Ira Sachs: ​‘In the age of Net­flix, I’ve been show­ing my kids Buster Keaton’

Fol­low­ing on from Love is Strange, his sto­ry of a mid­dle age gay couple’s forcible sep­a­ra­tion by hous­ing issues, New York local Ira Sachs dis­cuss­es how he came up with the idea for a con­tem­po­rary dra­ma based on a Japan­ese movie from the 1950s.

LWLies: Is Lit­tle Men a film made for kids?

Sachs: That’s exact­ly the kind of film I want­ed to make: a mature film about child­hood which also explored the plea­sures of cin­e­ma. There’s an absence, and it’s inter­est­ing, as what you’re talk­ing about is the very conun­drum of cap­i­tal­ism. I’ve begun to think that the film is a metaphor for the place that per­son­al cin­e­ma has in our indus­try. A store front rep­re­sents the last woman stand­ing. In a way, it reveals that this sys­tem doesn’t work any more.

Are the peo­ple who are fund­ing inde­pen­dent cin­e­ma dying out?

I like to be blunt and real­is­tic, which I think has par­tial­ly been how I’ve been able to sus­tain a career as a film­mak­er. I am some­one who takes mon­ey quite seri­ous­ly, and I would say that the num­bers don’t work. And yet, we still make these things and they still find their audi­ence. For me a film like Kes is the inspi­ra­tion. It was an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly impor­tant film for me when I first saw it. Would that film be made today? With what mon­ey? And who would its audi­ence be? I’m curi­ous to know.

Cin­e­ma feels much more short term now. Films come and go so quickly.

I’m not a nos­tal­gic per­son, but what has hap­pened in the age of Net­flix is that they are buy­ing films and releas­ing them in a way where the idea of an open­ing week­end is no longer a thing. These films just appear, they just exist. There’s no moment where they mark the cul­tur­al space. They just appear inter­na­tion­al­ly. Which was a pos­si­bil­i­ty for this film if we had gone in that direc­tion. It has been inter­est­ing to watch. It’s killing the local dis­tri­b­u­tion and exhi­bi­tion sys­tems. It’s glob­al­i­sa­tion in anoth­er form. And yet, I think we have to hope that some films will last. I’ve been show­ing my kids Buster Keaton. Looney Tunes is still possible.

This feels like a small film con­sid­er­ing its very minor-scale sub­ject matter.

I would say that it’s a pre­cise film. Maybe it’s an atten­tive film? Again, you don’t have to be loud to be big. If you are able to be deep, then you talk about very big things even if the scale of the sto­ry is small. It’s not a melo­dra­ma, it’s just plain dra­ma. Melo­dra­ma enlarges things, but it doesn’t make them bet­ter. I’m inspired by film­mak­ers such as Ozu and Loach and Satya­jit Ray and Mau­rice Pialat. They are film­mak­ers who believe in the individual’s story.

In the pro­duc­tion and the writ­ing, do you feel that you have a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence with each film?

This is the third film I’ve writ­ten with Mauri­cio Zacharias, and there’s a process we’ve come to that has been quite sim­i­lar. We get togeth­er and we talk about movies and we talk about our lives. We talk about the sto­ries we want to tell. For this film, we went back to Ozu, par­tic­u­lar­ly the two films Good Morn­ing and I Was Born, But…, which were both films that he made about kids who go on strike. That became a back­bone for our nar­ra­tive. Then we had to ask why our kids would go on strike, and we dis­cov­ered that Mauricio’s fam­i­ly in Rio are involved in a pro­longed evic­tion process with a ten­ant. Every time he’d come in and tell me some­thing new. It was clear to me that it was a real­ly raw and res­o­nant sto­ry, and there were two sides to it.

Do you have lots of ideas on the go at once, or do you approach each new film from scratch?

I’m a child of Montes­sori, which means you approach each thing on its own in a very order­ly fash­ion. So, I don’t have a draw­er full of sto­ries. For a year-and-a-half I’ve been work­ing on a film about Mont­gomery Clift for HBO. And we’re also start­ing con­ver­sa­tions about a new fea­ture inspired by an obscure Satya­jit Ray film called Kanchen­jung­ha from 1962 about a fam­i­ly walk­ing up a moun­tain. It cov­ers three gen­er­a­tions, it begins at the bot­tom and it ends at the top, and there’s a deci­sion that needs to be made through the course of the climb. It’s a great struc­ture. I think it’s going to be a very Shake­speare­an sto­ry­line. It’s very the­atri­cal­ly con­tained. I’m very excited.

Lit­tle Men is released 23 September.