Back to selection
The Space of a Day: Ira Sachs Discusses Peter Hujar’s Day with Azazel Jacobs
Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar's Day (courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films) With Ira Sachs’s highly recommended Peter Hujar’s Day opening today at New York’s Film Forum from Janus Films, we’re unlocking our paywall on Azazel Jacobs’s interview with Sachs from our Fall, 2025 print issue. (See also my interview with Sachs out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.) Both Sachs and Rebecca Hall will be doing Q&As this opening weekend. — Scott Macaulay
The “making of,” in which process is made visible through behind-the-scenes chronicles—documentaries, YouTube tutorials and explainers of all sorts—is its own journalistic genre. These pieces invariably fixate on the facts. When it comes to feature films, for example, this camera, this number of shooting days and this set of references are the currency exchanged between artist and reader. Offering transparency through specificity, these exchanges are a hallmark of this magazine, so, in his dialogue below with fellow filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, director Ira Sachs (Passages, Keep the Lights On, Forty Shades of Blue) comes prepared to share. Their conversation about the making of Sachs’s latest feature, Peter Hujar’s Day, is full of such details, as well as topics too—the fears and anxieties that erupt throughout the creative process—less often confided.
As such, their conversation is a productive echo of the concerns animating Sachs’s feature itself, which is also a conversation between two people: artist and photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). Their on-screen talk is also full of detail, the latter often seemingly extraneous but in ways that speak to its time and place: the downtown New York art world of 1974. Discussing the eponymous day, Whishaw—positively uncanny in the immersive, hypnotic ways he dramatizes Hujar’s words—describes taking a portrait shot of poet Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times, his first professional commission from the paper. Ginsberg’s phone is busy; Hujar goes downstairs to buy a New York Post, wonders whether Ginsberg finds him attractive, snacks at McDonald’s and finally meets up with Ginsberg, who wants to take the photo amidst burned-out buildings in the East Village. Hujar considers the finished work “mediocre.” He shares his desire for Susan Sontag to write the introduction to a planned monograph with Rosenkrantz. Later, he has dinner with friends.
Rosenkrantz’s concept was a book of conversations with artists, each of whom would recount the minutia of one working day, and she began with her friend Hujar. That project was abandoned, with his contribution only appearing decades later, in a small 2021 edition published by Magic Hour Press that Sachs has adapted with augmented exchanges gleaned from the recordings of the event. In the movie, Peter Hujar’s Day, Hall probably has five percent of the dialogue, but her extraordinary performance as Whishaw’s friend and sympathetic interlocutor succeeds in offering the viewer new emotional entry points and perspectives from which to contemplate this encounter. And with his direction, Sachs is extraordinarily attuned to the rhythms—verbal and otherwise—of his performers, as well as of the day itself, as daylight changes to night, shadows enter and the sounds of the city alter their personalities. (The exemplary work of cinematographer Alex Ashe, shooting on Super 16mm, editor Affonso Gonçalves and production designer Stephen Phelps also must be cited.)
Two years after the conversation dramatized in Peter Hujar’s Day, the artist would go on to publish that discussed monograph, Portraits in Life and Death. And Sontag did pen the introduction, explaining the title thusly: “Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death”—words that resonate today as they apply to Sachs’s film, which depicts not only an artist who died of AIDS in 1987 but also a cultural scene and pre-digital artist economy that no longer exist. We’re grateful to Jacobs, a 25 New Face for speaking with Sachs. Jacobs’s own most recent film, His Three Daughters, was discussed in these pages one year ago, and his third feature, Momma’s Man, co-starring his parents—artists and filmmakers Ken Jacobs and Flo Jacobs, both of whom sadly passed away this spring—also took place largely within the confines of a New York apartment. Peter Hujar’s Day is released this fall by Sideshow and Janus Films. —Scott Macaulay
Jacobs: One of the things that I really responded to in the film was that Linda Rosenkrantz is not focused on the event of “what happened the other day.” It’s the recording of Hujar’s commentary, his reclaiming of that day—that’s the event. He’s a working artist in New York City, yes, but the arbitrariness of her recording him talking about his day feels like an event in itself.
Sachs: Well, he’s an incredible narrator of his day. He’s not an ordinary person in the way he was able to narrate it, and I didn’t realize that abnormality until I noticed how extensive and detailed his telling is. I don’t know anyone who could tell a story like that. Because it’s performed so naturally, it seems like [the film] is the story of Peter Hujar telling his day, but it’s the story of a man who has an incredible ability to remember and describe the sequence of events in his life. I couldn’t describe this morning in the way that he was able to describe any one 20-minute section [of that day].
Jacobs: Is this something that you realized when you first read the transcript?
Sachs: No. While making the movie, I realized his recollection is so precise and layered and comes from so many different perspectives. It’s both the event and the subtext. He’s doing something that most of us could not do.
Jacobs: Wouldn’t you say that as a filmmaker your job was to translate this in a way that makes it seem like it’s even rarer?
Sachs: No. When you watch the film, you don’t think, “Wow, that’s amazing that he’s able to do that,” because it seems so much part of him that you don’t even notice that it’s specifically a character trait. The other thing, which is maybe even more meaningful to me, is that I didn’t understand until I finished the film what I loved about it. I didn’t understand it when I read [the source material], I didn’t understand it when I made it, but I did understand after it began to be in the world. [The film] is a window into the way that an artist’s mind works, and it feels very personal to me as to how my mind works. Like, I’m making a piece of art, I have doubts and search and go in circles, then I have confidence, then I have grief. [The film] is just the circling of the event of that photograph [of Allen Ginsberg].
Jacobs: You draw a particular narrative out of the recording of that day. I’m not walking away thinking about what Peter Hujar’s day was—I’m thinking about the day these two individuals met up, the way that you envision them meeting up, the way that they take breaks, what they eat—all these things that turn into the event of a recording that doesn’t see the light. It’s an unrealized dream, ultimately, that you are realizing because there’s no recording of it other than this transcript.
Sachs: Correct. There’s no description of what happened on the day when they made the recording. I would say my version is 100 percent fictional.
Jacobs: I can’t be alone in this, but when the film finished, the first thing I did was look up that image [of Ginsberg].
Sachs: Yes, it is the punch line, which the film doesn’t want to make, right? The narrowing of the story down to an image.
Jacobs: Was there ever an instinct, or did someone advise you, to include that photo at the end of the film?
Sachs: Several people brought it up, but I had zero interest in doing that.
Jacobs: I agree, I think it would have been the wrong choice.
Sachs: It would have meant that I was trying to make something literal about this experience, which is actually just experiential. It’s not a story about that photograph. It’s a story about two people talking about the making of that photograph.
Jacobs: There’s another layer to the film, which is that you’re allowing us to see that you are imagining the details of the day. At a certain point, the Nagra [Rosenkrantz is using to record Hujar] disappears. And we see the [film] lights and the set. We jump out to see what your process was. So, the film is constantly addressing itself as an act of creation. How did you get to that approach?
Sachs: I thought the film would be shot in a version of real time, meaning like an hour and a half. I went into the location with my cinematographer, Alex Ashe; a storyboard artist; and two stand-in actors. I had an idea that I would block the film based on the text, and within an hour, I was like, “This is a nightmare.” I had no idea how to block action when there was no motivation for movement. Why did they get up? You could come up with a couple of ideas, but I did not have a definitive answer. What probably happened is they sat at a table and talked, but I didn’t want them just sitting [the whole movie]. That would mean for an hour and a half I’d be figuring out why someone crossed the room.
So, I had set up a situation where I have money to make a film, I have actors on the way, a crew and no idea of how to shoot it. There were about five or six weeks where I’d wake up in a bit of a panic, not knowing where the camera would be. We wound up getting access to Westbeth, where we shot the film, for a couple of months before we made it. We began to put together the set, and we could use it as a place to experiment. Alex and I would take the two stand-ins and put them into different places based on an interest in space, bodies and light. What do these two people look like on the couch in the afternoon? What do they look like in the bedroom set at 8:00 p.m. with one illumination? What do they look like at the kitchen table? We started photographing them, and ultimately, in the middle of the night, I got to the point where I realized that this sequence of photographs was the storyboard, and it was the film. What gave me that permission were Jim McBride’s My Girlfriend’s Wedding, Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason and Andy Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl—films where I saw intimate interactions between a camera and a subject in which the break in time was done by a break in space. And I suddenly was like, “Oh, I can do that.” But understanding that those breaks would become fluid and visible to the audience was very, very hard for me.
Jacobs: These films that you just referenced are of a time.
Sachs: They are of different times, but they are definitely not the kind of movies that are still being made. I mean, in a way, they’re the history of documentary plus the history of experimental film, right? You can’t shoot twice, you’re only shooting one camera, you’re not coming up with different angles, it’s always moving forward.
Jacobs: I would say the big contrast with your approach is that you have money, actors and crew, but you’re telling a story about an art that’s not complete and two artists whose artistic life is not complete. It’s interrupted work for both of them, right?
Sachs: Once I began to understand that the film would take place in the course of a full day, I was aware of the emotional impact of that kind of time—morning to late afternoon to early dawn. That becomes a narrative that includes an emotional element, which includes death and rebirth. There was also a very significant, maybe third narrative, which is the narrative of love, and which has to do with Linda, and specifically Rebecca Hall’s performance of Linda.
Jacobs: And that connection between the two of them.
Sachs: The connection and actually telling a story of a woman who loves a man and, even more significantly, a woman who loves her friend. That was something I knew was there, but I didn’t know how it would ultimately be almost suspenseful. Working with Rebecca’s performance and understanding the impact of the last moments and seeing what could be there emotionally, meant, ultimately, that there is a somewhat conventional emotional plot.
Jacobs: Could you discuss more about both the relationship that you were able to assume or realize through the text versus what you brought in? And how you found it, in your own way, with these actors?
Sachs: Ben couldn’t live this material unless he had some idea of who he was talking about, even if on a bit of a shallow Wikipedia level. We had an encyclopedia of characters with images and voices and various other things. I tried to give Ben the material so that each of these people he mentions would be people he knew—that seemed essential. Although, I have to say that the skill of translating the small amount [of biographical information] I was giving him into something where you actually believe “this is his world” is his, and that’s an amazing thing. You feel like he knows all those people, right? That research involved talking to Linda, talking a lot to Vince Aletti, who is the friend who comes over [to Hujar’s] and gets his hair cut and still lives on 12th Street and 2nd Avenue. He writes for the New Yorker and Village Voice and is a wonderful reservoir of that time in the past. I also did something that I do in traditional narrative work, which is that I did not rehearse the film.
Jacobs: What does that mean? Like, they show up day one—
Sachs: —and we start rolling. There was a lot of conversation [beforehand], but I had never heard them say any of the lines.
Jacobs: Had Ben and Rebecca met up beforehand?
Sachs: I sent them to Hector’s, which just closed, for lunch. It was the diner underneath the High Line, just north of the Whitney, like the last remnant [of the old Meatpacking District]. This is generally how I work: I set up a little date for [the actors], and they get to know each other as quickly as they can. And Ben and I spent an afternoon walking through the East Village and going to various spots, but that’s sort of a strategic approach—the material will do the work. But this material is particularly unique in terms of the massive amount of words that Ben had on day one. I thought I made a tragic error and that it was impossible for him to get to where he needed to get to as a performer, having never rehearsed this. The challenge was from knowing the lines to being fluid with the lines. I thought I should have done it differently this time and that it was a huge mistake—everyone was there, and I wanted to jump out the window. Luckily, after the first day of shooting, I realized a strategic approach would involve them doing runthroughs of the lines we were going to do that day in the morning for an hour or hour and a half. And it worked—he definitely knew his lines, and on day two we were singing.
Jacobs: I don’t think there’s a filmmaker who will read this who doesn’t relate to that feeling of, “Oh, this isn’t going the way I expected, and how am I ever going to get over to that other place?”
