gay enough to earn an R rating in 2014?

“It’s totally unjustified,” says Morgan Jon Fox. “It’s a sham. It’s absurd that there are films that are far more violent or that have content that is far more detrimental that do not have an R rating.”

Brewer first saw the film before it was rated at the Los Angeles Film Festival. “I didn’t know it was going to be an R. What is the cause for the R rating? There’s nothing in that movie that is vulgar.”

Still of Charlie Tahan, Darren E. Burrows, and John Lithgow in Love Is Strange

Sachs is puzzled by the inappropriate rating, but remains, as always, unflappable.”It doesn’t upset me, except for the fact that this is a film about family, and it seems like it’s shutting off people who would get a lot from it. For better or worse, it’s a family film.”

Fox is more blunt in his assessment of the politics surrounding the rating. “To see two adults who are happy, who have been in a relationship forever, these are the kinds of role models that young queer kids need. But it’s so clear what they’re warning parents about, and that’s love. Warning: Your child may be influenced by love.”

* * *

“We’ve had terrific feedback,” Molina says. “The response from critics has been very positive, and audiences have loved it. I think it proves very clearly that there’s an audience out there for movies that are a bit more sensitive, a bit more challenging. It’s been very gratifying to see how people have responded to it.”

When Love Is Strange comes to Memphis for a premiere with the director on Friday, September 26th, it does so with the wind at its back. It’s currently sitting at 98 percent positive reviews on the film critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes; its $1.5 million budget was paid back with foreign rights sales at the Berlin Film Festival before it had even opened in America; and it has been very successful in limited release.

But it is the film’s message of love that Sachs says he wants his own two toddlers, Viva and Felix (“‘Life’ and ‘Happiness’, which they are.”), to take with them in life. “I was in Memphis a few weeks ago, and on Saturday I said, ‘Let’s have a potluck’, and on Sunday I had 10 pies and four batches of fried chicken. That’s love.”

And not at all strange.

Love Is Strange premieres Friday, September 26th at Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill. Ira Sachs will be in attendance for a Q&A.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Only Two Nights Left to See Ira Sachs’ Keep the Lights On

Memphis native filmmaker Ira Sachs’ latest film, Keep the Lights On runs through Thursday, November 15th at Malco’s Studio on the Square.

The Teddy Award-winning film chronicles the relationship between a gay Manhattan man and a closeted lawyer as they experience friendship, love, and then crippling addiction. Check out the trailer.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Keep the Lights On is a major work of indie/gay cinema.

After winning a major award at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and debuting locally at the Indie Memphis Film Festival last weekend, Memphis-raised filmmaker Ira Sachs’ fourth feature film, Keep the Lights On, begins a full run this week at Studio on the Square.

The ambitious, autobiographical relationship drama tracks the troubled, decade-long romance between a couple of New Yorkers: filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt, recently nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award for best breakthrough actor) and Paul (Zachary Booth), an initially closeted lawyer who is also hiding a serious drug addiction. It’s an unflinching, almost diaristic film in which Sachs digs into his own recent romantic history.

This transparency manifests itself in some extremely frank material involving drugs and sex, but these scenes make the impact they do in part because, like everything in Keep the Lights On, they’re grounded in feelings of love and longing, with a palpable emotional intimacy and with a heft that’s somewhat new for Sachs, whose previous films (The Delta, Sundance winner Forty Shades of Blue, and Married Life) have depicted smaller stories in tighter time frames.

Keep the Lights On has been called a “landmark” film in terms of gay cinema, and part of that might be the film’s thrilling combination of frankness and lack of self-consciousness about how “gay” plays in a straight world. It doesn’t make allowances for any potential audience discomfort in the manner of, for instance, something like Brokeback Mountain.

Also fresh is the way in which Sachs weaves elements of gay culture — the artwork of Sachs’ husband, Boris Torres; a soundtrack of songs from late New York musician Arthur Russell; a dive into gay film history via Erik’s documentary on lost filmmaker Avery Willard — seamlessly into his love story. Even the against-the-grain decision to shoot on 16mm film seams to tap into a certain subterranean cultural history.

