“Peter Hujar’s Day”, interview with the director Ira Sachs

February 21, 2025

Ira Sachs, director. "Peter Hujar's Day". A tribute to the famous photographer, to independent films and to the New York culture of the 70's

"Peter Hujar's Day", interview with the director Ira Sachs Angelo Acerbi

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“Peter Hujar’s Day” is the last title directed by Ira Scahs, the acclaimed American director who was in Berlinale last year with “Passages“. Starring Ben Whishaw who is again the lead in this new film. A day in the life of the famous photographer of the underground and intellectual New York of the 70’s, the most creative and rebellious moment of American culture, told directly by him in a recording session for a collective book , that never happened.

A fascination for him and that era only experienced at its end

Ira Sachs tells us he came to New York after mid-Eighties , the end of that era that is narrated in the film. “Peter Hujar’s Day” glorifies and describes how a group of people that shaped culture and imagery of a whole generation and beyond were friends or acquaintances , and how fascinating this was for a young aspiring film director.

The challenge of transforming a conversation into a film

Ira Sachs had a big challenge to overcome: all he had was a book that transcript the conversation and it needed to be animated to be narrated on screen. The location became the key element to help doing that, and the different rooms the actors used, and their physical dynamics worked toward this objective.

Plot

In 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz and photographer Peter Hujar tape-recorded a conversation in her New York apartment. The topic of the afternoon was 24 hours in the life of the famously uncompromising Hujar who was regarded as one of the most important characters in downtown New York’s cultural scene of the 1970s and 1980s. In his new film, which is set entirely in Linda’s Manhattan apartment, Ira Sachs freely and imaginatively recreates that long-ago afternoon and the discursive exchange between two singular individuals. The photographer vividly describes his interactions with leading cultural figures of the day, including Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag, as well as the challenges of living on limited financial resources in 1970s New York. Peter Hujar’s Day is a Bloomsday-esque rumination on both an artist’s life and time itself.

Written by: Angelo Acerbi

Guest

Ira Sachs