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Q&A with Ira Sachs and Isabelle Huppert

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You are such a quintessential New York Filmmaker, Mr. Sachs, but now you’ve made this film set in Portugal. I was wondering how the story came to you and how you worked with your writing partner, Mauricio Zacharia, to develop this film?
Ira Sachs: Probably around fifteen years ago, I saw a film by Satyajit Ray, the Indian master Filmmaker, called Kanchenjungha. It’s about a family on a vacation in the Himalayan mountains, and it takes place in one day. There are nine stories; there is a crisis that brought them together. The role of nature in that film is part of what makes it such a resonant film for me. It stuck in my head for a really long time as a really great set of boundaries about how to approach a film. When I met Isabelle after Love is Strange, she had seen the film and we started talking about the possibility of working together — among other things like life, family, and art.  It seemed  to me that this mountain project  would be a good one to go on with Isabelle, because we would both be somewhere different from our home. I then went with my co-writer, whose family is from Portugal. He recommended that we consider Centra. When he said that, I remembered I had been there on a family vacation when I was fourteen with my mom and two sisters. So my co-writer and I went back there. I visited maybe three or four times in the course of writing the film. This is not a film about Portugal, but it is a film about the landscape I discovered in the time I spent there. I had a very strong and intimate emotional response to the things I saw and felt. So we wrote the film specifically for the locations that are in the movie.

I think there is a certain amount of mystery to all good scripts

Isabelle, do you want to talk about your first reactions to the script?
Isabelle Huppert: We had conversations before I got the script from Ira. We started this conversation about two years before and we expressed the wish to work with each other. I had no idea what Ira had in mind, I knew that he was going to write something for me, but I had no idea what it was going to be about. He then sent me the script and I thought it was wonderful. It was well written enough to leave some blank spaces so I can fill it with my own imagination. I think there is a certain amount of mystery to all good scripts in a way. A script is a very weird material. It’s not a book or a film. It’s an amount of indication and information. The two main lines for me were that she was an actress and also that she was going to finish her life. The third fact about the film was that it was going to be shot in Portugal. I think the film says it all about the relationship between the drama that the landscape carries and the inner drama that all these characters have. This family’s journey and the landscape have a mirror effect. I was really excited when I read it because it was very promising.

IS: I think for me there are two ways of thinking about that sense of what is not known at the beginning of the film. As a director and a writer, I’ve always had an instinct to position people somewhere in the middle of the story. This way you get a sense that there is a movie and a set of stories that happened before the film and there will always be a set of stories after the film. There’s a sense that part of watching a movie is finding your way into the middle. That is done elliptically. It is not easy to create intimacy. When a movie asks you to engage with the conversations and in that work, I think there is a relationship that is between the audience and the characters. The other thing was that the film was a very personal one for me. It was not an autobiographical film, but a personal film in the sense that in the past five to ten years, I have been closer to illness and death in a way that I had not been in my thirties; I am now in my fifties. One of the things I felt very powerfully was not a secret, but that there were so many other conversations about life. That life is what goes on until the last moment. I felt there were many different genres going on. Not long ago I was very close to a very good friend who died of breast cancer at 50. I felt that I could have done in any one day, with her and her family and friends, done a story about money, sex, love, generations, loss. To me this film is less about dying and death, but is ultimately about loss.

I wanted to talk a little bit about your shooting style. With so many wonderful long takes, it feels like one flowing piece instead of like fragments. Can you talk about the scene where Mr. Gleeson purchases some pastries and then talks with Frankie?
IS: There was definitely a shooting style to the film, which came from a wonderful Portuguese cinematographer named Rui Poças. When we started, we thought about making a film about people walking and talking through nature and outdoors. We took a look at Éric Rohmer. We discovered a very particular language in Romer that we adapted for this film. It involved that there was no cutting without the actors making a movement that generates the reason for the cut. You never get to cut in for emphasis. What this ends up doing is leaving the actors with the space, and you are watching both the character and the performance, which I think is part of the pleasure of this movie. Its watching how the characters get from one place to another. In that particular scene, it is very choreographed work and we planned on doing it in three sections. As we were shooting, a hurricane, which was the first in 200 years, started coming into the region. What was supposed to be a twelve hour day became a one hour day. We thought we could come back and Brendan Gleeson said, “Well we have twenty minutes. Can we do the whole scene in one take?” There is this playful, joyous performance that happens between the two that feels very natural and very much what they as actors could bring to the scene. I’m glad it worked out.

