Ira Sachs famous quotes

03-24-2025

All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. Thatâ€™s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.
-- Ira Sachs

#Reality #Cinema #Shifting
Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.
-- Ira Sachs

#Gay #Cinema #Stories
By 1988, I was living in New York myself.
-- Ira Sachs

#New York
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.
-- Ira Sachs

#Honesty #Design #Feelings
People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves.
-- Ira Sachs

#Moving #People #Kind
Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experience I had when I was a kid.
-- Ira Sachs

#Kids #Thinking #Utopia
To me, honesty and the difficulty of honest communication are at the heart of both my life and my movies. The difficulty of being yourself.
-- Ira Sachs

#Being Yourself #Honesty #Communication
I'm a version of the same person.
-- Ira Sachs
You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.
-- Ira Sachs

#Decision #Fearless #Economy
To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.
-- Ira Sachs

#Pain #Artist #Rejection
I think parenting well is not so different than trying to consider how to be successful at any relationship. Like, how do you partner well? How do you collaborate well? How do we have this conversation well? You know, you're always trying to figure out what "well" means, so I think parenting is another version of that.
-- Ira Sachs

#Mean #Successful #Thinking
There was an age in which it was clear to me that my parents weren't perfect, but then there was an age at which I had empathy for that. And that was through therapy, probably. You have to rebuild and you also have to grow in your understanding of whatever it is your parents are facing, and that takes a major, profound shift of perspective from being a child.
-- Ira Sachs

#Children #Profound #Perfect
I think as a gay person, there was no way in my generation to not grow up with shame and a sense of being wrong. It was impossible to avoid. Externally, you might make choices that are very public and very open but internally that was a struggle.
-- Ira Sachs

#Growing Up #Struggle #Gay
For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.
-- Ira Sachs

#Individual
I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character.
-- Ira Sachs

#Character
I love a certain kind of acting style that I would call non-American, which tends to be more detail-oriented and less externalized. There's a kind of naturalism that I often find in non-American actors. I also find that quality in the American actors I work with, but I like to bring in those influences creatively.
-- Ira Sachs

#Style #Quality #Acting
I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.
-- Ira Sachs

#New York #Thinking #People
So there's a choice that I made to tell stories that are still psychological melodramas about domestic issues. The challenge is to figure out how to make 10 films a career as a filmmaker, and that's a really challenging thing.
-- Ira Sachs

#Careers #Issues #Choices
I try not to articulate ideas in the film once I've arrived on the plot and the characters. I believe that if I focus my attention with enough compassion and heart on those things, then other things will be revealed, and that's from the education that I've had from the novel.
-- Ira Sachs

#Believe #Heart #Character
I have a career now, and I have to say, five years ago I didn't. I'm 50, and you never know what works, but I think part of that is because - in this way that can't be defined but which can be examined - we cannot work alone.
-- Ira Sachs

#Thinking
The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.
-- Ira Sachs

#Pain #Character #Trying
As a father, I wanted to make a movie that my kids can love.
-- Ira Sachs

#Father #Kids
I've worked with non-professional actors, I've worked with movie stars, I've worked with kids, I've worked with older people, and I've found my job as a director is to cast them well and to understand what they need on set to bring the material to life.
-- Ira Sachs

#Kids #People #Movie Star
The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.
-- Ira Sachs

#Film #Intimacy
My early films were about self discovery, and films of internal conflict. At that level, they were very personal.
-- Ira Sachs

#Self #Discovery #Levels

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