Sachs: That’s where experience and craft [enter]. Maybe if I were 28, I would have also figured it out: He just needed to run his lines, and we’ll give him that time in the morning.
Jacobs: And did that adjust shapes, images, frames?
Sachs: Nothing changed on the set. It just changed what the actor could do. I often find that I’ll recognize something about a performance on day one, and I can say one very small thing or do one action that needs to be done, and it will change things moving forward.
Jacobs: And is that level of panic a familiar feeling now, or does it feel shocking each time?
Sachs: The familiarity doesn’t seem to help, actually. I mean, it should. My husband Boris will say, “Don’t you know that this is going to happen?” But it doesn’t help.
Jacobs: I’m curious about your relationship with Boris. Is this panic something [that occurs] since you’ve been together?
Sachs: Yeah.
Jacobs: Are there things that you are able to discuss that will shift your approach? Or do you keep this in?
Sachs: Boris is a visual artist, and conversation about our work is a deep part of our relationship. It’s active and occasionally contrarian, but mostly it’s central to our days. So, nothing is ever held [inside], but that doesn’t mean every detail needs to be shared, obviously. But how I feel is not something I would hide from Boris.
Jacobs: And these two artists that you’re focusing on, who are also in different mediums, and also are hearing each other wrestle with—
Sachs: Well, one is listening, and one is talking, right? One has no interest in the other’s… I can’t say, “the other’s life,” because I didn’t know Peter Hujar, so I have no idea what he was like as a friend. But at least in this day, he’s doing his job, which is to tell the story of his life. That is his job, so I can’t say that it mirrors how he might be in more typical conversations between two friends.
Jacobs: But you do get the sense that they’re able to talk about money in a way that artists that I grew up around just didn’t. At a certain point, he talks about trying to collect money he’s owed, or how much he’s going to charge [for a portrait].
Sachs: Peter wasn’t making any money—$100 here, $400 there. He was living off his professional work, which was not very much, in a time of poverty among artists that probably was not dissimilar to your parents’ world at that time. Without romanticizing it, I think it’s one of the more interesting qualities of that period—there didn’t seem to be much potential to make the kinds of money people now make in this globalized economy, and I think that was both difficult personally but, in a way, freeing artistically. The scale was about what was happening in the studio down the street, not in an art gallery in Paris.
Jacobs: Is it wrong to assume from the film that Linda Rosenkrantz is more stable?
Sachs: Linda was a middle-class woman with a middle-class job; she was working as an editor for an auction magazine. Throughout her life, she was a writer who had another job.
Jacobs: That comes across to me from the look of her house. There’s a sparseness, a beauty to it all. It feels stable.
Sachs: I think Linda had stability. Obviously, the house we created is a fiction, but it was inspired by photographs of her apartment, which was, I’m guessing, a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. Modesty, economic and personal, is something in common for both of them, except Peter had a kind of confidence, which comes from some possibility of greatness. Maybe I’m projecting back from the future, but he has a very different idea of himself as an artist than Linda, and I think that’s one of the things that’s very attractive to Linda. Peter had access to an artistic culture, which is very rich and deep, and was a person who radiated a kind of singularity as an individual that connected to his creative goals and aspirations and talent, which is very attractive, right?
Jacobs: Rebecca did a beautiful job of, in the film, seeing the value not only in her friend’s work but in his time, and in him being alive. There’s no sickness in the film, but he is sickly. She’s worried about him.
Sachs: She is just very maternal toward him.
Jacobs: But I think that there’s a shadow of—
Sachs: —the shadow is mine in the film.
Jacobs: Can you tell me more about that?
Sachs: Peter died in 1987, in his early 50s, with so much more that he could have made and so much life he could have lived. Let’s just not even talk about the work. AIDS is not tragic, but it’s very sad, and that loss is something I wanted to evoke in the film.
Jacobs: Yours is a period film done on a very small budget, and yet there are these expansive shots where you see the outside, and it completely works. It makes you think, “Oh, 1970s New York City exists from a certain angle.”
Sachs: It’s finding the angle. Those outdoors shots are pretty much replicas of shots in My Girlfriend’s Wedding.
