Passages: Interview with Director Ira Sachs

Ira Sachs Passages, which he also co-wrote, explores a complicated love triangle between filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski), his longtime partner Martin (Ben Whishaw), and primary school teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos).

The three of them search for connection amidst their desire and Martin’s yearning for a family.

Sachs, who coparents his children with his husband and the children’s mother, was in part inspired by his own life.

“That was a plot device,” he says. “The film is certainly personal, but it’s not autobiographical. I’ve made more autobiographical films than this one. This is a film of observation and of exploration of what it is to be a man with power, which I grapple with.”

Passages is inspired by Sachs own fascination with cinema as a storytelling medium and the work of those who’ve come before him.

Motivation to explore the dynamic of this love triangle?

This was always a film that in my mind began with a man on a pedestal and ended with a man on the floor.

It was a little bit living under Trump and wanting to find vulnerability in male power.

Use of the color red in film

I had wonderful collaboration with Khadija Zeggaï, the costume designer. We chose to make a very realistic film in an unreal way. Inspiration were films like Goddard’s Contempt, where what you remember and what lingers is the impact of color, as well as the pleasure of skin.

I wanted to make a film filled with pleasure, and I tried to access every element of cinema, which is music, light, color, emotion, pain, things that became the texture of Passages.

Love the scene in the bedroom where Martin and Tomas are arguing

I didn’t set it up. It was an accident. What I’m doing when I’m shooting is I’m looking for accidents. I’m trying to create an atmosphere in which there is the potential for something extraordinary. At the same time, there’s always the potential to fail. So, it’s an atmosphere of risk.

I’m positioning the camera in observant way, but can’t intrude. Sometimes the intimacy going on between the actors excludes the camera in a way that is enticing. I think of Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow‘s sitting on a bed and there’s a doorframe, and director Roman Polanski imagined the entire audience bending to try to look around the doorframe.

I look at the camera as something saying, “You’re in the room, but you don’t get to see everything.” I love when films create metaphors.

Agathe’s abortion real, or if she was lying to Martin

I make films that are filled with ellipses and which conclude in open moments. The future, the past, and everything in between is filled with possibility. I want the audience to try to imagine the other directions that the story might go. I think of Robert Altman, a great filmmaker of democratic cinema in which any character might take hold of the story. We don’t know who the hero is.

The song “The End of a Perfect Day” as a leitmotif

And the actor who sings the song in Remember the Night in that moment is this extraordinary character actor, Sterling Holloway, who was possibly gay and has this sensitivity, which is breathtaking. I watched a lot of movies during the pandemic. I discovered things that I’d never seen before, including Remember the Night. I found that scene with Barbara Stanwyck, and the song incredibly moving. It’s a direct lift from Remember the Night.

Ben Wishaw?

We became friends on Instagram. It was a shared interest in both each other’s work and also in queerness and creativity and community. That was just being born when I finished the script for Passages, and so that was like the next step. Making the film has been a wonderful experience with Ben. We’re working on a short film in November, where he plays the photographer Peter Hujar. Passages was particularly joyous set. Franz, I always thought of as an animal and Ben as a knife. Ben’s extraordinary because he has modesty that disappears in the moment of action.

Film about desire, and sex scenes garnered NC-17 rating

You start with asking the actor what is his boundary, and then you proceed from there. There’s no discussion until the boundary is stated about what an actor feels comfortable with. Then you come up with strategic plan using bodies and camera that gives the actors the same kind of freedom that they have in all the scenes, which is the freedom to discover things.

Film with open ending

It’s really subjective. I do think the film ends on an open note, but also it’s important to create a unified whole. There is completion, if not resolution.

Share this: