For four decades, Ira Sachs has chronicled queer life in New York, shining a light on the artists and iconoclasts whose work gives the city such a vibrant, transgressive edge.
“The Man I Love,” which Sachs describes as one of his most personal films, adds to the canon. Set in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis, it follows Jimmy George, a downtown performer who is dying of the virus but desperate to take on one final role. The 60-year-old Sachs drew on his own experiences starting out in theater and film at that time to shape the story.
“I moved to New York in 1988, and the city was both dark and also full of life,” Sachs says. “People knew they could be next; death was all around them. But it led to this explosion of creativity. And this film is about what it means to live a creative life and what it means to work, which is what most of my films are about.”
“The Man I Love” premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Sachs’ direction, as well as the central performance of Rami Malek as Jimmy earned some of the strongest reviews of their careers. Sachs spoke with Variety during the production of “The Man I Love,” as well as on the eve of its premiere.
When it was announced, “The Man I Love” was described as a musical fantasy. Is that how you describe the finished film?
That’s not the movie I made.
Was that the movie you set out to make?
There was one fantasy scene that didn’t make it in the film. Ultimately it became a drama with a lot of music in it. One of the producers I worked with said they’d never seen a film transformed throughout the process of making it the way this is. That doesn’t make any sense to me, because all my films feel like that — they’re all in process until they’re completed, and so they sort of define themselves. The first short that I made, “Lady,” was abstract, and someone asked me when I started, “What do you want it to be?” And I said, “I only know what it is when I see it complete. It reveals itself.”
Is “The Man I Love” drawn from your own life?
When I started the film, I thought I was making a biography, but I ended up making an autobiography. It’s very personal.
Who is your surrogate? Rami’s character Jimmy George or the men who orbit him: Dennis (Tom Sturridge) or Vincent (Luther Ford)?
Well, I’m still alive, so I’m not Jimmy. I could say Vincent. To an extent, the film is about survival. It’s also about memory. It comes from a place that is very much out of my experience, having known people and been connected to people and have been in love with people who had a terrible illness. I had a boyfriend who had AIDS, and I lived in a time in which AIDS was not just present, but it created an intense atmosphere of both dread and possibility in New York. I made a film that’s a testament to creativity as a form of survival. Art and art-making are so vital to life and to breathing. In that way, I connect very much to Jimmy.
In what ways were ’80s New York a time of possibility? I look at the death toll from AIDS and it seems like a scary, almost apocalyptic time to be a gay man.
It was, but also there was so much creativity. I arrived in the city as a youthful person, so everything lay in front of me. Our intention was to make a film that was testament to the fact that one lives until the very end. One doesn’t die actively, one lives actively, and so what is life? When I first described this film to someone, I was probably in my early 50s, and I said it’s about what do you do with the time left. This is a compressed, dramatic version of that intellectual exercise, as well as a specific one, because it shows the horrors of the AIDS epidemic. But there was such an artistic flourishing that came out of the East Village in the ’70s and ’80s. I’m still running on the fumes of that time. I’m so grateful to have been part of it.
Do people think enough about that era? It feels like some parts of the gay community have kind of memory-holed it, because there’s Prep now and AIDS in this country isn’t as much of a public health crisis.
Historical amnesia is prevalent and not specific to gay people. It’s like that line about war — the winners are the ones you remember. The ones you hear about with AIDS are often the ones who lived. A lot of people disappeared who I knew that time in an intimate way. There are fewer and fewer of us left who can tell that story.
One of my favorite parts of the film is when Jimmy goes back to his hometown for his parents’ anniversary party. He looks so uncomfortable in his suit — like a fish out of water. It’s so striking because he basically struts through New York City.
There’s often this great divide between the person you become and the person you were; the family you create for yourself and the one you come from. Sometimes if you’re in a room full of people in New York City, your contemporaries, and you imagined everyone’s grandmother on their left side, and you imagine all those grandmothers around the table, what an odd assortment of people would be there. None of them would have any connection to each other. When I think of my own friends, we all were transformed by our arrival to New York. It molded us.
