Ira Sach’s latest film “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a fascinating experiment and the historical document and in speaking at Indieview studioPresented by Dropbox, he said it “kept me up at night” and tried to find out how to make it cinematic interesting.
The film, a narrow 75 minutes, is a filmed recreation of a conversation between the famous New York photographer Peter Hujar and his friend and journalist Linda Rosenkrantz from 1974 where he describes a day in his life in NYC’s art scene in the center. He discusses chatting with Susan Sontag and photographed Allen Ginsberg, and everything was recorded as part of a transcript that was discovered just 2024, 50 years after the conversation first occurred.
With only two people talking, Sachs had to find a way to make the dialogue “exciting, emotional, not boring”, which he called a “interesting challenge.”
“I joined the time but also to the structure of intimacy between these two friends, who seemed dramatically unexpected and very intimate,” Sachs said. “A connection that feels genuine between two people is what I am looking for in every scene that I shoot. This is a step forward because the language is so genuine, you feel that you are already there. So then the assumption was actually very difficult. ”
Sachs did not write a word himself, the entire script is deducted from the real transcript, but he built 33 scenes from the material and had to find the intimacy between Hujar and Rosenkrantz.
“When we had everything in place, two actors, money, we shoot in a couple of weeks, then it’s like:” What the hell am I doing with this, “he said.
The movie Stars Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as Hujar and Rosenkrantz, two Briter each played 70’s New Yorkers with distinct accents. But since this movie was not a “biopic” in the traditional sense, it released each of their performances.
“I wasn’t trying to do this whole man,” said Whishaw. “It was just this day, this very moment with this friend. I let go of feeling that I had to make some mimicry of him. It must be more personal. It must be him but it must be us. “
“It mainly elicited her warmth and love for Peter, which I think is very present in the text even if they do not talk about any aspects of their relationship,” Hall added. “This is the brilliance of the film, you get more from the nuances of human relationships and life and emotions when characters do not speak. So there was a lot of space to play it. ”
See the entire interview with the group from “Peter Hujars Day” above.
“Peter Hujars Day” premiered at Sundance Film Festival. The film is looking for distribution.
Dropbox is proud to cooperate with indieview and Sundance Film Festival. 2025 premiere 68% of the feature films at Sundance Film festival used Dropbox in its film production. Dropbox helps filmmakers and creative teams find, organize and secure all files that are important for all projects.
