As his new film opens in the UK, gay New York filmmaker Ira Sachs chats to Jack leger about putting his own life on screen in Keep The Lights On…
How autobiographical is this film?
Completely. I ended a relationship in 2007, and on the last day of the relationship I was aware that 10 years before there had been a first day that was very specific. And now the whole story was over. I knew that if I told it with enough detail it could resonate to a wide audience.
It’s also startlingly intimate…
I wanted to make a film about shame and to do so shamelessly. I think that you can see that in the arc of the two characters – two men who grow to be comfortable with themselves in very different ways.
Why did you wait so long to make a gay-themed film?
I was aware that it had been 15 years since I put a gay character in my work. I think there are lots of reasons why. I mean, I came out of the closet at 16, but there are many more closets like sexual spaces I couldn’t share with other people, issues of addiction and other dark corners. But professionally you want to be accepted and sustain a career, so you kind of shift the stories that you tell.
And the film looks gorgeous.
My cinematographer was Greek: Thimios Bakaatakis, who shot Dogtooth and Attenberg. He’d never been to New York, so I think there’s this freshness about his eye. And he shoots sex really well because he’s not uncomfortable with it. So there’s a warmth to those scenes, and the film doesn’t suddenly shift or hide from the intimacy.
Did you set out to make a European-style film?
The film does seem more ordinary in Europe than in America. I don’t find it particularly radical, but the nudity, for example, definitely isn’t foreign in European films. That said, I feel that the film has found an audience in America. Well, Americans aren’t as repressed as their cinema!
• ‘Keep the Lights On’ opens in cinemas on 2nd November.