What made you think of Rami Malek to play Jimmy?
From ‘Mr. Robot.” In that series, he had this very natural, easy kind of acting in which I couldn’t see the beginnings and ends of his sentences, and I was curious about it. He’s also such a unique presence. Rami is a star, and he has something magnetic that allows him to hold a movie together.
Jimmy performs several musical numbers. What was it like to shoot those?
I’ve made movies with quite a bit of music, but I’ve never met a movie where the protagonist actually performs on that scale. What I like about the musical scenes is they become scenes of dialogue. They become conversations between Rami and the other actors, and between Jimmy and his boyfriend and his lover and his mother and his sister and his nephew. They became forms of language.
Rami Malek and Tom Sturridge are straight, but they are playing gay roles. Do you have any issue with straight actors playing gay parts?
I don’t ask people who they’ve slept with, and what I have found out is, you never know.
“The Man I Love” is your second time having a film in Cannes. What does that mean to you?
I’m an American who has watched and digested and considered primarily European cinema as my precursors and my mentors and my educators. I’ve been very engaged with the language of European cinema and its connection to naturalism. American cinema has traditionally been rooted in theatrical transformation. I think my approach to finding the truth of something is more through discovering its essence than engaging in transformation.
Do you read reviews of your work?
I do read reviews, but I read them less intently as I get older.
When you do read them, do you fixate more on the positive ones or the negative ones?
The positive reviews have the potential to affect you more deeply. The negative reviews get under your skin and make you want to fight back. John Kander of Kander & Ebb is a cousin. He was opening a show, and I sent him an email saying “break a leg.” He’s 35 years older than I am, which means he sits in a position of mentorship, and he said “the terror never leaves you.” I found it very comforting that the man who wrote “Cabaret” and “Chicago” and all these great works still gets scared, because I still get scared when I’m starting something new.
You make very personal, indie films that defy easy categorization. Is it hard for you to get the money to produce them?
I’m a hustler. I take money seriously. I don’t belittle money. I don’t expect a lot of money, but I work closely with my producers who understand what I need, and then they give me the range in which that will be possible. I would never go below that range, but I would never spend above it either. I had to understand that Hollywood offered me next to nothing. I had to work in a different system. In 2012, I worked briefly on some studio things, but I quickly understood that it was not for me, and I was not for them.
What wasn’t for you about Hollywood?
A lot of people operated in extraordinary ways under the studio system, so it’s not that great work can’t be produced in it. But if I’m going to do something, it can’t be in a corporate system. Also, major studios don’t make the kinds of movies that I make — non-genre driven, domestic dramas that are about queer people. They literally don’t make those stories. And my work is inherently political.
What were the studio films that you worked on?
I worked on a biographical film about Montgomery Clift for HBO, and I worked on an adaptation of a book called “Christodora” for Paramount.
Was it a valuable experience?
No. The only thing I learned from it was what I didn’t want to do.
In what ways is your work political?
I am a gay man, and I primarily make movies about gay men. Every time I make a movie, I’m overturning the idea of what is interesting to people because the dominant culture says our lives are not interesting. That’s something I refuse to accept.
At the Americana Film Festival last year, you warned that “darkness is falling on cultural expression” because of the re-election of Donald Trump. Why?
We don’t have freedom of speech anymore. I’m despondent. It would be hard to look at this country and not feel shocked. Everything we held to be unchangeable and precious is disappearing. Cinema under repressive regimes adapts in ways that can be fascinating. Look at Spain during Franco or Iran under the mullahs. They kept making great art, but they did so by leaning into metaphor. That’s something queer cinema has often tried to do. But because of the times we’re living in, it seems like a good opportunity re-engage with the artists I remember from the East Village, who were always brave risk takers. No matter what, their work always felt deeply personal and very, very free.