Keep the Lights On has been compared to last year’s gay indie romance, Weekend, which was a good film. But Keep the Lights On is bigger, bolder, and more richly cinephilic than that. Its streets-of-New-York vibe echoes Scorsese. Its blunt intimacy and homemade quality — partly shot in Sachs’ own New York apartment — suggest indie maverick John Cassavetes. Its visual texture and bruising romanticism remind me of Hong Kong great Wong Kar-Wai (Happy Together, In the Mood for Love). It’s not for all tastes, by any stretch, but it’s a significant film.

Keep the Lights On

Opening Friday, November 9th

Studio on the Square

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Indie Memphis Thursday: Big Star, Craig Brewer, Sun Don’t Shine

Kentucker Audley on our cover this week.

  • Kentucker Audley on our cover this week.

The 15th Indie Memphis Film Festival kicks today with a limited slate before opening up with wall-to-wall action tomorrow.

You can check out my cover story in this week’s paper on Memphis-connected filmmakers Ira Sachs and Kentucker Audley, who are both involved with multiple films at this year’s festival, most notably new features — Sachs’ Keep the Lights On and Audley’s Open Five 2 — that are provocatively personal. I also touch on a quartet of selections rooted in Memphis cultural history, including the two highest-profile screenings tonight. Separately, colleagues Chris Davis and Greg Akers join me to highlight a handful of potentially overlooked festival selections.

The gala screening tonight of Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (Playhouse on the Square, 6:30 p.m.), the fine new documentary portrait of the great Memphis ’70s band, is sold out, but there’s plenty more to choose from.

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Ira Sachs Returns to Sundance with Keep the Lights On

Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth in KEEP THE LIGHTS ON

  • Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth in KEEP THE LIGHTS ON

FIlmmaker Ira Sachs is headed back to Sundance. Sachs, a native Memphian and Central High graduate who lives in New York wrote and directed Forty Shades of Blue, the festival’s 2005 Grand Jury Prize winner. He returns to Park City with Keep the Lights On, a just-completed drama about a long-term relationship between two men that’s rocked by secrets and addiction.

Though shot in New York Keep the Lights On is tangentially related to Forty Shades as it’s a fictionalized account of events in the filmmaker’s life that occurred while he was in Memphis shooting the film.

111 feature films were selected from more than 4000 submissions to screen at Sundance, 2012. Keep the Lights On It’s is one of 16 films selected in the U.S. dramatic feature category.

Memphians Adam Hohenberg (also a producer of Forty Shades of Blue) and Iddo Patt are among the producers.

“The film is about relationships as they actually are with all their complexities and contradictions, instead of how they are usually depicted in most mainstream Hollywood movies,” says Hohenberg who hopes the film will premiere in Memphis next fall.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Home Again

A Central High School graduate who shot his first two feature films in Mempis — The Delta, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996, and Forty Shades of Blue, which won the Grand Jury Prize there nine years later — Ira Sachs ventured to Vancouver last year to shoot his third film, Married Life, a period thriller and intimate human drama set in the late 1940s and shot with an estimated $12 million budget.

Sachs, who was raised in East Memphis, where his mother still lives, will be in town this week to celebrate the local debut of Married Life, which pairs the indie-identified filmmaker with a heavyweight Hollywood cast: Academy Award winner Chris Cooper, emerging ingénue Rachel McAdams, former James Bond Pierce Brosnan, and prolific character actress Patricia Clarkson.

Married Life, in which Cooper plays a man having an affair who decides to kill his wife to save her the embarrassment of divorce, evokes such 1940s Hollywood classics as Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and Woman in the Window and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt, but there’s nothing postmodern about it. It’s not about those movies so much as it’s modeled after them. “It’s not an homage,” Sachs says with a laugh, “but kind of an exploitation.”

Since the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last September, Sachs has traveled around the world showing it. “I’ve played the film in Toronto and in Rio and in Dubai, and I have seen that there is a kind of ease with which people connect to the story and the characters, whatever their perspective is,” Sachs says.

This month, the film goes into theatrical release. Sachs talked to the Flyer from his New York home in advance of his trip back to Memphis this week.

Flyer: There was a nine-year gap between your first feature, The Delta in 1996, and your second feature, Forty Shades of Blue in 2005, but only a three-year gap between Forty Shades and Married Life. Can we assume that this was an easier film to get made?

Ira Sachs: It was an easier movie to get made. But I also think the second film is a particularly challenging one for independent filmmakers to get off the ground. The first one you can do with credit cards and family. The second one is like real money. Also, Forty Shades of Blue was what could technically be called an art film, which is a dying breed. Married Life was written, constructed, and made with movie stars in mind, and I think having a cast involved is really what makes financers interested.

Married Life is adapted from a 1950s pulp novel. Were you inspired by the book or did you set out looking for this kind of material?

Back in 2001, I had spent a summer reading old pulp fiction, looking for something to adapt. I had, in the month before, watched a lot of Joan Crawford movies and film noir and [Alfred] Hitchcock.

I was struck by how those films were great entertainments — larger-than-life, over-the-top stories — and also able to speak to me personally when I watched them, almost on the level of metaphor. You know, at that point, films were still about what happened in peoples’ homes. And I think now most of those kinds of stories are seen on television, not in the movies. Movies [now] are really about escape. And I understand that. I go to movies too. So [the goal] was to make a film that has the pleasure of escape while speaking to something truer or more complicated underneath.

I found this great pulp fiction, an out-of-print British mystery novel called Five Roundabouts to Heaven, which was written by a man named John Bingham. And I loved the book. I loved its frankness about relationships.

The Delta and Forty Shades of Blue were both original screenplays that were rooted, at least in part, in autobiography. The fact that you were interested in doing something that was more period and genre …. is that what led you to outside source material?

I think that all my films are rooted in autobiography. I think I bring a lot of what I’ve experienced in my own relationships into this film — the notion of what you share and don’t share with people you love and also an examination of a certain kind of co-dependency. There’s a narcissism to Chris Cooper’s character that I relate to very personally. So I think that it’s an emotionally autobiographical film, I guess you’d say. And for me, it’s also important to note that although the film is called Married Life, as a gay man, for me the term “married life” reflects not the institution but the experience of being in a long-term, intimate relationship.

Initially, Chris Cooper’s character seems to be the protagonist, but over time the audience identification shifts across the four main characters.

That was one of the challenges of the movie and why I think it’s unusual in terms of today’s movies. In Hollywood, they call it “the rooting interest,” and you need to decide both in terms of making movies and marketing them — who the audience is going to root for. For me, I’m more interested in a democratic approach to characters, which allows you to root in different moments for each of them because there is a common empathy for everyone in the story. [Robert] Altman is the great example of a democratic style of moviemaking. He’s comfortable with sharing the identification. That’s also what I think makes it a suspense film. Emotionally, the audience has a kind of suspense about what they want to happen, because [their identification] is shifting. And I think that’s kind of fun.

Once the plot is set in motion and the tension builds, the real intrigue is how everything is going to end. A lot of movies like this in the ’40s or ’50s tended to have tidy endings, sometimes tragic, as in Scarlet Street. You’re going away from that here.

Justin Fox Burks

I think that’s what makes this movie modern and also what makes it different from its source, the book. And it’s also why the visual language changes, because at the end the movie breaks out of its convention and becomes something different. For me, what it becomes is a humanist film about intimate life, and that’s ultimately what I’m interested in. At the same time, the audience can enjoy it for its primary function, which is as entertainment, a kind of roller coaster of who’s going to do what to whom when.

Let’s talk about the casting process. With The Delta you used unknown actors, and Forty Shades of Blue was written with Rip Torn in mind. How did this cast come together?

I cast Chris Cooper first. I needed to fill one of the four corners of the ensemble to figure out how to fill the others in a way that made sense. And Chris is someone who could make a character who does some really bad things still likable and still knowable. I knew Rachel [McAdams] from Red-Eye. She’s really great in that movie. She has so much going on just under the surface of her face, which makes her amazing to watch.

I thought Patricia Clarkson needed a part where she could be really sensual. She tends to be in these character parts, and I knew her a bit and thought there was another side to her. And she’s probably the character the audience identifies with most. I think a lot of women are happy to see a woman over 40 be carnal and frank and honest in a way we don’t see very often but which is true to today and also to the 1940s.

And Pierce [Brosnan] I knew from The Matador. I had never seen him as James Bond. I had seen his humor, but I hadn’t seen the level of craft he has as an actor. At the end of the day, he’s the one who provides the film with its tone. There’s a very specific wry, knowing but also hungry kind of need in his performance that gives the film its tension.

Did the success of Forty Shades of Blue, particularly in terms of its actors — Dina Korzun was nominated for an Independent Spirit award and Rip Torn got rave reviews — help you corral a cast of this caliber?

Each of these actors wanted to see Forty Shades of Blue before they would decide to be in the film, and I think what they saw in Forty Shades was that I could make them look good, that I could make a movie. They needed to know that. I think they responded to the script also, but an actor agreeing to do a movie is really trusting the director not to embarrass them at the end of the day. Forty Shades of Blue gave them that confidence.

How was the experience for you different, working with such a high-profile group of actors?

It wasn’t different. You know, I directed my first play at the Memphis Children’s Theatre when I was 16 — Our Town. And I feel like I learned then that I liked the nature of collaborative performance. I like being in charge, but I also like learning from the people I’m working with. And I’m not a kid anymore. By the time I made this movie, I’d been working in film for 20 years, and it felt very organic to be with these people.

Are you working on another project?

I am. I’m working on another script with Oren [Moverman] called The Goodbye People. It’s an adaptation of two novels by the writer Gavin Lambert, and it’s a drama set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s. It’s about love and sex and drugs and cults and the difficulty of not falling off the rails.

When did you get to the point of thinking, This is my career. This is what I do now?

I think between The Delta and Forty Shades of Blue I never stopped thinking that this was what I was going to do, but it began to seem like perhaps it was just a conceptual project. I had so many pieces of paper and scripts and things that were all about being a filmmaker, but I wasn’t a filmmaker anymore, it felt like. I feel now that I’m making movies and hopefully will make another one soon.

Watching your career and Craig Brewer’s, you get a sense of how hard it can be to get movies made. It seems like there’s more work getting a production started than actually making the film.

I really embrace, and I think Craig does as well, that producing is intrinsically part of directing. You can’t actually separate the two. I probably spend 80 percent of my time trying to get things made, but that is directing. That’s never been untrue.

Married Life was shot in Vancouver?

It was shot in Vancouver, but I truly think it was inspired by Chickasaw Gardens.

Did you grow up in Chickasaw Gardens?

I grew up around Galloway, but my mother grew up in Chickasaw Gardens. And I think this film is inspired by my grandparents’ generation and the people I grew up with in Memphis. The club where Harry and Richard meet at the beginning of the movie in my mind was the Petroleum Club. The house on the street in my mind was near the lake in Chickasaw Gardens. There was a certain kind of reference to my own memories of Memphis that I think I kept in mind while making the film.

Do you think you’ll ever film a project in Memphis again?

Definitely. The worst part about the movie was not being in Memphis and not having that deep connection to the people I was working with and the town I was working in that I’m used to having.

The script you’re working on now wouldn’t make sense in Memphis, right?

No, it won’t be in Memphis. But there are a couple of possibilities I keep playing in my head, and I will definitely make more movies in Memphis — if allowed back.

You haven’t lived in Memphis for a couple of decades. How can you still feel so grounded here when you’ve been gone so long?

Well, I’ve made two movies there. I’ve lived there as an adult. I go back a couple of times a year. But mostly it’s because you never leave. [Pauses] Memphis is the only city in the world where I’m very interested in what happens at every shopping center that I used to go to growing up. What’s happening with Poplar Plaza? Did that liquor store on Highland close? What happened to the bookstore? For some reason, I still care about all these kinds of things as [part of] my city.