Jacobs: Can you tell me a bit more about your working relationship with Ben? The obvious thing to comment on is the amount of trust he has in the film. But the other thing is that he really wants to see the film that you’re envisioning.
Sachs: He wants to be a part of the film that we’re going to make together. I certainly didn’t know what film we would end up with when we started out, but there was an instinct I had when I finished the book, which I read in Paris while making Passages with Ben. On the last page of the book, I had an emotional experience
connected to Peter’s description of the sex workers talking shop outside his window in the early morning. I shivered when I read that. You know, when you read a script, if the end is good, then you feel like, “There’s something there”? I read that, and I was like, “The end is good.” So, everything was about, can I get something really good at the end? That was really the pressure of the film. Ben and I share an interest in the creative life and in queer history, and in the transmission of that history to us as artists and individuals. And there was something in common as gay men, also. When I think about Ben, I think about Isabelle Huppert, which is a very pretentious thing to say, but she’s the person who, I would say, lives a life somewhat similarly to him. As an artist, she’s just drawn toward experience. I think Ben is creating a career that looks like that, too.
Jacobs: And is it experience with particular artists, directors?
Sachs: Yes, but it isn’t determined in advance who those particular artists are. Not necessarily looking but being open to things that come. And also things that come not with a strict idea of their capitalistic worth.
Jacobs: I understand. And I think it just goes back to this idea that any filmmaker can relate to, which is the complete panic that you’re going in the wrong direction.
Sachs: That’s why we have these conversations, because you can feel really alone.
Jacobs: But a film can still be dead regardless of [the changes you make in production]. A lot of times, you’re watching a film, and it’s dead, and it stays dead, and you know the filmmakers, who were committed to it, knew it was dead while they were shooting it, but there was an inability to pivot. It’s very, very hard to figure out how to pivot drastically, or even in any which way, if you have very limited time.
Sachs: There’s the inability to pivot, definitely, but, also, if the material—be it the actors, script or idea—does not have depth, you could be stuck, right? Not everything could be pivot-able. Working on a new movie now, I understand how important the script is, and how important the actors, DP, production designer, costume designer, extras person and line producer are.
Jacobs: Another thing that comes from experience is knowing what’s not important, what fights aren’t worth it because [the result] just doesn’t show up on screen.
Sachs: Sometimes, you get lost and can’t see the forest.
Jacobs: How do you conserve your energy? How do you decide where to put it? I think that’s the one thing that I noticed has changed with each film—I can have a better idea of where to focus the energy, whereas I think with my first film I was ready to fight for everything.
Sachs: You’re implying that one gets better, which is actually always a question. How do you regain anything that you had from when you were 25 that is potentially going to be lost? It’s an interesting inversion of what you were just describing.
Jacobs: That’s true. But when I think of your work, you go into areas you haven’t been. You may be bringing in things that you’ve learned, but how much they apply is arbitrary because you’re telling stories in different worlds.
Sachs: Yes, every film has this feeling of newness. That being said, I have realized, particularly working on a film now, that most of my films are about the creation of a work of art. There is a narrative around the creation of art that is very intimate to me and that I’m drawn to because I have a well of knowledge and understand the arc of that narrative. For example, this film is about the creation of a photograph. Passages is about the creation of a feature film. Keep the Lights On is about the creation of a documentary. Forty Shades of Blue is about the creation of an album. I’m drawn to this narrative of creativity, not because I think it’s a good narrative but just one that I have the best access to.
Jacobs: I can see that. But it’s not the main thing for me about you. I see an artist who consistently goes to places that I can connect to that I haven’t been to.
Sachs: Well, let’s hope I’m doing that again now with my new film.
Jacobs: Finally, I just want to commend you because, since seeing the film, I feel like I’m walking around looking at my own day and trying to understand what the story of it is. So many things that Peter mentions feel so important, but it was just the day in a life, and it wasn’t interrupted by a major plot, right? Somebody didn’t die. And yet this artist’s life feels very important to me at this particular time. I feel like I can feel these ghosts in the city after seeing your film.
