Ira Sachs revives a lost day in the life of Peter Hujar

On 19 December 1974, photographer Peter Hujar sat down for an interview with journalist Linda Rosenkrantz at her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She asked him to recount the previous day in minute detail. In turn, he shared stories of a phone call with the writer Susan Sontag, a photoshoot with Allen Ginsberg, his ritual of taking two naps a day, and ordering Chinese takeout with his friend, the curator Vince Aletti.

Originally intended as part of a book Rosenkrantz was planning about how artists spend their time, the project never came to fruition. Any documentation of the conversation was thought lost forever. That was until 2019, when the transcript was discovered in the Morgan Library. Published later that year by Magic Hour Press as Peter Hujar’s Day, the text has now been adapted into a film of the same name by director Ira Sachs, starring Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz.

When the film premiered at Sundance in January, its quiet, meditative quality felt like a reprieve from the noise and chaos surrounding Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, which had taken place just a week earlier. Shot on 16mm film, a medium Sachs has used on earlier works, including his debut Delta, the format was chosen for its ephemeral beauty and the way it plays with light and texture. Almost every scene in Peter Hujar’s Day could double as a portrait, with its artful compositions and moments of near-stasis, intermittently punctuated by Mozart’s Requiem, creating aesthetic ruptures and a sense of the material’s dominance over the audience. Together, these cinematic choices, coupled with the intimacy of the dialogue, transport viewers to a time one feels nostalgic for, even if they never lived through it, all without ever leaving the apartment, evocatively dressed in period detail: dark wood furniture, beaded curtains, and crochet cushions.

Hujar’s photographs captured downtown New York’s flourishing creative scene of the 1970s with emotional and psychological potency. Sontag once noted that his subjects “appear to meditate on their own mortality.” Among them were actress Candy Darling, writers William S Burroughs and Fran Lebowitz, and artist David Wojnarowicz. Yet despite his impact, when Hujar died of an Aids-related illness in 1987, he was destitute, and, as Sachs points out, discussions around art in the film rarely stray far from questions of economy. That theme is echoed in the production itself, with Westbeth serving as a location, a building that has housed low-income artists since opening around the same time that Hujar and Rosenkrantz spoke.

Ahead of the release of Peter Hujar’s Day this November, Dazed sat down with Sachs in a West Village diner to talk about bringing the film to life, and his mission to nurture the next generation of queer artists.

You first encountered Peter Hujar’s Day at Les Mots à la Bouche bookstore in Paris while filming Passages. What spoke to you about the text and compelled you to adapt it into a film?

Ira Sachs: I was taken with the amount of detail and the intimacy of the experience Hujar described. There was an emotional arc that didn’t necessarily imply art in concept — it gave me a feeling over time, which is what I look for in movies. And the conclusion of the book, when Hujar is up late at night listening to the sounds of the sex workers on the street, is such a vivid, cinematic scene.

I immediately knew I wanted to make something from this material, and I wanted to do it with Whishaw, who I was working with on Passages. I was hungry to continue that rich collaboration. Peter Hujar’s Day is an art project that could have ended up being fifteen minutes or two hours; we had a lot of freedom in that sense. I knew Whishaw would be game to make art together based on our shared interest in queer creativity, history and life — both of us looking to artists we love, some of whom are no longer here, for direction on how to live.

The initial conversations with Rosenkrantz expressing your interest in adapting the book took place via Instagram Messenger. How did your relationship and the conversation evolve from there?

Ira Sachs: There were a few bumps along the way toward acquiring the rights — I think she was nervous about the idea of someone taking her material and whether they’d do right by it, or by her. There was also a bit of glamour around the process that I think intimidated her. It took about a year for us to iron everything out.

About four months after I first wrote to Rosenkrantz on Instagram, I went to LA, where she’s lived for decades. I went to her apartment, and we went out for lunch. From that point on, we became very familiar — we understood each other quickly. In some ways, there was a kind of replication. I’m not comparing myself to Hujar, but she has an ease with people she’s drawn to that’s quite immediate. As a gay artist, I felt like I was someone she was naturally interested in — someone trying to make art authentically, in a way she respects and honours.

The film opens with the shutting of a clapperboard as Whishaw assumes the character of Hujar. What were the ideas behind this narrative device?

Ira Sachs: The thinking is abstract. For me, it was the first time I had ever worked significantly with actors not in their own accents — both Whishaw and Hall are British but adopt North American accents here. As soon as Whishaw became Hujar, there was a level of theatricality that I wanted to embrace.

The clapperboard is part of the rapport I have with the audience — it says, I know this is a fiction. It’s a reverie on the pleasures of cinema as much as it is an exploration of intimacy, history, Hujar and Rosenkrantz. I felt free to connect to the images as I connect to cinema itself.

There are conversations I’m having with the likes of [Jean-Luc] Godard, [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder, [Chantal] Akerman and [Jean] Eustache. I used to be shy about saying that part of my history — part of my family — are these films that I love. Every film, in some way, is an expression of that love: for those artists and for the making of cinema itself.

I had the financing, the actors, the set — everything in place. And suddenly I thought, this is a very bad idea

Only the transcript of the conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz remains and there’s very little, if any, footage of Hujar at all. This absence of original material must have made bringing the story to life on screen challenging?

Ira Sachs: That was the hardest part, because I had this idea that I would make a film in real time — that we’d shoot the conversation as if it took place over a consecutive hour and a half. But an interview, like the one we’re having now – two people sitting across a table, not moving – isn’t cinematic.

