Ira Sachs Quotes

I realize I have strength as an artist and professional by embracing my difference instead of what makes me the same.

My films might have been queer - because I was - but they were not gay.

It's easy to make a film, but it's hard to make a career of being a filmmaker.

You can understand why good publicists go on to run distribution companies: because the creativity involved is complex and nuanced.

Most simply but profoundly, I chose to live an honest life, which I think as a gay person is not a given.

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

Every time you make a film, you create a world. You make decisions about sets and costumes, and you create a universe connected to reality, but not reality itself.

I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.'

'How to Survive a Plague' is history-telling at its best. It's a film I'll show my two children, now toddlers, when they are old enough to understand. It's a movie that I cannot forget.

Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job.

Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York.

New York grabbed me too hard, as did adulthood.

Every film is hard to fund.

When you live with people you know them better than you care to.

I've been close to two or three couples, gay and straight, who have been together for 45 years.

I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years.

I conveniently was not accepted to film school, which I applied to in 1987, and so I decided I would become a filmmaker instead of a student.

I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.

Intimacy is something to be cherished, and intimacy is not something to be afraid of.

I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.

A lot of what I think I do as a director is try to give everything over to the actor. So I disappear.

By 15, I was lucky enough to find the theater.

Without community events like NewFest, I don't think we'd have a queer cinema in America.

Secrets make for good drama, and revealing the hidden truths and contradictions of life is, for me, one of the most exciting aspects of making movies.

I don't rehearse with my actors ... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on ... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed ... so you film reactions; you don't create them.

What I loved about 'Goodfellas' is that it's a film about bad behavior - but told with great energy and without judgment - but it doesn't actually shy away from the consequences of that behavior in the characters' lives, which I think is similar in 'Keep the Lights On.'

What's interesting to me is the distinction between my old life and my present life.

I've been hiding crucial events in my life since I was 13.

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

Capturing intimacy is pretty much the only thing I'm interested in. That's what excites me and what I find beautiful in movies personally - that almost obscene sense that we shouldn't be this close to these people. I find that very inviting and meaningful as an audience member.

As a filmmaker, you realize that places have character based on their history as much as a face does or an actor does.

I started making movies in the early '90s, a few years after I discovered 'the cinema' during a three month stay in Paris during which I watched 100s of films.

I think there's a fear of difference in American cinema.

I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious.

Everyone wants to belong, and everyone needs to belong in order to make a career on some level.

As I've gotten less righteous, less pedagogic, I have become more loving of the artificiality, the art form, the imitation of life in film.

I try to keep feeling what's going on and try to use the camera, the actors and the design to enhance those feelings. There's something really emotionally direct and honest about how I put the material with the images. You hope that the strength of mise-en-scene comes from an honesty towards the material. You also hire really well.

I've always been interested in how the individual comes to know and accept him or herself, which I think has been hard for me.

As independent filmmakers, we are actually deeply dependent on each other. The Spirit Awards are a public expression of those bonds, the intricate set of relationships and histories that we filmmakers depend on to make our most personal work.

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.

You can be aware of the passing of time without being nostalgic.

I've made four films about the destructive nature of relationships, of secrets and lies, and I think I'm no longer interested in that subject - which is a wonderful relief.

Music Box has proven itself in a few short years to be a cutting edge distributor with a sophisticated understanding of both the market and cinema.

As a gay person, my life has been marginalized.

I always hope that people feel less alone when they see a movie that I make. That some part of the story played out on the big screen will resonate for individuals in the audience in a way that gives them comfort.