Q&A with Ira Sachs, John Lithgow, Marisa Tomei, and Alfred Molina

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Love is Strange.

Mr. Sachs, can you tell us about developing the story?
Sachs: This is my fifth feature, and all of my films – while not strictly autobiographical – are very personal to me, and connected to my own life on some level. In my 40’s I experienced for the first time a relationship where I thought that it might blossom with time, and that it had a future that could be beautiful. All of my previous films were about the nature of love to destroy everyone involved [laughing], so, uh, this was new, and there was an optimism that I felt. So I set out to tell a love story. But I wanted to do so with the idea that each of us has a different perspective depending on what point we’re at in our lives. So we have this couple, played by John and Alfred, but then you also have Marisa [Tomei] and Darren Burrows, who are playing a couple very much in the middle of their lives, and a young man who is discovering love – Charlie Tahan – for the first time. And to me, it was an attempt to really tell a multigenerational, epic story within a crowded New York apartment.

“It was one of the finest pieces of screenwriting I’ve ever read.”

Mr. Lithgow, when you first read the script, what was your response?
Lithgow: I immediately wanted to be in the film! It was one of the finest pieces of screenwriting I’ve ever read. I compare the experience of reading it to the experience of reading Terms of Endearment…. And that was twenty five years ago. It was just something that was so complete, and the relationship was so complete. I also read it with the knowledge that Alfred would be playing George. And I just thought we’d make a perfect gay couple. And you know, every detail was there. Here’s best example I can give you of how superb the screenplay is: The early scene in the kitchen, where we’re interacting as married couples do, and there’s no dialog—just quiet, every day actions. Every detail of that scene was in the script. And yet, Ira didn’t mention anything—he knew we had read it. We did it. It was the script come to life. You know, people talk a great deal about Ira’s work process, because it’s so germane to the experience of the film. He just simply lets it happen. I’ve never been given less direction, and yet known so thoroughly what the director needed and wanted. And it all came through our long one-on-one session together before we started shooting the film, and from the script.

Mr. Molina, could you talk about the process of working with these two gentlemen?
Molina: In a sense, there was very little to do—very often in a script, there are plot points or points of logic that you need to clean up or iron out… and you find yourself in the very unenviable position of having to repair something, or find something that’s lacking. But here, it was so finished, it felt like putting on a made-to-measure jacket; it was so easy. And of course that gave us more freedom in terms of how we played with each other, how we created the space between the characters. All of us, at some point or another, discussed this while we were on the set—I think we all had a very similar experience. So when people ask, ‘how hard was it to play these characters,’ or, ‘how hard was it to get this film together,’ it wasn’t hard at all! It sounds almost disingenuous, but in fact it felt very, very easy.
Lithgow: Although, interestingly, both Alfred and I had the experience of – we’re both theater actors – we’re masters of the ‘grand gesture.’ In both cases, it took us a day or two to get used to Ira. He just does so little… and wants us to do so little. It was like we dispensed with all of the tricks we – I should say I – rely on and fall back on, and it was the best thing for me.

Ms. Tomei, your character is so important to the film. Can you talk about developing the character?
Tomei: As it turns out, my process working with Ira was a little different from John and Alfred’s. He and I spent time talking through her scenes, making small changes here and there—I needed to understand more about what Ira had in mind. It wasn’t clear to me, at first, what her relationship was with her husband. So we spent some time figuring that out.

And that’s part of the joy of the film, for the audience—it’s not quite clear to us what their relationship has gone through lately, and the audience has to figure some things out…
Tomei: Yes, not to mention what’s going to happen to them after the film ends… Whatever it is doesn’t seem very good! But the family aspects of the film really resonated with me; we all know what it’s like to help family members, and what’s it’s like to get on each other’s nerves.

One of the most compelling things in the script is the way that Ben’s death is dealt with. How did you decided on that particular treatment?
Sachs: I am always interested in both the things that are in a film as well as the things that are not—the spaces that allow the audience to find their own place in the story. The ellipse is a very classic, and very novelistic, device to show that time has moved forward, and to me these are some of the strongest jumps you can make in a film. It was always very clear to me that this was not a film about death. I had very little to say, and the movie had very little to say, about the act of dying. That’s another movie. It was about loss, certainly. But it was mainly about the cycles of life and things moving on. And the story of this film was always going to be handed on, like a baton, to this young boy.