I had the financing, the actors, the set – everything in place. And suddenly I thought, this is a very bad idea. Any attempt to get these two characters to move while staying in real time was impossible. It became a very stagnant film. I went into a kind of crisis – I wasn’t sleeping for days, thinking, what have I done?

What did you draw on to resolve that challenge and find a new cinematic language for the film?

Ira Sachs: Two things happened. First, I started looking at very personal, intimate documentaries made by a filmmaker with just a camera and a subject. Portrait of Jason by Shirley Clarke, about the self-described hustler and nightclub performer Jason L Holliday, and My Girlfriend’s Wedding by Jim McBride, about his girlfriend at the time, Clarissa Dalrymple. In McBride’s film, at one point she’s sitting on the couch, then cut — they’re on the terrace overlooking New York — then cut again, and she’s in bed talking to him in the middle of the night. I could see how time could move through cinematic ellipses, and that liberated me.

The second thing that happened is that I took two stand-ins to the location and, with my cinematographer Alex Ashe, we filmed them at different times of day in the space, which was by then fully decorated. I had all these images in my Notes app, and when I looked through them, I realised there was a film there. If they were in bed, then outside, then in the kitchen, then in the dining room — that’s a movie. It’s a series of images that unfold over time.

That became both my pleasure and my greatest interest: thinking about how these two people could embody a portrait as an examination of light, space and form. This film, in a way, is exactly that — with the form being Hujar.

How closely does the film follow the text of the book?

Ira Sachs: The book is an edited version of the original transcript. When I was working on the screenplay, I went back to the Morgan Library, where the transcript is held, and brought back some things that hadn’t been used — the whole discussion about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, for instance. So the book preserves this one afternoon, and the film preserves just a little bit more.

That said, I had no rules. Certain lines came out because they didn’t feel right for the film, but no words were added. I didn’t choose the locations based on what they were talking about — it was simply based on what I needed at that time. Whishaw used Hujar’s rhythms verbatim. The process was like doing a play without rehearsal, or like experimental jazz — finding the pauses, the repetitions, the amendments. It’s very musical language. His performance is beautiful; exceptionally fluid, easy, insightful, original.

Even though Hujar has the majority of the dialogue in the film, you never feel Rosenkrantz’s character is secondary. How did you maintain that sense of balance?

Sachs: What I’m struck by is that Whishaw had a lot of text, and Hall had a lot of silence, and yet together they created a very even two-hander. Part of that is because Hall is an actress and a writer — a writer without words, in this case — but she’s really telling a story of friendship, love, loss, curiosity and tenderness. There’s so much writing in her physical gestures.

In a way, the three of us were all writers. Along with Hujar and Rosenkrantz, it’s a five-person collaboration — and each of us had a part of equal priority.

There’s a point in the film where Rosenkrantz says the reason she’s doing these interviews — like the one with Hujar — is because she wants to hear about how people fill their time. Was it ever in your consciousness, personally or from an audience perspective, to make people more mindful of time and how precious it is?

Sachs: One of the things that interests me in movies, and what I aim for in my own, is capturing the ephemeral. That’s partly why I don’t rehearse with my actors: once you rehearse, you start creating a then and a maybe, instead of the here and now. Even if a film is set in the past, it’s always about the present — this one is about 2025; it’s about these actors, in this room, at this time, in this moment.

Hujar’s power of recollection isn’t usual — there’s genius in it. His memory and his attention to detail are almost photographic. As a director, I’m more interested in others; I like to be an observer who notices the details of another person or character, and tries to understand how text and subtext interact with space and time.

Hujar has a real ability to share the circular nature of his own thought — including his great doubts about himself and his work — which mirrors what I experience every day as an artist: moments of confidence and moments of doubt. You could say there’s a comparison to Ulysses by James Joyce or Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, in their ability to describe the creative process. And for me, that gives comfort in my own daily struggle to make things I care about.

Hujar has a real ability to share the circular nature of his own thought — including his great doubts about himself and his work — which mirrors what I experience every day as an artist: moments of confidence and moments of doubt

Rosenkrantz and Hujar’s emotions at the end of the film are ambiguous, and could be interpreted as poignant or even sombre. Did you want to communicate what was to come for Hujar and his community — the sense of impending loss knowing that he, and so many of those around him, would later be taken by the HIV-AIDS pandemic?

Sachs: It was something we all knew on set, even if we didn’t discuss it. That loss was present without being spoken — and I think it’s there in the images. There’s a shot of what remains of the piers on the Hudson River, those metal spikes still rising out of the water. They’re like evidence of a rich, fascinating culture of sex and art that once existed there — a culture that was profoundly altered by AIDS and by gentrification. So yes, it was on my mind, quietly, even if unspoken.

In 2009, you established Queer | Art, a non-profit supporting LGBTQ+ artists — a mission that feels especially urgent in light of federal cuts to arts funding under the Trump administration. Why is this mission important to you?

Sachs: I never had a queer mentor myself. There’s been a paucity — a real absence — of those relationships, partly because of the decimation caused by AIDS, and partly because, as queer makers, everyone was fighting for space. That space was hard to win, and so there hasn’t always been an environment of generosity.

I’ve never had an older queer filmmaker tell me anything about my work. With Queer | Art, I wanted to create those intergenerational conversations, because they’re so essentially necessary. My conversations with Alex Ashe were one of those — two people of different generations who live for cinema. The film, in many ways, is a testament to that: an intergenerational dialogue about movies, and about our shared love for the impact of the image. I love meeting people in his generation who devour cinema.

Peter Hujar’s Day is now showing in select theatres across the US.