Ira Sachs Quotes

"Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job."

"I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.'"

"I realize I have strength as an artist and professional by embracing my difference instead of what makes me the same."

"My father moved out to Park City in in the mid-'70s and lived in a Winnebago behind a hippie joint called Utah Coal & Lumber that was one of only two or three restaurants at that time. Park City was a sleepy little mining town, with not a condo in sight."

"Intimacy is something to be cherished, and intimacy is not something to be afraid of."

"There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age."

"My films might have been queer - because I was - but they were not gay."

"I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make."

"For gay people, we learned about our lives in secrecy and a lot of fear."

"Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema."

"Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling."

"All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on."

"Why do people stay in relationships that are tough from almost the very beginning?"

"I think it's interesting: What is the generational effect of the experience of being a gay person in America? For my generation, it was very difficult."

"I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time."

"I don't rehearse with my actors... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed... so you film reactions; you don't create them."

"One of the biggest things that happens to many people when they have kids is that you suddenly realize that you're not going to last forever. You know there is another generation who are the heroes of their own stories, and that is humbling."

"Being an artist is in part an act of rupture."

"Music Box has proven itself in a few short years to be a cutting edge distributor with a sophisticated understanding of both the market and cinema."

"I think there's a fear of difference in American cinema."

"A lot of what I think I do as a director is try to give everything over to the actor. So I disappear."

"I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious."

"Every film is hard to fund."

"By 15, I was lucky enough to find the theater."

"As a gay person, my life has been marginalized."

"New York grabbed me too hard, as did adulthood."

"By 1988, I was living in New York myself."

"It's easy to make a film, but it's hard to make a career of being a filmmaker."

"Without community events like NewFest, I don't think we'd have a queer cinema in America."

"I've always been interested in how the individual comes to know and accept him or herself, which I think has been hard for me."