Peter Hujar’s Day began, as many great works of art do, with a DM. Director Ira Sachs (Passages, The Delta) had just finished reading a recently unearthed interview between the late portrait photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz that took place in 1974. That dialogue — a conversation about creative anxieties, complete with the mundanities of daily life — had been published as a book in 2022.
So Sachs decided to message Rosenkrantz on Instagram about what would eventually become a film adaptation starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as Peter and Linda. Deceptively simple and surprisingly moving, Peter Hujar’s Day recreates the interview over the course of a day, set in a single beautiful West Village apartment.
The Verge spoke with Sachs about the challenges of making such a small idea feel expansive and cinematic.
Director Ira Sachs Jeong Park
The Verge: You’ve mentioned that the genesis of the film began with you DMing Linda Rosenkrantz on Instagram. What did that look like?
Ira Sachs: I didn’t do any research, so the thing that was really surprising was maybe a month later when I realized she was 89 years old and then I was DMing her. But it was a casual back and forth. She’s super with it, and we’ve become very close in a very touching way — in a way that I think reflects something about her relationship with Peter, actually. Not just that we share this work, but also somehow — I mean, I don’t think I remind her of Peter, but I feel like she reminds me, as the movie does, of the particular nature of heterosexual women and gay men, their friendships. Like, it’s a particular type of friendship that I know really well. And I cherish her.
Is this how you usually start projects? You just, like, DM someone cold?
I start projects with an idea that I feel confident to follow. So, in a way, yes.
At what point did you know this interview would make a good movie?
On the last page. Because I was very moved by the imagery and the feeling that Peter transmitted through his description of 3 in the morning, on the corner of Second Avenue and 12th Street, looking out at the city and listening to the prostitutes on the street below. I felt like that was a cinematic image and a cinematic moment.
And so, the challenge throughout was like, ‘Oh, I need to make that last moment really count.’ All movies, I think, are made in the last moment. And to recognize that, for me, that last moment of the film was both in the moment of 1974 but also filled with loss and melancholy and beauty.
When you say loss, a loss of what?
I could say most simply the loss of that time. But I think, more specifically, I both thought and tried not to think too much about Peter’s death 17 years later from AIDS, that the candle was blown out.
Maybe this is just top of mind, because we’re in biopic season, but what compels you to take such a contained and compact approach to Peter’s life?
Well, I never thought of doing anything else. I wasn’t interested in making a biographical film of Peter Hujar. I was interested in making a film inspired by this particular conversation between Peter and Linda. And what the text had for me was all the intimacy and authenticity that I’m always searching for. Like, in all my work, I just hope to achieve one moment as intimate as Linda and Peter’s conversation.
And because the text is verbatim, it really has the feeling of what it is to spend a long afternoon with a close friend. It also conveys the detail of that time and his life so viscerally — you know, it’s like Proust, really. It really is so densely authentic.
The thing that kind of goes unnoticed about Hujar is he’s an exceptional storyteller. There’s something quite exceptional about his use of language and imagery that I think is quite unique.
Courtesy of Janus Films
The film takes place in a single apartment in the course of one day. But I was really impressed it never really feels claustrophobic. And it also kind of never feels like a stage play either. Peter Hujar’s Day feels like a film. But were you worried about it feeling too small?
I was. The boundaries, the concept at some point — about a month before we started shooting — seemed insurmountable, to be honest. I thought, ‘Uh oh, this was a mistake.’
But liberating myself from the real was really helpful, and also from the physical actuality of the conversation itself, meaning two people across the table talking for an hour and a half. I just decided my version was going to be very different and would instead be 23 scenes over the course of 12 hours.
Constructing this script then, you have all the dialogue already. What was piecing the rest together like?
I spent a couple of weeks with two stand-in actors and my cinematographer, Alex Ashe, on location in an apartment at Westbeth in the West Village, which had been donated. So we had access to this space, and I really spent time photographing these models at different times of day, in different locations. And ultimately, a sequence of those photographs became the kind of guide to how to shoot the film. Really, there was something quite random about what people talked about at certain moments in the film. It wasn’t like I think, ‘Oh, they’re talking about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. They should be doing that on the bed.’ It was literally like, now there needs to be a cut, because the film needs to maintain an energy.
I took a lot of things away from the film about creativity. But earlier, you said it was a little bit about the things we lost, like this era we lost. How much are you thinking about where this film sits in the modern age or what it’s like watching it today?
I find as an audience member that there is this incredible, unexpected content in the film, which is the window it provides to how hard it is to make art. And that, for me, is something I’m happy to hear any day of the week. I feel it’s an affirming kind of circular conversation that I have as an artist on a regular basis, which is between confidence and doubt. I vacillate very quickly between the two in the same way that Peter questions did he make a good photograph of Allen Ginsberg, or did he make a bad photograph of Allen Ginsberg? And I love that even Peter Hujar — who we now monumentalize and canonize as this great photographer — even Peter Hujar lived with steady doubt at the time.
And for me, that’s very… comforting. It’s really what the impact of the film is in the moment. It’s how it’s received now. This is not a film that nostalgically looks back.
Steady doubt and also worrying about how to make ends meet.
Yes, yes. I think the question of sustainability is one that each of us faces with terror and occasionally hope.
Peter Hujar’s Day is in theaters beginning Friday, November 7th.
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